Were you impressed by early 3D graphics? Weirdly enough, I wasn't.

When I saw stuff like Quake 1 and Tomb Raider back in the day, I was not impressed graphically and did not find them visually pleasing. I understand they are huge technical milestones and revolutionary games, and that my opinion on their graphics here is in the minority haha.

I'm currently doing research on people's perception of early 3D graphics back when they first experienced them for a paper. What did y'all think back in the day? Were you impressed by early 3D graphics?

Would love to hear your thoughts on this, and if you have 30 seconds, I put together a super short 3 question survey about this as well. Would help me out tremendously if you could answer it <3

Answered your survey. I was impressed by the game worlds and mechanics that they had made in early 3D, not so much the graphics. I don't believe that anyone looked at those games and thought that they were incredibly life-like, that's more of a nostalgia effect that we are looking back on. The graphics looked just as much of a mess back then as they look now, it's just that it was impressive that we got there at all and it really sparked our imagination on what was possible, or going to be possible soon.

Quake 1 looked incredible at the time on an adequate PC.

That said, it is not an example of "early 3d graphics"

One of my favourite talks on the subject (as it applied to the IBM PC compatible)

Playing Mario 64 for the first time on my 9th birthday after having mostly played Genesis games was quite mind blowing. The closest thing to a 3D game I had played previously was Chex Quest (a doom engine FPS), so Mario 64 was unlike anything I had ever seen.

These days I definitely prefer the look of gen 4 and 5 2D visuals over gen 5 3D visuals, but at the time those fully 3D games on N64 and PS1 were very impressive.

I think I was, partly because I didn’t grow up with the 2D consoles that came before. They definitely aged the quickest and the worst, though I have a weird fondness for how the Gran Turismo games looked on PS1. The blocky design aesthetics of some older cars worked well in that style.

I was very wowed by 3d. Not so much anymore. Graphics pre-psx/n64 we’re only impressive to me because I could control something projected on my tv. Light gun games were cool. Basketball and soccer games were cool because they were representative of things I enjoyed in real life. Fighting games were cool. You couldn’t get me to care about anything that wasn’t mega man, duck tales, or chip ‘n dales or Fzero before psx/n64. When psx/n64 launched I cared about everything. I started playing ff7. Gave tomb raider and Mario 65 a whirl and I was hooked. Fast forward to right now and I care less about 3d and more about a seamless experience where my skill is tested (in all things not multiplayer.. that’s for another thread).

I was... 9 or 10 at the change up? So that and having come up on NES/SNES yeah I was suitably blown the fuck away by that new stuff.

Hmm, it's difficult because i wasn't familiar with NES/SNES when i started playing 3D games. I think my neighbors Amiga was the first avenue for me to see 2d graphics. It was fine, but i can't say that i loved the look of those games. But at the same time, i was very aware that 3d games also looked very janky and blocky. I distinctly remember playing Slipstream 5000 as a kid and being like 'man.. this game is cool, but i bet in 5 years time this kind of thing will look soooo much better'. I never had that feeling of 'man, we're at the peak of 3d now.' It always feels like there's plenty of room to improve.

I think Half Life, Metal Gear Solid & Shogo were the first games that i was impressed with from a graphical standpoint.

I started fooling with pc video games right arounds/just after 3d was happening. So I was backsliding through duke Nukem and Hexen shareware, coming across Quake, Wolfenstein and Doom. I had a terrible beginning computer (I didn't know better). But I consider that the fun times now.

I would say that with that perspective of early 3d games I have not always been enamored of later photo realism. Playing games like Amid evil, Dusk, and other throwbacks has satiated some nostalgia. And as more a post occurrence with me, I also have learned to enjoy 2d games.

I can't recall ever having that "Oh my god! These games are in 3D now!" moment. Maybe it's because I was born around the time 3D consoles were released, but when I finally moved on from my Genesis to the PS1, I don't think I even realized there was a distinction between 2D and 3D. They were all just more video games to me.

Depends. On PC I found some early 3D games breathtaking at the time. Like Descent, for example, and yes, also Quake (or many other shooters).

On consoles I found it rough. Too jittery with all the texture warping on PSX and on N64 everything was extremely blurry.

