Game that blew you away most, graphically

So I'm curious to see from fellow bombers which game blew you away most, graphically speaking. I'm talking about relative to the time you saw it.

I would say the first time I saw Super Mario 64 blew my mind. I was in a Toys R Us and saw it on a tv in a kiosk...I plainly remember seeing Mario jumping out of a pipe and I couldn't believe what I was seeing!

Next in line I'd say Donkey Kong Country when it first came out...then maybe Gears of War (the first game that made me believe in the power of the 360)

Kinetica was the first PS2 game I ever saw and back then it looked amazing to me.

The early Half-Life 2 trailers made my head explode. It was also one of the first games I'd seen with physics that made sense. I also remember Doom 3 being crazy even though I didn't end up really playing it.

The original Assassins Creed. Really hammered home the generational shift for me.

Probably final fantasy 8. The cinematics were... pretty much the best looking thing of its time.

I remember being blown away by Soul Calibur and Shenmue back in the day. I don't really get blown away by graphics the same way that I used to when I was younger. But then again, nothing is really as impressive as it used to be. DEPRESSING! LOL.

Soul Reaver was when I realized how much you can accomplish with games. 

@gamefreak9 said:

Probably final fantasy 8. The cinematics were... pretty much the best looking thing of its time.

Yes. This. The ball/dance scene in particular.

For me It's probably SotC and RDR. In both games I stopped many times to marvel at my surroundings.

As far as older games go: Sim City 2000 with its SVGA graphics.

@mtcantor said:

The original Assassins Creed. Really hammered home the generational shift for me.

Yep, that game as well. Blew me away at the time. Masyaf, the Kingdom, when you first reach Jerusalem and Damascus, or sitting on top of that huge cathedral in Acre. Great moments.

Fury 3 for the PC when it came out in 1995.

Those graphics looked so awesome and the music was great and I loved that game so much.

Just look at that ship design!

Edit: Oh man, I found some gameplay footage! That title screen music is the best!

Mario 64. It was amazing to see Mario in 3D. I didn't get a PSOne till late in it's life cycle, so moving from a Genesis/SNES to the N64 was a huge graphical jump for me.

@wewantsthering said:

The early Half-Life 2 trailers made my head explode. It was also one of the first games I'd seen with physics that made sense. I also remember Doom 3 being crazy even though I didn't end up really playing it.

Good call on Half-Life 2 I remember thinking the physics looked so unbelievably real!

Yeah, definitely Half-Life 2.

I dreamt about Ocarina of Time after seeing it for the first time. GTA3 was the first time I said "done, they've created the real world inside a game". Metroid Prime was a huge one as well, then Crysis, of course.

It's hard to find just one, so here's a simple list in no particular order that came to mind.

• Crysis (first) Tech demo
• Far Cry
• Doom 3
• Age of Empires 3
• Assassin's Creed
• Mass Effect
• Gears of War
• F.E.A.R
• Project Gotham Racing 3
• The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion

That moment when you first emerged from the sewers in Oblivion...

kind of looks like crap now.

I remember the first time I played Just Cause 2 it was like "whoa." Doom 3 was a great looking game when it came out, and still holds up today.

When Half-Life 2 was revealed. It was fucking uncanny.

HAS to be Morrowind. I remember playing it for like, 3 hours, then going outside and saying to my brother: Man, does the sky look fake or what?

Good times :)

Yeah Mario 64 was amazing when i first saw it. When i saw FF7 for the first time i was also blown away, same with FF8.

Installing a 3Dfx card and running GLQuake for the first time. Whoa...

Damn, i remember when i got a Voodoo2 video add-on card around '97-98. Fuck!!!! There was a Need for Speed (the exact name escapes me) demo that was so insane. Quake 2 was so smoooooooth. No PS game looked like that. PC for life since then.

The first Gears blew my mind when I first saw it

I was really impressed the first time I played RE4 on the gamecube.

Super Mario Brothers. I had an intellivision before that, and the change to sprite based visuals was astounding. It was like watching a cartoon. Nothing since then has caused the same sense of awe at the advancement of technology

@Jrinswand said:

I remember being blown away by Soul Calibur

Good god, this. Even as a youth, I was a die-hard PC gamer. When I first started downloading gameplay videos of Soul Calibur on the dream cast, I was blown away. Holy shit, leaves are blowing around on the floor. A floor that has individual stone tiles!? I took 9/9/99 off of work and played the living crap out of Soul Calibur. It was even better looking in person and silk smooth. Soul Calibur was the single game that ruined console launches for me. Graphically, it was unlike anything I had seen before. Gameplay wise? It was so smooth, so polished, so fun. It was my system seller.

I remember buying a PS2 on launch and being so let down. After all the hype Sony had created, I was expecting real time FF8 dance scenes. What I got were aliased games that played like shit and looked like slightly uprez'ed PS1 games; they couldn't touch the smoothness or sharpness of the Dreamcast launch titles. It took months before I took FF9 out of my PS2 to play an actual PS2 title. Ring of Red. (So awesome.)

Also...

Mechwarrior 2 ATI Rage edition. Polygyonal surfaces with... textures? And glass cockpits that reflected the skybox? Holy. Fucking. Shit.

The original EverQuest. It was a whole 3d world! Colored lighting!

@wewantsthering said:

The early Half-Life 2 trailers made my head explode. It was also one of the first games I'd seen with physics that made sense. I also remember Doom 3 being crazy even though I didn't end up really playing it.

^This. At the time the game looked utterly astounding given the work they'd put into their facial technology and weighted physics, vs the ragdoll stuff that everyone else was running with.

Oblivion. The first time I equipped a torch in a dungeon blew me away. I tried using light spells too, but they just didn't compare to the warm glow of a torch.

