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Re: Far Cry 5

Posted: Tue May 15, 2018 2:58 am
by da PAC Nigguh
rabidtictac wrote:
Tue May 15, 2018 12:50 am
A lot of games from before the hd console generation still look timeless because they had good art direction.
I find that very, very few 3D games from before the 360/PS3 era hold up well. The low poly count stuff looks like absolute shit. The only ones that were decent were games that obfuscated how shitty they looked with 2D backgrounds like RE and FF.

Now the 2D 16-bit stuff from before all that still looks fucking great, though.

Re: Far Cry 5

Posted: Tue May 15, 2018 3:49 am
by rabidtictac
da PAC Nigguh wrote:
Tue May 15, 2018 2:58 am
rabidtictac wrote:
Tue May 15, 2018 12:50 am
A lot of games from before the hd console generation still look timeless because they had good art direction.
I find that very, very few 3D games from before the 360/PS3 era hold up well. The low poly count stuff looks like absolute shit. The only ones that were decent were games that obfuscated how shitty they looked with 2D backgrounds like RE and FF.

Now the 2D 16-bit stuff from before all that still looks fucking great, though.
I can name more than a few that I think look excellent still, especially if you play them on an SD tv or with some kind of upscaling/hd versionizing.

Jak and Daxter
Sly 2 and 3
Ratchet and Clank (all of them look good)
Vagrant Story looks pretty ok even today, especially for ps1. It's very atmospheric.
Gotcha Force
God of War (any)
Ace Combat Zero and X (4 looks a bit rough)
Viewtiful Joe 1 and 2
Devil May Cry 3

And then you have the ps2 era 2d stuff and stuff that uses 2d backgrounds, which looks great. Pretty much all the nippon ichi games look good and you start to see some early Vanillaware games getting localized, like the oft-forgotten Grim Grimoire, original Odin Sphere and (in the wii era) Muramasa.

I could probably think of a bunch more if I dug through the games I own. Lots of the psp stuff still looks great now because you're experiencing it in its original aspect ratio/format on PSP, or you can get it upscaled with better performance on emulators.

In general, games with cel shading or strong use of colors have aged better when it comes to the 3d shit.

Re: Far Cry 5

Posted: Tue May 15, 2018 4:06 am
by da PAC Nigguh
PS1 had a huge advantage by using CDs. They could use much better textures because of the storage space. N64 games ended up looking much worse even though it was technically more powerful.

Re: Far Cry 5

Posted: Tue May 15, 2018 5:22 pm
by VoiceOfReasonPast
Don't forget Okami. Great art direction and cel-shading. That game is like a fucking eyegasm.


2D is pretty much timeless by default unless you really fuck up, or we're talking about some of the really old stuff that is maybe a bit too abstract these days.
Of course, many are a bit too lazy / play it safe in that they do retro stuff, instead of pushing the envelope like Vanillaware does.

Re: Far Cry 5

Posted: Tue May 15, 2018 7:05 pm
by Kugelfisch
I'm always bemused by people claiming that the early 3D shit was supposedly thought of as amazing back in the day and that only in hindsight they look terrible. They always looked terrible and nobody was impressed. It were the gameplay possibilities that 3D brought people found amazing. Just visually speaking, TLOZ:OoT for example looked like hot garbage from day one.

Re: Far Cry 5

Posted: Tue May 15, 2018 11:01 pm
by Poonoo
Kugelfisch wrote:
Tue May 15, 2018 7:05 pm
I'm always bemused by people claiming that the early 3D shit was supposedly thought of as amazing back in the day and that only in hindsight they look terrible. They always looked terrible and nobody was impressed. It were the gameplay possibilities that 3D brought people found amazing. Just visually speaking, TLOZ:OoT for example looked like hot garbage from day one.
The novelty of games being in 3D was what sold them because it was unlike anything we had seen before. So many older series had "3D" at the end of the latest game release in the mid 90s because it was a massive trend at the time despite a lot of the games having dogshit cameras (that people even hated then) and a lot of the early games not playing anywhere near as well as the 2D games did. Even a lot of the good games in say 1996 are a bit rough to play today.

In saying that though, at that time people starting comparing the graphics of games. With 2D games I don't remember anyone saying a game had bad or good graphics but once the switch to 3D was made that changed. Though people didn't start being impressed with graphics until the PS2 generation.

Re: Far Cry 5

Posted: Tue May 15, 2018 11:11 pm
by rabidtictac
Also there was a sense of freedom to playing in 3d. Mario 64 really opened people up to the possibilities a 3rd dimension could bring for interacting with the game world. Games like Vagrant Story, Final Fantasy and Crono Cross showed how you could rework dungeon crawling rpgs to use the third dimension. Then there were the fighting games like Tekken 3 which brought in a totally new audience who enjoyed 3d fighting games more than 2d.

Although I'd argue soul calibur 1 and 2, Tekken 5 and Virtua Fighter 4 were when the real era of 3d fighters took off. But tekken 2 and 3 were huge.

Re: Far Cry 5

Posted: Wed May 16, 2018 4:29 pm
by VoiceOfReasonPast
Wasn't there also a time frame where the 3D novelty was such a thing that 2D games like Symphony of the Night got some flak initially for daring to still be 2D?

Re: Far Cry 5

Posted: Wed May 16, 2018 6:16 pm
by Kugelfisch
VoiceOfReasonPast wrote:
Wed May 16, 2018 4:29 pm
Wasn't there also a time frame where the 3D novelty was such a thing that 2D games like Symphony of the Night got some flak initially for daring to still be 2D?
Look how well that argument held up. We all know what we got when Castlevania actually went 3D. Some games should never be 3D and Castlevania is one of those. Mega Man is another.

Re: Far Cry 5

Posted: Fri May 18, 2018 2:36 am
by Some Sick Fuck
rabidtictac wrote:
Tue May 15, 2018 12:50 am
A lot of games from before the hd console generation still look timeless because they had good art direction.
Beyond Good and Evil is one of my favourite games of all time, still looks good for exact same reason:

Image

It also needs to be said that a lot of kids didn't really care about early 3D looking like crap. (I was one of them, and I remember - although there were games that I have considered straight up disgusting even at the time.) You can always sell something less than impressive to kids, especially if it's supposed to be the newest hot shit. Doesn't always work, as it didn't with shit like Virtual Boy for example.