Best technical achievements on consoles

What are the most impressive games that technically pushed the limits of consoles and were impressive to be on the consoles ?

Here are my examples :
GTA V PS3/X360 - I am very suprised that GTA V was so massive and playable on the previous gen consoles. GTA V on the XBOX 360 is on 2 discs and is about 16GB large. Compare that to the PC version ( 65GB) and it's quite amazing that they were able to squeeze the game on to the 360 while retaining most of the features. And not even mentioning that the 360 came out in 2005 and it's power has never changed.

Resident Evil 2 N64 - Another game which was squeezed as much as possible to fit on a cartridge. Suprisingly, it retained most of the features of the PS1 version and had the better N64 graphics.

So what are your examples of games that are really pushing the hardware ?

 

Crash n Burn on the 3DO. Extremely far draw distance on the 3D graphics, probably among the first 3D texture mapped car games to come out on a home console.
And before anyone says the track in crash n burn was pre-rendered 3D a la megarace - it was not, you could change the viewing angle of the track/objects by moving your car left and right.

Hard Drivin on the atari lynx. A recognizable (if not as enjoyable) recreation of the arcade game, complete with 3D polygons, on the equivalent of NES level hardware. The lone programmer/artist still refers to this achievement on his linkedin page 25 years later.

 

Not strictly console (but always in the gaming arena) - Many titles by 'Ultimate' (later RARE) on the ZX Spectrum - it may seem trivial now but when gaming was very much in its infancy they released a series of games (Knightlore, Sabrewulf, Alien8, Underworld, in particular) that were leaps and bounds ahead of the competition.

Composers like Rob Hubbard and Martin Galway did the same thing with sound chips on the C64, turning the usual gaming music back then (bleep, bleep, bleep) into the equivalent of Beethoven's 9th.

Console wise - I'd say RARE had a great run on the SNES - Goldeneye and Donkey Kong Country spring to mind.

Doom PC
GTA3 PS2
Shenmue Dreamcast

It gets harder for me to think of anything post PS2 because that's around the time when games suddenly required budgets the size of a Hollywood blockbuster. They became technically good, but often hollow experiences - and it's hard to praise a game for graphics when you've got a team of 200 artists working on it. It just isn't the same thing (imho)

 

WipEout on PS1.
I just couldn't believe my eyes the first time I saw it.

 

The Saturn port of Quake was really impressive at the time, hasn't aged well and was never as good as the PC version. But still a real achievement given the Saturn hardware.

 

"Recca" for Famicom was a minor miracle if you ask me.

 

At the time the game came out, the water effects in Crash: Warped looked lifelike. Years later, Bioshock releases. I picked it up on launch for 360 and probably sat there for 2 or so minutes after the actual intro ended, not realizing that the game had actually started. To this day, my mind still gets blown a little when I revisit it.

 

I have a few:

SNES: Secret of Mana really taught us how the SPC700 can be used as did FF6 and SMW2. SMW2 also may be the best looking 2D game of all time due to the SuperFX 2 chip. (Is it really being used? I put it in a game genie and it worked 100%, even polygons showed up on the screen!)

TG16: With either precise trickery with code (or witchcraft), Rondo of Blood pushed a pseudo-8 bit console very hard by doing multilayered scrolling (something it can't do really well) and brought out some very impressive graphics!

PS3: God of War: Ascension: For something that's on a console that can be a bitch to program for, it brought out prestine visuals to hold us over for the PS4. It looks better than the Wii U at times (especially the Alecto battle. Also, unlike some other games that stream textures and/or music via the BD-ROM drive, this caches it to the HDD to reduce wear and tear on the drive and the drive can cache to the RAM in conjunction w/ the HDD sometimes as well. (Just get ready for a layer change loading screen when your about 75% into the game).

 

Most impressive game for me is Shantae for the Gameboy Color. It pushed the system to its limits and the developers did a good job with the game overall. Sucks that it didn't sell well.

 

I haven't played it but yet I've heard that it takes advantage of the GBA hardware when played on a GBA. It is one of the few GBC games that take advantage of GBA hardware when played on the GBA system, like certain 3DS games when played on a "New" 3DS.

 

Weird, you totally sure about that? Was it a Game Genie or a Pro Action Replay?

