Blocky polygons the next big thing for indie devs?

[Captain]

Missing the point.

Try imagining them with today's graphics.

(i swear, if square remakes Einhander it will do everyone good)

[PC Engine Fan X!]

The 480i polygonal aestethics of Squaresoft's iS: internal section looks great with it's 60fps framerate overall presentation. Too bad that it never got a proper add-on disc appendum or true sequel on the PSX platform -- "iSE: internal section eternal" would be the most appropiate sequel name title that comes to mind. The vibration/rumble effects used within the iS engine (along with Irem's R-Type Delta subtle rumble effects during some stages truly shines) really showcase what the PS1 Dual Shock controller was capable of in the hands of talented developers.

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

[Doctor Butler]

It's kind of funny to remember that these ugly games came out around the time that 2D graphics were just about perfected:
Third Strike, JoJo, MvC, Garou, all beautiful in their own right.

And then there's games like Silent Hill, Metal Gear, Tomb Raider etc., all of which are godless atrocities to the human-eye.

[Jonathan Ingram]

What's funny about it? Those 'butt-ugly atrocities' pushed the boundaries of the gaming media and captured imagination of the masses in a way those pretty 2D reiterations of ancient concepts, which (let's be honest here) increasingly fewer people gave a shit about, never could. Third Strike could have the most intricately detailed and lavishly animated sprites in existence and they would be completely, utterly worthless towards the goals that Konami set about to achieve with Silent Hill and Metal Gear Solid.

[CStarFlare]

That's very true. When early 3D hit, people who weren't gamers frequently commented on how amazing technology has become.

No one said shit about SotN.

[Obiwanshinobi]

Obiwanshinobi wrote:
Low-poly models tend to look WORSE in high resolutions


I've never agreed with this.

Horses for courses, but I showed my pal Silent Bomber (a game that's aged well as a game) on his huge-arse LCD, emulated in its native resolution, and the imperfections of software 3D acceleration were all too apparent in motion. Then we took it to the PS2 hooked up an RGB CRT and those imperfections wouldn't matter anymore because, girl, them explosions had stolen the show.

Another moment of awe was when Harry Mason stroke a match in the original Silent Hill. On the real thing it looked too good to be true, like some tech stolen from the future. Meanwhile, on ePSXe the lighting looked just lame and the dude, rather than grainy like everything on screen, looked blocky/flat like everyhting on screen (sometimes less detail is more as your imagination fills the gaps).

I liked MGS on PC in 1024x768 (forced AF&AA), though, but then that game was meant to look "cleaner" than Silent Hill, I think.

Oh, and while the upscaled backgrounds of FFVII oozed scaling artifacts, I found its LEGO dudes (on ePSXe in 1024x768, lollied with AA too) adorable - a perfect reimagening of puny sprites from older jRPGs. The only game that did it for me again was Suikoden III (played after Iⅈ not a good a jRPG as either, but that's beside the point).

[null1024]

What's funny about it? Those 'butt-ugly atrocities' pushed the boundaries of the gaming media and captured imagination of the masses in a way those pretty 2D reiterations of ancient concepts, which (let's be honest here) increasingly fewer people gave a shit about, never could. Third Strike could have the most intricately detailed and lavishly animated sprites in existence and they would be completely, utterly worthless towards the goals that Konami set about to achieve with Silent Hill and Metal Gear Solid.

I'm honestly conflicted as to whether that's a good thing. MGS, SH, etc contributed massively to the cinematisation of gaming.
And as for rehashing, all of those fighters tried to push the genre forward and came out at a time when fighting games were still a pretty major genre in the market. Third Strike tries to perfect what came before it, in both graphics and gameplay [it's not a perfect game, but it's gorgeous and extremely well regarded].

You are at least right in that what Konami set out to do really couldn't be done as effectively in 2D, so they made do with the 3D they had. Which was the right choice, plain and simple.

---

On an unrelated note, I kind of wish Super-Scaler style games were better regarded. When polygonal 3D happened, they became about as fashionable as wearing a hubcap instead of a shirt, even though most of them hold up much better graphically.
Really, whenever I show my friends something like Galaxy Force II, they look at me oddly when I tell them that this game was an '88/89 release. It's a gorgeous game.
It's probably the sheer effort required combined with the fact that Super-Scaler visuals lend themselves perfectly to on-rail experiences and damn near nothing else.
It'd be neat as fuck to see if someone could even attempt to do a sandbox style game solely with scaled sprite based graphics, but I'm fairly sure it wouldn't work too well -- but Sega certainly did manage to make a fucking [almost] FPS just fine with it, so it's certainly possible.

