Best technical achievements on consoles

That's right it was 480p up scanned and it looks rubbish because it's interlaced.

 

ConkerBFD on the n64 is damned impressive. For starters, you have LOADs of voice samples (very rare at the time, no pun intended) which was a accompanied by not just mouth animation, but realistic mouth animation instead of just flaps. You also had characters that were proper rigged meshes instead of being a bunch of intersecting polygons. They even had independent fingers! And Conker's tail even had physics, it was effected by wind resistance when Conker moved around.<br><br>All in all, an example of the technical wizardry Rare used to be the kings of.

 

Some that come to mind:

Crash Bandicoot 2 and Warped: these games both really pushed the limits of the PlayStation hardware. The level of detail and the lighting effects were really impressive for PlayStation games. Graphically, those two games arguably look better than some N64 games. They also both had a very stable 30fps-ish speed throughout the games.

Wave Race 64: the water effects in this game were totally unique for the time. I think it's one of the best-looking games for the N64, despite being a launch game in the US. Today it's been surpassed technically, but I still find it aesthetically appealing in a way that few other games can match.

Conker's Bad Fur Day: as other people have mentioned, Conker was pretty impressive because Rare rewrote the microcode for the N64 so it could do things like multiple light sources and MP3 audio.

Shenmue: this needs no explanation.

Shadow of the Colossus: this game was very ambitious for a PS2 game, to the point that maybe it was a bit too ambitious. It had some really impressive effects like hair simulation and motion blur. Unfortunately I think they pushed the PS2 hardware too far, because there was quite a bit of slowdown - though it didn't ruin the game. Luckily the PS3 re-release that came out a few years ago eliminated the slowdown.

That's all I feel like writing for now.

 

Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver on the Playstation was impressive, once the game started there were no loading screens, just one big open world to explore. Unusual for CD based game.

 

I agree with dark.....Rare and DKC on the snes, stunning!
I was shocked at Starwing/Starfox at the time of release....3D on a snes (I was only 10 at the time!)

 

I remember seeing my friend play Star Fox and being impressed by the 3D visuals, but also thinking, "Holy shit this is slow." Interesting thing I discovered about Star Fox: my PVM has an overscan feature, and if you turn on the overscan when playing Star Fox, it gets rid of the borders and the image fills the screen without losing anything.

Sega's SVP was a lot better than the SuperFX in regards to framerate. It's too bad only one game used it.

 

MGS2's Tanker section springs to mind, That still looks pretty impressive today imo (Well on the HD collection version anyways) and even keeps at a steady 60fps for the most part

Remember being blown away by Pokemon G/S, mainly because the back sprites when in battles didn't look like a random blob of pixels lol

 

iS: Internal Section. The only 640x480 framebuffer on Playstation (ingame, games like Gran Turismo have that fb for some screens).



Vagrant Story. The first motion blur ever on console?



Ginga Fukei Densetsu Sapphire. Absolutely outstanding game for PC Engine CD, probably the best graphics ever on 8-bit CPU console. The 3D effects, the lightning effects, etc.



Chikyuu Kaihou Gun ZAS. One of the best looking Game Boy games ever, amazing number of sprites on screen and great effects.



Hammerin Harry. Another masterpiece on Game Boy, giant sprites, incredible animation, great level design..

 

One of the best technical sound achievements is definitive Chronos, for the ZX Spectrum...

Also worth noting, the system had only a single 1-bit beeper, controlled by only one connection, from the Z80 processor.

 

Game genie. I should also add that it didn't have outer pins! Its amazing!

 

I can't believe it hasn't been said yet but RED ZONE on the Sega Megadrive/Genesis.

Look it up, and not just the helicopter segments but the ones where you go into buildings too. Holy fucking shit. Not to mention FMV.

Oh I think Zero Tolerance on the Sega Megadrive/Genesis is an honourable mention too.

 

Somebody made a demo of Star Fox running on a Genesis/Mega Drive without enhancement chips and it is really mind blowing. The SNES couldn't run that without the SuperFX chip. Here's a YouTube video of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQaY3-FNOuM

 

Red Zone isn't doing anything that special. The 3D effect is nice but compared the The Adventures of Batman and Robin it's quite poor. Basically The Adventures of Batman and Robin is just one massive tech demo for the Mega Drive. As for the FMV, quite a few titles have done that on the Mega Drive. The most impressive being the Bad Apple music video or if an official release the colour intro to Sonic 3D.

I've seen that. Pretty cool but not that amazing when you consider there's Hard Drivin' that runs at around the same speed with just as many polygons and there's the full polygon Japan only space action rep, star cruiser also on the Mega Drive.

 

One thing that stands out to me was in the beginning of EA Sports games for SNES where it goes "E...A...Sports...its in the game". Not sure how impressive that was but one of the only games on the SNES where I remember hearing a voice sample.

 

Not impressive in the slightest I'm afraid. Even consoles and computers from the early 80's could do that.

 

Yeah obviously PCs could do that, just thought it was a little difficult with the type of sound channels you had to work with on a console.

 

Not really. Even the Master System and NES had clear speech at times.

 

I'm pretty sure that the Snes sound chip played all sound via samples, so playing a voice sample is very easy on the Snes.

 

How has nobody mentioned SoulCalibur for the Dreamcast yet?

 

In my opinion, Soul Calibur is a beautiful game and a graphical showcase on any home system for 1999. But in the same DC Catalogue there are games released after that pushed further the system capabilities. I consider SC an optmization achievement, more than a techinical achivement. I consider a real technical achievement on DC and Naomi DOA 2, for example; Tecmo´s fighter has character models with 3 times the polycount (between 7k-10k), that you can find in Soul Calibur. While in soul calibur char models has polycount with average 3k-4k polys (but thanks to the well done work, they look like they were built with more detailed geometry).Also, in DOA 2 you can find bigger, interactive and multilayer stages. The real merit of DC Soul Calibur is, graphically speaking, ,how Namco managed to transform a powered 32 bit game (original Soul Calibur runs on a System 12) into a totally next gen 128 bit looking game; but you can tell, playing both versions, that the core of the system´s 12 is still there. Original SC was a technical achievement on the System 12, more than DC, because the game take that arcade hard beyond it´s limits. That´s a a reason why SC couldn´t be ported to PSX, despite System 12 is a PSX based hardware. In comparison, DOA 2 is built up from the scratch to take full advantage of the Naomi hardware. Anyway, Soul Calibur has an outstanding treatment of lighting , not just for 1999. In that particular aspect, i think that SC is a real tech achievment on the DC.