There was a reddit thread about that just the other day so let me copy that response first:

They were really fascinating to me, even that "3D" version of Tetris and the Win 95 screen saver with the labyrinth were pretty cool at the time.

After the initial wow factor with games like Star Fox, Doom and Daytona USA (yeah there were some 3D games before that but I didn't play them until later) I was more picky though; I wasn't that impressed by Mario 64 when I saw it in action, nor Quake 1 but I saw that one about a year or two after it came out. Didn't like how Toshinden for PS1 looked either. Some games just looked kind of odd like GoldenEye with its photographed faces and smudgy textures.

Some things like texture warping and choppy camera movements on PS1 were just kind of weird at the time, as you weren't used to how it was supposed to look. Same with mixtures of 2D and 3D like in Terminal Velocity or Rise of the Triad (and many others), or the low framerate animations of Quake 1.

When I saw Quake 2, the blood particle effects, colored lighting and how bodies could blow into chunks, that was really impressive to me. I guess the next major leap was 3DFX graphics in Unreal and Dethkarz. Not a lot really wowed me after that for several years besides FF10, Shadow of the Colossus, Doom 3 and Half-Life 2.

In retrospect I am more into heavily stylized visuals like Rez, JSR, Wind Waker, Okami, Grim Fandango, Journey, etc. but I also dig that early flat shaded poly look as seen in Star Fox and Virtua Racing.

---

"Did you generally prefer the graphics of 80s and 90s 2D games over the graphics of early 3D games like Quake 1, Zelda Ocarina Of Time, and Tomb Raider 1?"

This is very broad and my previous response was that it depended on the game. A lot of 80s 2D games weren't that visually appealing to me, being about 6 when I started playing 16-bit games and playing Amiga games pretty early. Various 2D games looked great but DKC for example was a big standout in that it looked like something completely new and you weren't quite used to how real 3D was supposed to look yet (I think I played Star Fox and Doom in the same year). A couple of years later that illusion was gone and you saw it for what it was, pre-rendered 2D with parallax layers. Anyway some 2D games still looked great after 3D started becoming mainstream, like Secret of Evermore, Red Alert or Warcraft 2. And some 3D games looked rough even when new but a lot of the excitement came from it feeling more like real-life due to the 3D movement and world. Simply moving around freely and actually exploring the backgrounds that were just backdrops in 2D, was amazing at the time. And for story, you could now see characters talking and expressing themselves much more clearly and with more advanced movement, so it became a lot more immersive than even pretty good 16-bit stories like Zelda 3, Beneath a Steel Sky or the aforementioned Evermore.

I think I was about 9 when I first played Star Fox, maybe 10 when I played Doom and Daytona USA. I also had a game history oddity, the Laseractive, with some FMV games on it like Rocket Coaster and Pyramid Patrol. That was more like 2.5D, with the car in the former being a sprite and the track a CGI movie, but at first the illusion was convincing.

Edit:

That PC video linked to above made me remember another early 3D game, Stunts, though I actually played it around the same time as Star Fox I wanna say. That game was really cool at the time, especially building your own tracks and crashing the car in creative ways. I also saw Corporation before Doom at a friend's house, someone's older brother was playing it, but it was too complicated for us to play.

I didn't play most of those racing and flight sim games mentioned; I guess they didn't appeal to me as a kid in screenshots and the boxes, which was what you had to go on early on. I do remember seeing pics of and wanting to play Ultima Underworld but it didn't happen at the time. Generally I was reading Nintendo Power for gaming news, which didn't cover PC, or checking the flyers that came with the games. By the mid-late 90s I was also reading PC Gamer and PSM.

Depends on your age i guess, you mentioned Tomb Raider which is one of my early 3D memories and i would have been about..... 8?
So going from DOS games that looked like this...

... to the Sega Mega Drive and then to running around inside 3D caverns with extremely creepy ambience, scary animals and backflips yes i was probably blown away.

I was actually having a conversation a while ago with a friend about early 3D and i used Alone in the Dark as an example, does Alone in the Dark look bad?

I think it looks jank in a way that probably affects gameplay, but being so early it does have a lot of charm, and is probably quite scary in places since it's so... well if humans look like aliens expectations probably go out the window.

Well, AITD converts its ugly points into comedy points.

