Games That Pushed Older Systems to the Limit?

Recca on Famicom definatly, no slow down what so ever.

Kirby looks almost 16 bit on NES.

And star fox adventure's on Gamecube had the detailing on the fur that people thought was impossible on that console

 

NES: Ninja Gaiden 3
Megadrive: Virtua Racing
SNES: Star Ocean
PSX: Tekken 3
Saturn: Virtua Fighter 2
N64: Perfect Dark
Dreamcast: Shenmue 2
Gamecube: Rogue Leader 2
PS2: Shadow Of The Colossus
Xbox: Doom 3
Gameboy: Fish Files

 

Didn't Kirby's Adventure on NES use an extra chip? In fact didn't loads of NES games use extra chips (Memory Mappers?) to enable smoother scrolling or larger prites etc or am I making that up

Also Quake on Saturn would pesumably be a game that used the system in an impressive way, fast detailed 3D, lighting etc

Edit - that list linked to on RacketBoy's site is pretty good. I'd agree with most of those although I guess some would be excluded as the OP stated not games with extra chips etc

 

Quake pushed the system quite hard. Lobotomy stated during development that they felt confident they could get Duke Nukem running more efficiently than Quake, although admitted it was impressive.

Yup, that list is pretty decent.

 

yes there were lots of extra Chips. Anything from Extra Graphics to Sound was realized by those guys

for example:
Standart NES: 4 Sound Channels
NES + Namco106 Extra Soundchip = 12 Sound Channels
NES + VRC7 Extra Soundchip = 10 Sound Channels incl. FM Generation, which was pretty much a setup like the Mega Drive already.

those 2 beasts were not used by many games though.

 

Street Fighter II - Master System

:033:

 

My memory is iffy on them but I remember Flashback and Another World (Out of this World) being impressive for their time when released on the SNES and Genesis.

 

No ones mentioned the Panzer Dragoon series... those water effects were pretty impressive for the Saturn.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhsTmiK7Q2M play this while playing any of these games.

 

Definitely Conker's. THe level of detail, sound, and overall FPS on nothing but 4mb of RAM, really was astounding. PD comes second place, but 4 human players versus 8 simulants was a blast.

 

Yeah it was Another World or Out of this World as others may know it. Flashback on the SNES is bloody awful though. Far too slow. On the Mega Drive though Flashback is very nice.

Yakumo

 

oh i forgot gamecube's f-zero GX it think it was technically great, but hateful to play (and for an f-zero fan like me it's a sad thing tosay )

 

R-Type on the PC-GT

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkAHVzZ2ks8

Wow, I forgot how astonishing The Adventures of Batman & Robin is. That's just nuts!

 

The level of detail in Conker's was quite amazing indeed, I assume it did use the Expansion Pak right ?

And Perfect Dark was astonishing in many ways, the power of its multiplayer was incredible and through the whole game not only the graphics but also the amount of recorded speech clips and the AI was pretty impressive for the time.

 

There were some games for the PSX, but at the cost of loading times, so I don't think that should count.

I don't know if SMB3 pushed the NES to it's limits, but it sure blew me away.

 

Kirby/SMB3 however uses a MMC3 which just allows you to access more memory (but it's still limited to the same number of tiles at a time/program code) and a scanline interrupt to allow for better status bars and parallax than what's built into the NES, no soundchips. Even with soundchips, and some graphics limitations removed (MMC5), it's still not "cheating" in the same sense as an enhanced SNES game since there's no co-processing going on or a 32X with video overlay.

 

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Pulse Racer - Xbox