Technically impressive PSX games and Hello

Hello! I'm new here and have always enjoyed reading posts and discoveries of forgotten treasures.

Prepare for long personal intro!:
I find the Sega Saturn to be much more interesting with all the hardware it has available to developers, and I think it's mis-understood as being "difficult to program" for. It has plenty of hardware resources available, developers have much more freedom, and games can be built in many ways for such a system. I think it's only difficult when porting games from a very different machine setup (like PSX games). It's basically an expensive arcade machine with an expansion port and cartridge slot connected to the system BUS, and it is very future proof. It doesn't use obsolete hardware and if you learn 68000 or SH2, you'll be able to program various calculators, cell phones, and other products that use the same hardware today. I wouldn't say it's my favorite machine, but I might be wrong after learning something I don't know about (lol).

So what games does anyone consider technically impressive on PSX?

I'll start off by mentioning Mortal Kombat Trilogy. I think this game is very underrated as it did get pretty lousy reviews back in the day. It's also a 2D game and most gamers at the time were wanting some new and different 3D games (and for some reason MK fans didn't want a cool Trilogy sequel with unreleased animations, faster gameplay and extra content. I don't get that...). This game does a heck of a job utilizing 1megabyte of ram available in the PSX. This is noticeable on endurance matches when fighting two opponents or even two boss characters (yup two Boss characters in one match). There is no loading when fighters (or two boss characters) change in endurance matches, some backgrounds are two screens large, there's loads of gibs when characters die, and there's some transparency effects not utilized in Mortal Kombat arcade cabinets (lifebars, smoke and shadow effects); there's no slowdown either. It has a huge character roster and every character has their standing and winning animation while selecting a fighter. There's some compression artifacts (e.g. Robot Smoke looks light grey instead of blue-steel) but it's usually only noticed with colors orange and purple. The sound rate is also somewhat low but it's not bad (not as bad as the Saturn port), and all the details seem intact regardless. Overall I think they did a great job maximizing memory available, and Capcom should've learned a few things from this (especially their VS series games on PSX). Maximum 2D animation use, and SFX that still sounds high quality despite the low amount of memory. Big thumbs up to the programmers!

 

Firstly, welcome!

Your post got caught up in the auto moderation queue for some reason. I'm not sure why, as you didn't use any links etc. Just be aware it may happen again over your next few posts, but one of us will get round to approving your posts, fear not!

The Saturn IS difficult to program for, especially if you use both processors. Many developers back in the day had issues.

 

It's hard to say what is technically impressive. But I'd say Legacy of Kain - Soul Reaver (area loading), Terracon, Metal Gear Solid, Tomb Raiders, Spyro games (LOD).

 

Without skipping a beat, Crash Bandicoot 3 is a title that immediately comes to mind. The expressive, explosive animation, sprawling worlds and, of course, the extremely impressive emulated Z-buffer not only show what the PSone was capable of, but served as a sort of proof of concept for what Naughty Dog was just warming up for early on in their career.

 

FFVIII was impressive. The pre-rendered backgrounds had a lot of detail to them... Even the ones that are only used once in the entire game.


The PS1 port of Street Fighter Alpha 3 was also well done and very close to arcade quality at that. There were load times, a few frames were sacrificed, some frames were actually pseudo-2D models (like Ryu's Hadouken), but it still did the arcade justice.. Especially when compared to Capcom's older PS1 ports.

 

Anyone remember the Street Fighter Alpha 1 ludicrous load times? I loved the game so much I would accept the 10+ second loads but killed the flow of the game.

Vigilante 8 was impressive especially graphically compared to similar games at the time and same goes for Gran Turismo 2.

 

Parasite Eve II definitely. The first time I see FMV combined with polygon model in a scene.

 

I'm guessing you mean the Playstation's 1 Megabyte of Video RAM. But don't forget there's also 2 megabytes of Work RAM which could also be used to store graphics and could be moved into Video RAM as needed. About Capcom and their VS games, I don't think they could have done much with them due to the lack of memory. Looking at Street Fighter Alpha 3, you might think it's spot on, but if you've played other versions, most importantly the arcade, you'll notice things that are missing. Plus the biggest thing is that the tag team play requires the system to have up to 4 different characters in memory at once. Again, there just wasn't enough space for that. Obviously the Saturn with the help of the 4MB expansion managed a fantastic port of MSH Vs SF. If the PS had received a memory expansion like that it may have helped.

 

Toy Story 2 on the PS1 looks very clean, the levels are large and there is a lot going on.

 

Wipeout XL, Wipeout 3, Tobal 2, Ridge Racer Type 4, Crash Bandicoot 1,2,3, Crash Team Racing, Chrono Cross, Rival Schools, Street Fighter Zero 3, Soul Edge, Tekken 3, Omega Boost,...

 

IMO when considering "Mortal Kombat Trilogy"; surely by compressing sprites, a lot more animation and/or sprites could've been possible. Not only that, cartoon visuals are much easier to compress, vs motion captured actors and backgrounds that require maximum color and dithering; at least when considering movie codecs but I bet it's the same for video game visuals. When a game like Mortal Kombat Trilogy uses so much animation and color for organic motion captured 2D graphics and two screen backgrounds, I don't think there was any excuse for Capcom to avoid something similar especially with cartoons and a somewhat imperfect port of SFA3 IMO. "Mortal Kombat Trilogy" looks fine with compression, but on a CRT TV it looks even better and compression seems transparent.