I was born in the very, very early 90's. I started gaming on a Game Boy, then got a SNES around the time the PS1 came out. I do recall playing my Game Boy and SNES a lot, and I do recall getting a PS1, but I don't recall being "wowed" by the 3D-ness of PS1 graphics. I remember thinking "cool! New video games!" but I don't remember thinking "oh my God you can see these characters from every possible angle and move in all three dimensions!" It was just a different challenge to me.

Basically a case of being old enough to have technically been there, but still young enough to not really comprehend just how impressive things were at the time. It's worth noting that even with a PS1 plugged in, I kept my Super Nintendo available and continued to play it fairly often. As far as I was concerned, they were just two consoles that existed at the same time, one could do things the other could not but neither was less relevant than the other.

I do recall seeing a Dreamcast for the first time, in a Funcoland (we call those "Gamestops" now). They had a TV set up on a counter with a Dreamcast playing some kind of racing game I thought that looked incredible. Never got one, though. And I recall seeing Gamecube games for the first time, specifically Metroid Prime, and that did look genuinely incredible to my eyes. How could games get any better looking than that?

I was actively put off by 3D graphics until Half-Life. Half-Life still looks good.

I think for the time, they were alright. Stuff like Mario 64 and Twisted Metal did well by either leaning into overtly cartoonish graphics or by using already-blocky things like vehicles and guns to skirt low-polygon counts.

The problem is: videogames more than any other industry are MASSIVE trend-chasers, and once a few 3D games broke big, suddenly 3D was the "future of gaming" and not only did the Saturn completely shit the bed, despite some GORGEOUS 2D games, but everyone getting on the PSX train meant 2D sprites were almost completely left behind.

And my GOD, nothing has aged worse than PSX-level graphics (from either the console or equivalent PCs).

@undeadpool: you are so right about the psx aging terribly. My love for it is out of nostalgia. The bus rides taken to blockbuster. The thrasher skateboard game bought at full price, instead of tony hawk, because I didn’t remember which game I read the article about. The transition into rumble and analog sticks. The freshmen year in college with twisted metal instead of booze and drugs (aka how videogames have saved and ruined my life). I used to manage a movie theatre and I put a PlayStation classic and a movie projector in the break room for a staff of about 40 so people they could play games. I even printed out gamefaq strategy guides for every game. I imagined over a year that every game would be beaten and they would be in awe over resident evil or enjoy syphon filter. Nope. The only game they carried about was Tekken 3. I guess that game has honestly stayed the same so it was cool to unlock all the characters and challenge people to a game that is currently on sale with a bigger number.

People just don’t understand how much of an accomplishment psx was. If I could go back I would have probably just put an snes classic in the break room. That stuff endures with its simplicity. Psx without an instruction booklet is torture for people that didn’t play one at its apex.

It's a weird one to call. I'm impressed by graphics from the early 3D era from an academic standpoint. For all the roughness the Playstation had, Metal Gear Solid still works for me whereas Final Fantasy VII is a nightmare of weirdly proportioned lego people.

That's the big thing to consider, really. Once the door was kicked in on 3D graphics, you had lighting, camera framing and a whole host of directorial tricks to get your game looking good.

Using one of your examples, I do remember the first time I realized that you could walk around a corpse in Quake and see it from all angles (as opposed to a sprite) and being blown away. And then on top of that, seeing it all with 3D acceleration was quite something! That whole 3D acceleration era was really fun and impressive for me.

Another slightly earlier one was seeing Virtua Fighter in an arcade for the first time (and then Virtua Racing), it was soooo smooth in 3D, my mind was blown.

That being said, it is interesting to think of how early 3D elements were being introduced to games and what constitutes 3D in the first place. Games like Stunt Car Racer, Hard Drivin’, Star Fox, that FX chip SNES driving game all had 3D in them. I don’t think I knew that what I was looking at was significant but it did look somehow different. I still have a fondness for the low poly flat shaded look that seems to be back in fashion at the moment.

I’m sorry, I realize that I am rambling, a lot of nostalgia in this subject for me!

I guess "not really" since I didn't appreciate the technological leap from sprites to polygons until much later in life. But I still remember being between 6 and 8 years old, hearing the "You cannot open this door" music ques for Mario 64, Diddy Kong Racing and Banjo-Kazooie, and being fucking terrified.