And on another unrelated note, arcade 3D does tend to hold up fairly well. Even the Sega Model 2 stuff [a 1992/3 era board, although revised several times over the years] looks more than acceptable, if not old [to be fair, a LOT of that has to do with style -- Sega's whole blue skies aesthetic and saturated as fuck colors help hide the fact that the board doesn't do smooth shading at all].
Man, I think I'd kill for something new but Model 2-esque. Virtual On is gorgeous. VF2 is solidly pretty. Maybe not HOTD1, that game is actually pretty damn ugly. If indie devs tried to capture that look, flat shading and textures and more than just the meager handful of polys that pre-DC home consoles put out, I'd be happy as fuck.

I still dunno why Namco moved to PS1 based hardware when they had boards that handled much more like the Model 2 graphically [more polygons and actually correct texturing, which the PS1 is wholly incapable of], but I guess they had gotten good at PS1 coding and it was cheaper.

actually, Namco's whole Playstation fetish bothers me, isn't Tekken 7 going to run on a PS4 based board?

[Pretas]

(sometimes less detail is more as your imagination fills the gaps).

This is why Chocolate Doom is my preferred source port of Doom. So-called "pixel soup" has the positive effect of making low-resolution 3D games look much richer and more full of life in movement. ZDoom smooths all of that away, but the environments feel too flat, plastic and sterile in comparison. The same applies when exploiting graphics settings in PS1 emulators.

[Obiwanshinobi]

I suppose the devs liked to work with PSX and its arcade siblings.

If indie devs tried to capture that look, flat shading and textures and more than just the meager handful of polys that pre-DC home consoles put out, I'd be happy as fuck.

Did you see Darwinia? It's like Cannon Fodder made of vectors.

Speaking of which, technology that would make Sensible Software style work on large LCDs would be welcome.

[Doctor Butler]

What's funny about it? Those 'butt-ugly atrocities' pushed the boundaries of the gaming media and captured imagination of the masses in a way those pretty 2D reiterations of ancient concepts, which (let's be honest here) increasingly fewer people gave a shit about, never could. Third Strike could have the most intricately detailed and lavishly animated sprites in existence and they would be completely, utterly worthless towards the goals that Konami set about to achieve with Silent Hill and Metal Gear Solid.

I agree 100%, but I'm speaking from a purely objective standpoint.

In retrospect, people look back and admire the fine craftsmanship put into Third Strike's animation.

PS1 games, on the other hand have not aged well at all.

Spoiler

I'm honestly conflicted as to whether that's a good thing. MGS, SH, etc contributed massively to the cinematisation of gaming.
And as for rehashing, all of those fighters tried to push the genre forward and came out at a time when fighting games were still a pretty major genre in the market. Third Strike tries to perfect what came before it, in both graphics and gameplay [it's not a perfect game, but it's gorgeous and extremely well regarded].

You are at least right in that what Konami set out to do really couldn't be done as effectively in 2D, so they made do with the 3D they had. Which was the right choice, plain and simple.

---

On an unrelated note, I kind of wish Super-Scaler style games were better regarded. When polygonal 3D happened, they became about as fashionable as wearing a hubcap instead of a shirt, even though most of them hold up much better graphically.
Really, whenever I show my friends something like Galaxy Force II, they look at me oddly when I tell them that this game was an '88/89 release. It's a gorgeous game.
It's probably the sheer effort required combined with the fact that Super-Scaler visuals lend themselves perfectly to on-rail experiences and damn near nothing else.
It'd be neat as fuck to see if someone could even attempt to do a sandbox style game solely with scaled sprite based graphics, but I'm fairly sure it wouldn't work too well -- but Sega certainly did manage to make a fucking [almost] FPS just fine with it, so it's certainly possible.

And on another unrelated note, arcade 3D does tend to hold up fairly well. Even the Sega Model 2 stuff [a 1992/3 era board, although revised several times over the years] looks more than acceptable, if not old [to be fair, a LOT of that has to do with style -- Sega's whole blue skies aesthetic and saturated as fuck colors help hide the fact that the board doesn't do smooth shading at all].
Man, I think I'd kill for something new but Model 2-esque. Virtual On is gorgeous. VF2 is solidly pretty. Maybe not HOTD1, that game is actually pretty damn ugly. If indie devs tried to capture that look, flat shading and textures and more than just the meager handful of polys that pre-DC home consoles put out, I'd be happy as fuck.