 

Crash bandicoot pushed the PSX to the limit, they would get insanely close to the poly count. After the background and characters were built, they only had the polygons left for 2 - 3 enemies at a time. Their answer was to create the signature crates that actually led to his name.

Grab some popcorn, get cozy, and check out this 13 page making of Crash Bandicoot by Andy Gavin(one of the founders of Naughty Dog), it's a great read

http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/02/making-crash-bandicoot-part-1/

 

Alien: Resurrection ... hard as hell, but technically still impressive.

 

MK Trilogy didn't exactly have the same amount of sprite frames found in other games of the same genre, and IIRC frames were even shrunk down a bit in order to fit. Most contenders had really way more animation sprites, hence why they were so difficult to port. As for the actual quality of Trilogy, it's quite low in general and I wouldn't consider it a good example of technically impressive title. I was a pretty big MK fan years ago, but when I tried MKT for the first time I went "meh" and abandoned it shortly after.

 

I'm not sure what you mean by Capcom and not having any excuse. The "excuse" or rather the reason is perfectly simple. There was not enough available memory to store every frame of animation for a game such as Marvel Super Heroes Vs Street Fighter. In one of the playstation ports of the VS series, they simply removed the tag team play aspect from the game unless you were going to play a 2 player VS mirror match I think.

Compression was not going to help this situation either. Unless you can be sure that there is enough CPU time free to handle an effective decompression scheme for sprites and enough memory with this compression scheme to fit even the largest combination of graphics. If compression like this had been a reasonable option I think we would have seen it done. Instead what we saw was on Playstation, either cut frames or more loading, and on the Saturn we saw the RAM expansion carts.

 

Black Ops Entertainment's Treasures of the Deep. Amazing graphics, amazing animations and the best fog use in Playstation so far.

Squaresoft's iS: Internal Section. The only game in real high-res 640x480 60FPS. Yeah, its a quite simple barrel-shooter (Tempest clone) but its amazing how it handles.

EA Canada's Sled Storm. Great graphics, ultra-smooth gameplay, outstanding controls, 4 players splitscreen and ... well, the best snowmobile racing game ever done.

Psygnosis Wipeout 3: Special Editon. The best game of the series so far, amazing speed, graphics, effects, its just the best of its kind.

 

Capcom failed to use compression schemes (like you mention) in comparison to "Mortal Kombat Trilogy", and it's quite clear how much animation can be stored using compression schemes without slowdown. "Mortal Kombat Trilogy" allows two full Boss characters with their unique sounds and animation (including animation not in original arcade) in a single match with no noticeable loading times during match, and some backgrounds are two screens large (very similar to Capcom's vs series). If the system needs more RAM, then that is cheating. It's very easy to add extra animation and data with more RAM. If Capcom needs more RAM to utilize better animation, instead of compression schemes, then they don't seem as efficient as "Mortal Kombat Trilogy" programmers. Maybe Capcom has hard time managing multiple system ports I think but who knows for sure? I think Capcom make some of the best games with best programming but more RAM is cheating lol.

I disagree with "Mortal Kombat Trilogy" having shrunk down animation. All animation seems intact including all sounds. Only resolution seems lower compared to Arcade and things seem a little squashed, but framerate is much higher. The sound quality is also a little lower quality but not that much worse like Saturn port (though it's true the round announcements are cut and match ending fanfare). Shang Tsung morphs seem to be the only problem with such small ram. IMO it's the best version of 2D Mortal Kombat utilizing the "Mortal Kombat 3" game technology. I think only the Nintendo 64 has cut animation.

 

Well, that's the meaning of "shrunk down" after all. And as a matter of fact:

On the left arcade Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, on the right Mortal Kombat Trilogy PSX. No wonder they could fit a lot more frames, the scaled resolution allows more by compromising quality plus MK never used a ton frames anyway. Frame rate doesn't seem to be that much better either, hence why this is barely a valid measurement for comparison with what CAPCOM did.

 

Correct. MK Digitized sprites have no where close to having the same frame count as Capcom's CPS2 productions. Not only that, the shrunken character sprites had an adverse affect to the actual gameplay, creating some pretty rediculous combos that had to be adressed with additional game revisions. It took them 2 more tries to get MKT into a competent fighter on the psx and it still wasn't enough for it to surpass UMK3 in the competitive scene. -.-

 

I guess that's a big f87king difference. TBH I never really found the PSX interesting and think it's a dried up money making machine.

This may go against the rules but for some odd reason, "Primal Rage" is a Sega Saturn game that seems oddly better than both the PSX and DOS port. Supposedly the DOS port is the best version (16mb install?), but it uses 256 colors and 320x200 resolution. In comparison the Saturn and PSX both use thousands of colors. For some reason the characters in Saturn look extremely huge. I'm not kidding but some characters (Sauron) in Saturn port use like half the screen size! When I play the DOS port the characters don't seem as big vs the Saturn. 256 colors also doesn't look too hot on a computer CRT, but if using svideo on specific video cards it looks way better on a TV CRT (they do a great job blending the dithering and make 8-bit color like 64-bit).

(Top=Arcade Bottom=Saturn)