I vaguely recall Sonic 3D wowing me, but I honestly couldn't tell you if that was because it was 3D or because it was being done on a Mega Drive. The PlayStation and N64 never really wowed me, it just felt like the logical continuation to me.

You want to talk about tech progression that impressed then we need to start talking about Max Payne's jacket or Agent 47's tie. I remember magazine articles being written about that!

@cikame said:

Depends on your age i guess, you mentioned Tomb Raider which is one of my early 3D memories and i would have been about..... 8?

So going from DOS games that looked like this...

... to the Sega Mega Drive and then to running around inside 3D caverns with extremely creepy ambience, scary animals and backflips yes i was probably blown away.

I was actually having a conversation a while ago with a friend about early 3D and i used Alone in the Dark as an example, does Alone in the Dark look bad?

I think it looks jank in a way that probably affects gameplay, but being so early it does have a lot of charm, and is probably quite scary in places since it's so... well if humans look like aliens expectations probably go out the window.

Yeah, well, thought "how early" when I saw "early". At least, the line here is drawn when "3D acceleration" would become PC graphic card buzzword.

Seeing the Virtua Fighter cabinet for the first time in late 1993 was pretty remarkable to me. Probably the single most remarkable thing I recall seeing in video game graphics. A fully posable 3D camera, smoothly animated figures that appeared to move in a biomechanically correct way (presumably driven by a skeleton and motion capture reference.) Going from seconds-per-frame sprite animations to this where everything was moving at 30fps looked like something from a different planet. From watching the attract mode sequence I distinctly remember being confused how a regular arcade stick and a few buttons could possibly be adequate to manipulate a 3D character that was articulated right down to individual fingers and had the ability to grab and suplex another character in a way that looked physically simulated rather than animated.

By the time Quake rolled around ~3 years later that newness of poly-raster 3D had mostly worn off to me. Every console had done some of it by that point, and on PC there were plenty of examples of halfway steps, whether it be raycasted "2.5D" FPS or games with voxel/heightmap-based landscapes. By 1994-95 on PC I had Mechwarrior2, FX Fighter, Magic Carpet, NFS, Duke3D, Dark Forces, and some others I'm probably forgetting, and I honestly didn't even bother trying Quake immediately at launch because it didn't seem that special from screenshots. In terms of pure visuals I think the biggest thing Quake delivered was the combination of precalculated and dynamic lightmaps. It gave the sense of the world and objects inside it occupying the same space. Before Quake you made a room look dark by uniformly tinting the brush textures and maybe apply some brightness fall-off based on distance. After Quake you'd precalculate radiosity maps for the environment which would give you a pretty good approximation of all the indirect bounce lighting.

I think where Quake delivered a revelatory experience was with the shift to 3D acceleration and the addition of QuakeWorld's netcode. That's what facilitated a paradigm shift in how we played games. Everything changes when you're running at >60fps and playing against dozens of other people. Frankly, I'd still choose QW Team Fortress over any modern derivation of it (TeamFortress2, Overwatch, etc).

Another anecdote of the change to 3D: Making a map in the Build engine always felt like you were working against it, and whatever you made could only be a barely recognizable representation of what you wanted. I recall it being common to want to recreate your high school or house and be able to show your friends, but chances are you gave up after a few hours when you realized how much smoke and mirrors were involved to reproduce even the simplest floorplans. After Quake those fundamental technical constraints were basically gone.

Saturn, 3DO, Jaguar, and other earlier 3D graphics.

Also developers jumping aboard the train quickly meant the industry as a whole got used to developing in 3D quicker, which was a good thing for everyone. You can see a big leap already within that gen in games like Crash 1 to Spyro, Jumping Flash to Mario 64, Tekken 1 to 3, Destruction Derby to Gran Turismo, FF7 to FF8 to Chrono Cross, etc.

I was always fascinated by the early 3D graphics because you could see every developer making choices and having ideas. I think form year to year you could see leap and bounds of new techniques or improved ways to show 3D objects or animate them better. The industry was testing, improving, and re-thinking even moment. Moreover, how each machine worked was totally different. There was no "one way" to do the math or put polygons up on the screen, and no 'one way' to texture objects.