From recent memory it would be Lords of Shadow. I was really into the art design and constantly stopped to look at something thinking "Man, that looks pwetty". Especially the shot where you see that huge vampire castle in the distance. I must have stood there for minutes just looking at the scenery. One of my favorite games of this generation.

Call of Duty 4 and Skyrim.

Bioshock, Uncharted 2 and Final Fantasy 13.

Tony Hawk 2 for the dreamcast.

Skyrim after installing about 20GB of graphics mods. I went from vanilla to heavily modded with a new ENB and everything and it blew my mind. It is a completely different feeling game now.

When I first got my Gamecube with Super Mario Sunshine and Mario got covered in slime-stuff. That game actually looked really good, and still does.

Oblivion. When I first got out of the sewers it was crazy. That was the first "next gen" game I got for my PC as I had spent the previous year playing BF2. My copy is rated Teen.

Gears of War just because it was the first Xbox 360 game I played.

Forza 3. I had been playing Forza 2 and the difference in graphics between those two games is staggering.

Edit: Here's a couple screenshots of heavily modded Skyrim. It isn't as good looking as normal because I reinstalled Windows and ported everything over to my new install and a couple mods didn't like that, but I still think it looks nice. My trees need a bit more work though. It usually isn't that jaggy either.

@Zelyre said:

@Jrinswand said:

I remember being blown away by Soul Calibur

Good god, this. Even as a youth, I was a die-hard PC gamer. When I first started downloading gameplay videos of Soul Calibur on the dream cast, I was blown away. Holy shit, leaves are blowing around on the floor. A floor that has individual stone tiles!? I took 9/9/99 off of work and played the living crap out of Soul Calibur. It was even better looking in person and silk smooth. Soul Calibur was the single game that ruined console launches for me. Graphically, it was unlike anything I had seen before. Gameplay wise? It was so smooth, so polished, so fun. It was my system seller.

Yeah, I think even if it didn't have all of the fancy visuals, the framerate alone would still have made it really impressive. Aside from a few games here and there, it wasn't often back then that you got 60 frames per second. That was before I even knew what "60 frames per second" meant and I could still tell that it felt different somehow, better.

@mtcantor said:

The original Assassins Creed. Really hammered home the generational shift for me.

this for me, the crowds in the game where unreal and when i saw them for the first time i was astounded

I had been really impressed and excited about a lot of games growing up, but I think the first time I was actually amazed was playing Metal Gear Solid. The first time I was in the tutorial section to get used to the controls, there was one VR level where you had to sneak by an area by crawling through a small space and I got down on the floor and started crawling and then suddenly the view switched to first person as I crawled through a little tunnel. That moment exploded my brain when I realized what the possibilities could be for a third person 3D game that let's you switch into a first person view. Around the same time, I also first saw Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time which both blew me away in the same way. The idea of a big, open, colorful 3D world was mind-boggling. It's pretty funny how games that blew me away graphically also happen to be the ones that stick out in my memory the most and that I also consider some of the best games I've ever played. I guess graphics are more important to me than I thought. Although since then, I don't think that graphics have taken as big a leap from generation to generation and that may be why if any games have blown me away since then it's been because of other things like the scale of the game, the combat or platforming mechanics, the depth of the customization of the characters or their abilities, etc. I miss being blown away by graphics, but I'm sure one day there will be another huge leap like there was with the Playstation and N64.

I was really impressed the first time I played RE4 on the gamecube.

Super Mario RPG LotSS blew my mind that it was on the fucking SUPER NINTENDO! Well I was a kid back then so I might have just been excited.

The most recent game might have been Battlefield 3. It looked great when it came out if you have a PC that can crank out max graphics.

Battle for middle earth games, Crysis 1, Gears of war, Mass Effect 1,

I remember Vanguard Bandits on the PSX blowing my mind when every time you would attack an enemy it would instantly go from the 2D sprite based over head strategy map into a fully 3D battle animation without a second to load. Plus the 3D at the time was really awesome.

@buft said:

@mtcantor said:

The original Assassins Creed. Really hammered home the generational shift for me.

this for me, the crowds in the game where unreal and when i saw them for the first time i was astounded

Forgot about that one. That game still looks insanely good on PC.

Mario 3 NES. Everything just looked really clear and identifiable and less angular than I had ever seen before.

FF7. CUTSCENES YALL.

MGS2. shooting glass and watching it crack, shooting individual bottles, shooting pipes and TVs.

HL2. People forget that the source engine was insane at the time. Shooting the pieces of a structure an watching the rest of it react. Ragdolls, good reflective surfaces, physics. That was all pretty new.

@billyhoush said:

Installing a 3Dfx card and running GLQuake for the first time. Whoa...

Without a doubt, this was the one. I saw it at a friend, all of us bought a gfx card the next day. Going from software rendered games to hardware rendering was insane, I don't think we will ever see a leap like that. :(

Ninja Gaiden for Xbox. Game still holds up on the graphics side.

I remember being blown away at Mass Effect the first time I saw it. Those faces looked so good!

@Icemo said:

Fury 3 for the PC when it came out in 1995.

Those graphics looked so awesome and the music was great and I loved that game so much.

Fuck yeah! Fury 3 was the shit!

Jurassic Park for the Genesis as a kid, that BLEW MY MIND AWAY!!!

yeah, I was easily impressed

The Legend of Zelda A Link to The Past. As a kid I played the shit out of the original Zelda and I remember looking at pictures in Nintendo Power of Link to The Past even before the SNES was out and having them just blow my little mind. First game I was ever REALLY stoked to play pre-release, I ate up all the media I could on that sucker.