 

Here´s my list of the games that have impressed me, at the point that i could not believe that the console at the time that i played the game can handle that graphics:

NES: Super Mario Bros.3 2. SNES: Doom, Star Fox. PS1: Metal Gear Solid, 007 The World is Not Enough, Quake 2, Bloody Roar 2 (specially for the character level of detail, stages are simplier thought), Alien Resurection, Capcom vs SNK (fuck! a 2D Naomi game on a 32 bit system which is famous for being 2D weak). N64: Perfect Dark (amazing..for some moments look like an early DC-PS2 game with lower res, and have game modes unnusual for the time and system -cooperative, multi against bots and players), Conker´s Bad Fur Day (this last is specially impressive how good it looks, without the need of an expansion pak), some Pokemon Stadium´s 1 & 2 Pokemon´s desing. Dreamcast: DOA 2, but just at the time and compared with major part of DC catalogue; Shenmue 1 & 2 (i still can´t believe how many details have that game, and it was released in fucking 1999), Ikaruga (i know it´s 2D perspective, but looks georgeus still today); and in some aspects (lighting specially and fake, but well made, reflex maps):Test Drive Le Mans. Sometimes it can pass like a 2004-or even 05 PS2 average racing game, but was released at 2000. PS2: God of War 2, RE 4 (can´t believe that PS2 could handle it, even with the downgrades looks amazing), GT 4. GCN: RE Remake-0, original RE 4 (looks outstanding, left the PS2 port greatly behind), Star Wars Rogue Squadron 2 and 3 (specially 2...this graphics at 2001....fucking unbelievable). Xbox: Half Life 2, Far Cry Instincts, Doom 3, Riddick, Forza, DOA 2 Ultimate (looked like downgraded X360 games), DOA 3 (again..those graphics in 2001...unbelievable!). X360: Halo 4, Forza 4-Horizon 2, Crysis 3, GTA V, MGS v. PS3: The last of fucking us, Uncharted 3, GT 6, Killzone 2 and 3 (specially the 2 for being a 2009 game for fuck sake), GTA V, Crysis 3, MGS V.

 

sfc: tales of phantasia, star ocean, rendering ranger, rudras treasure
ps: final fantasy7, gran turismo
n64: RARE games

 

OutRun 2006 Coast to Coast for the PS2 - Sumo Digital ported a Chihiro arcade game to the PS2, even adding 480p and 16:9 support! Yes, there's a bit of slowdown here and there, but the gameplay and feeling is intact. They should have won an award for this.

 

There is no Super FX 2. There is only the Super FX which had 3 different revisions. "Mario Chip" used in Star Fox, GSU-1 used in most Super FX games, and GSU-2 used in the later Super FX games. The advantage of the GSU-2 was support for twice as much ROM which Doom and Yoshi's Island both use. However the chip is not clocked any faster and used the same instruction set. Also, some Game Genie units do support the Super FX and other enhancement chips. Older ones do not pass through the outer edge pins so those games may not work or glitch and crash.

A lot of TG16 games pull off parallax or multilayer scrolling effects. Lords of Thunder is one I can think of. It's not witchcraft. Scrolling horizontally in strips is very easy, the NES had games that did this. But other nice effects on the TG16 can be done just by adding very large sprites to the situation. Often it looks like there are two background layers but part of the scene is made up of a large sprite designed to look like part of the background. So it's not precise code trickery, but it is certainly creative and careful design.

Thinking about Dracula X, in my opinion the game is superb. However I can't think of anything at the moment that seems like something the game did itself that other games on the platform didn't do as well. For a lot of us it is amazing just because it's a CD-ROM game from back when we were more likely playing SNES and Genesis. I just think the game is solid and very enjoyable. But I don't know that I view it as technically impressive for the platform.

 

A lot of the games listed here are not technical feats but just good games. A technical feat of a game should be doing stuff that most games on the system can't.

Shante on the GB comes to mine. An amazing game full of fluid animation.

PANORAMA Cotton on the Mega Drive. A very impressive 3D sprite based shooter.

The Adventures of Batman and Robin for the Mega Drive. Truth be told it's a pretty shitty game due to the ridiculous difficulty setting but the graphical effects in that game are amazing. Real sprite scaling, alpha blending, rotation and all manner of line scrolling effects.

Stella Assault on the Saturn. A Super smooth 3D space shooter with solid graphics, 16.9 video option and a massive amount of areas.

 

I remember a thread here about retro-consoles music composers, and I had been blown away by one of the guys. He used a pretty limited chip and with a custom firmware/driver/code was able to greatly improve the number of perceived channels of it. IIRC he made kinda good prog rock for some games.

[EDIT]
Found him!

Tim Follin

In layman's terms, he's modulating a one-level on/off beeper with square waves faster than it can cope with to create those sounds.

He made pretty great "1-bit" songs! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T42WuUpBuHE
He also did the Ecco The Dolphin DOTF soundtrack!

 

N64 = Resident Evil 2 (Fitting it all in a cartridge with FMV)
PS1 = Crash Bandicoot (High resolution, awesome usage of flat shaded polygons)
GBC = Shantae
Genesis = Panorama Cotton (They beat Sega at their own game. )

 

Gran Turismo 4 on the PS2 managed to pull off 1080i and 16:9 on the PS2 (which was so much weaker than the Xbox).

 

It wasnt true 1080i, don't get too excited.