An interesting side bar was there were people advocating polygons (triangles vs trapezoids), voxels, and even volumetric spheroids as the basic building blocks of rendered scenes. Watching a different techniques try do 3D only with software was fascinating. If you were old enough to see Wolfenstein (2D faking 3D), Magic Carpet (Voxels), Quake (polygons), and Ecstatica (ellipsoids).

Moreover, the beginning of the 3D era was the time where the console games media became interested in talking about hardware in depth. It was a great time to be in gaming especially if you were old enough to understand what was going on. The rise of magazines in that era was spectacular. I don’t think I have ever read cover to cover so many different magazines. The profit of games and gaming is likely huge now, but the industry was far more "interesting" and lively 25 years ago.

My first 3D console was an N64 and the feeling I remember was that "This is how games look now". I don't remember having my mind blown with anything and the only games I remember looking bad were just bad games, like Superman 64. I think when I saw some PS1 games for the first time, like one of the Crash Bandicoot games or Metal Gear Solid, I remember thinking those look grungy.

I don't think I was really impressed by 3D games graphically until the PS2 / Xbox.

I was impressed. Before 3d graphics went mainstream, I had a Sega Genesis, and I played games casually like toys. One day at my friends house, I saw Quake running on a pc and was blown away. My family couldn’t afford a pc to run Quake, but we got a PlayStation where I saw games like Tomb Raider and Final Fantasy 7. I thought games have arrived and I have been a hardcore gamer ever since.

@sometingbanuble: This is the thing, it's fine to talk about how revoultionary and impressive the graphics were, that's undoubtedly true, but like early superhero movies: you can't go back to a lot of them without that context or nostalgia.

Jaguar and 3DO haven't aged badly, they were ALWAYS bad. Ditto for the Saturn because it was designed to do 2D, so it NEVER did 3D well (unless it was a port, like Virtua Cop or Virtua Fighter) but games like Dragon Force and the Saturn's version of "Symphony of the Night" were gorgeous and remain impressive.

This is what I mean: there's a stark difference between aging badly and ALWAYS being bad.

The problem with the jump you're describing is: apart from some REAL exceptions, some of which I already listed, those games still haven't AGED well. They looked great at the time, but if I put out a fighting game that was "retro" that looked like Tekken 3, it'd be laughed off of the storefront (unless it had a gimmick), while 2D 32-bit style games STILL look gorgeous (from Guilty Gear to Octopath). So in that way: I could make the same argument that if devs hadn't leaped onto the 3D trend, we could've had games like Guilty Gear Stride or Dragonball FighterZ so much earlier: games that blend 2D and 3D art seamlessly, or even just ultra-detailed high-rez 2D graphics like earlier Guilty Gear games had.

@undeadpool: Superhero movies have kind of jumped the shark at this point. Id rather watch a Christopher Reeves Superman than any modern stuff. Cinema and the psx were made to capture a vision. Replicate a dream but you fill in the blanks. It’s all done for you now. I’m more interested in any stunts pre 2000 than current day we through 200 iMacs at the sweat on Spider-Man chins. But do you.

Being a Super Nintendo kid, I remember playing the first Ridge Racer on PS1 and not being impressed. While the move to 3D was exciting, it felt brittle - not solid like my loved sprites. The lack of anti-aliasing would tear the edges of polygons - It looked flimsy, like the car would collaps at any moment.

When Mario and Zelda rolled into 3D it felt a lot more solid, then those very early attempts - but I still, even today, get that light-as-a-feather feel in modern games.

I was. I remember thinking Virtua Fighter was amazing. So was Virtua On. My uncle had a PC long before my family did so I got to see how Quake 1 looked and was blown away. My first home experience was Mario 64. All were amazing experiences because I'm just old enough that I played 8-bit games when they were new. But also I mostly played a Colecovision before I played my Genesis, the first console I thought of as my own. Going from Pitfall to Mario 64 in ten or so years was pretty amazing.

The Mother 3 N64 tech demo still kind of blows my mind to this day.

3d was always the most interesting thing about any videogame to me even before games had 3d graphics. The first videogame I thought was cool was the maze game included with the black and white macintosh because it had a mode that allowed some maze paths to look 3d and cross others. The coolest thing about 8-bit and 16-bit games was the various tricks they used to evoke spatial depth both visually but also in terms of world building and gameplay. I still find it difficult to enjoy games with flat level design where gameplay relevant information is largely conveyed by two coordinates instead of three. (most RTS, simulation, top down action rpg, and even many 3rd person action and open world games)

@undeadpool

They have to have aged at least as poorly otherwise you're not making any sense. While they were worse, it was not a huge leap from the PS1 to the Saturn with certain games like Nights or PD2 even if it was worse overall, and some 3DO games were impressive in 1993-1995 or so. So no I don't think PS1 in particular aged the worst.

Again, it was good that most made the jump early or 3D would've taken even longer to improve.

Laughed off the shelves? No there are various retro-style 3D games being made in recent years and they clearly have an audience. Though they do tend to have more stable framerates and models.

SotN is regarded as a bad port on Saturn, though sure, it still looks quite good.

You listed Twisted Metal which wasn't particularly cartoony and wasn't a top tier looker at the time, and Mario 64 which looks bad compared to later games that gen.

@undeadpool said:

I adore the PS1 aesthetic i'm guessing because i played so much of it as a kid, but we quite often reference "video game ass video games" on this site and those are the sort of games i think about.
I'm not a stickler for using original hardware and love to up-res PS1 games via emulation, i think bumping up the tiny resolution of old games is a fascinating way to revisit them, it does a lot to make them feel fresh again.
I need to take more PS1 screenshots but here's a few, i don't use texture filtering or anti aliasing usually because i like it looking as crisp as possible, and alleviating texture warping with perspective correction works wonders on some games.

I answered your poll! I played Tomb Raider 1 which made my jaw drop and I also felt a bit of vertigo in a certain scene (I did finish it), the WipeOut series was also killer and I still have the discs in their jewel boxes. Unfortunately the PS died due to overheating and I couldn't take it back, my room had the water heater in it and I think someone leant on the PS whilst I was away for the weekend and switched it on. After that point it wouldn't spin up any CDs. I couldn't return it, because of the distance/cost involved.

As far as Quake 1 goes though, the difference between software mode and using the 3DFX patches simply blew me away at the time. So much difference in lighting (candles etc) and the definition on-screen, I couldn't put it down and I finished that too.

Yes and no. While I thought 3D graphics were cool and clearly the future, I still had a strong fondness for the 2D 16-bit like graphics during the early to mid 90s, mainly because consoles were starting to get powerful enough to make them look as good as they did in the arcades. What's sad, is that Sega actually tried to go this route, but were left behind by the 3D craze of the late 90s. I believe the Saturn could of been the ultimate 32-bit arcade machine if it was given a chance. It was still quite popular in Japan a couple of years after it died in the States. Yes, the Saturn was capable of doing 3D graphics as well, but it was primarily a very powerful 2D arcade machine with multiple functions that never truly got explored. I'll put it this way, great games like Guardian Heroes or Radiant Silvergun, could not be done on a PS1. And I loved the PS1 just fine eventually, because of the 3D games getting better and becoming the main staple at that point.

The year you first saw 3D graphics is a big deal too. This survey assumes you were around in the mid 90s. I was born in '85 and started playing games on NES.

I remember seeing Virtua Fighter 1 and being impressed. I'd never seen anything like it before it, or since. Most games went a different direction for low poly graphics as far as I know. I never played it, but It's the memory that has stuck with me for early 3D graphics. It looked nuts and has stuck with me despite never playing the game.

Toy Story and earlier 3D film graphics were primitive in a different way, they could still be very round. I was wowed by Wolfenstein 3D. I only played it at an older kid's house who had a PC. That was a portal to another world, from what I was used to on NIintendo consoles. I think he had Doom, Duke Nukem and Artillery. Games that were visually more and less advanced (just "different"). It's harder to decipher my feelings, as I was wowed by everything.

My memory of playing Mario 64 was more about how it played rather than how it looked. I remember, attempting to do a group video game review project in elementary school and some people wanted to give all the N64 games 10/10 for graphics by default. I'm not sure if I was fully on board with the idea, but conceded.

At the end of the day it was a new thing. It wowed because it was new it's hard to separate how it looked from how it changed how games played. Looks are definitely a big part of it. Once established we were all collectively Wowed by how it became gradually better over the generations. Recent years has seen diminishing returns on that, but the games community still has a love for uncanny realism that wouldn't fly in mainstream films.

Still low poly graphics is a look, that when used well today works just as well as pixel art. Low res textures, perhaps less so, but even then it can invoke a nostalgic look like a crt or gameboy filter. A talented art team could make a great looking game today inspired by mid 90s graphics.

Each console gen blew me away until the 360/PS3 to XBone/PS4 eras graphically speaking.

Load times where the most mind blowing thing in the last few years.

I remember seeing Killer Instinct the first time and thinking this was the future. Didn't really know how game development worked, and that the backgrounds were actually fmv. So, no. The graphics themselves were a big disappointment.

3D gaming itself blew me away. Seriously, it changed everything, and for a while I wanted nothing to do with 2D stuff. But the graphics looked like smeared ass. Jagged, janky, smeared ass.

I think OP might be of a certain age. The PSX presented so many novel experiences that a PlayStation magazine monthly demo disc that spanned the life of the console is kind of the only videogame collection you really need in 2022. Most of us older gamers have just been chasing that high to the detriment of our wallet and other sacrifices.

@cikame: There'll always be exceptions, and one of those is a vehicle game, which I already mentioned look better by nature. My point is: they abandoned 2D way too early for a gimmick (3D graphics) and that has hampered the PSX's style long-term.

@alianger: I feel like we're on the wrong end of each other's argument. I'm saying: most PSX games have not aged well, the 3D games in-particular, while 32 bit 2D has aged just fine. Games like Xenogears and Guilty Gear still look great, look like they could've come out of some indie studio with an artistic vision, while Battle Arena Toshinden might look audacious and stand out, but you wouldn't say they've aged well. Anytime PSX tries for "realism," apart from vehicles (which is why I listed Twisted Metal and Twisted Metal 2, not because they're "cartoonish," but because they're all vehicles and those naturally look better in 3D) and some exceptions, it falls flat on its face. The system's general look is more stopgap than anything else and it has aged BADLY overall.

@sometingbanuble:And for me, most old superhero movies aren't impressive from a stunt perspective, they were done with awkward CGI (again: before it was really ready) and Spiderman in the original looks like a weightless doll. And the plots and characterization are cookie-cutter (Mary-Jane's sole reason to be is to shriek for help and make Peter Parker mope. Oh, and leaving her fiancee at the altar for no good reason), while today: the characters are fleshed out and have long-terms arcs. To say nothing of the genre-bending going on between movies like Thor: Ragnarok and Captain America: Winter Soldier. But hey, you do you too.

I didn't have a PS1/N64, but my dad did have a PC, and so Quake 2 was the first true 3D game I spent any significant time with, and it definitely made an impression. That said, the first 3D game that really impressed me was Pikmin. There was a life and movement to that game that I think holds up extremely well.

I still vividly remember being on vacation in Seattle as a kid and learning that Sega was hosting a big Dreamcast expo at a convention center there. While I'd seen some of that stuff in arcades, like Ready 2 Rumble Boxing, I distinctly remember the almost unfathomably long lines to see NBA 2K and NFL 2K in person. I never owned a Dreamcast, but seeing those games running in real time for the first time was a real holy shit moment for me, and of course I thought Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time were life changing experiences. Triply Play '97 on PSX and Ken Griffey Jr.'s Winning Run (which, despite being a 2D game technically and a SNES game, told me sports fans were in for some real serious shit when the Playstation came out) were also real mind bending experiences as someone who'd played untold hours of the Griffey game on SNES and Baseball Stars in arcades.

Yeah, I was super impressed. Even stuff like Turok was absolutely nuts to me, as absolutely nuts as that feels to say now.

Oh one more: I was never a PC gamer but a friend got a 3D Accelerator card and Star Wars Racer on PC, which I'd played a bunch of on N64, and man did that seem like a completely different game. So insane to see in someone's living room at the time.

@undeadpool

"Games like Xenogears" Because of the 2D element or did you mean another game? I'm kinda nostalgic for that mixed look for some games but it is less uniform aesthetically and technically.

I see what you mean, yeah I'll take something like Mega Man Legends over Resident Evil for example. In retrospect.