I still dunno why Namco moved to PS1 based hardware when they had boards that handled much more like the Model 2 graphically [more polygons and actually correct texturing, which the PS1 is wholly incapable of], but I guess they had gotten good at PS1 coding and it was cheaper.

actually, Namco's whole Playstation fetish bothers me, isn't Tekken 7 going to run on a PS4 based board?

Man speaks the truth.

[BryanM]

Have to admit I'm part of the problem - when Street Fighter 3 came out I was underwhelmed to say the least. 6 freakin' years and 10 million iterations of SFighter2 Turbo Hyper Mega Fighting; who can blame me tho.

It'd be neat as fuck to see if someone could even attempt to do a sandbox style game solely with scaled sprite based graphics, but I'm fairly sure it wouldn't work too well -- but Sega certainly did manage to make a fucking [almost] FPS just fine with it, so it's certainly possible.

This is something I've thought about a bit myself ever since 3d World Runner. The issue is those damn walls want to be able to rotate, and you're left with a faux-3d system like DOOM or FACEBALL or Battlezone. In which case you might as well just render the world geometry in 3d (makes having elevations simpler) and have sprites for trees and units and such.

With scaled sprites alone you can have a world filled with trees and pillars, which make for lousy boundary lines. With some mode 7 type rotating you have rivers and pointy rocks; at least some clear but still cheesy delineated boundaries. I guess there's good reason scaling alone was only ever used for running down tunnels.

Silent Hill 1

It's a really odd game, artwise. Everyone can see Harry's model looks like a deformed turd - it was never meant to be seen without wonky inaccurate nearest-pixel rounding. A lot of games back then used floating point variables, which is a really bad idea for everything. Lots of devs had issues with characters falling through the geometry. Never use floating point variables for anything.

Eh, and the disaster that was the HD re-release. Incredible.

[null1024]

This is something I've thought about a bit myself ever since 3d World Runner. The issue is those damn walls want to be able to rotate, and you're left with a faux-3d system like DOOM or FACEBALL or Battlezone. In which case you might as well just render the world geometry in 3d (makes having elevations simpler) and have sprites for trees and units and such.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOm9VzB1B48
Last Survivor does walls admirably. That being said, doing any kind of complex terrain would be absolutely horrid if the camera had to rotate freely like that. As for something with more 3D to it in the actual layout...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5wDl1gcs2E
F1 Super Lap certainly tried.

[Jonathan Ingram]

I'm honestly conflicted as to whether that's a good thing. MGS, SH, etc contributed massively to the cinematisation of gaming.

I honestly don't see how. When you say 'cinematization', I instantly think of contextual one-button actions(the notorious 'press A for Awesome'), sudden camera shifts to focus on that epic explosion in the background and incessant QTE-strings. MGS and Silent Hill had none of it, at least none that I remember of. Cutscenes, yes, but they come separately from the gameplay and don't mess with the mechanics in any way.

And as for rehashing, all of those fighters tried to push the genre forward and came out at a time when fighting games were still a pretty major genre in the market. Third Strike tries to perfect what came before it, in both graphics and gameplay [it's not a perfect game, but it's gorgeous and extremely well regarded].

This is purely anecdotal, but I don't recall Third Strike being perceived as such at the time of release. Not by the mainstream, at least. Its siblings from the Alfa series continued to be more popular among the people with only a passing interest in the genre years after it had come out.

In retrospect, people look back and admire the fine craftsmanship put into Third Strike's animation.

Well, I would imagine that to some young PS3-owning neophyte whose only experience with 2D games is Dragon's Crown, Third Strike would look no better than PS1-era polygons.

Also, I believe that there's plenty of fine craftsmanship to be found in Silent Hill and the likes as long you approach them with the consideration for the kind of hardware limitations that the developers had to work with.

[apatheticTurd]

32-bits era 3D probably will never be nostalgic in the way faux 8-bits is. In retrogaming discussions, you often see people saying 3D from that time is "the Atari 2600 of 3D" or that it has no stylistic appeal (a stance I disagree with, but whatever).

There are an handful of quote-unquote indies that uses flat polygons to good effect, though. SkyRogue looks Pretty Nice.

SkyRogue has that Model 1 look [other than the transparencies, but it's still sexy], very Sega blue skies. It's really, really slick.

Personally it reminds me of Namco's System 21 stuff.... though I guess untextured 3D games from that era all look kinda similar? Shush.

[gameoverDude]

Xevious 3D/G still looks great for being on PS1. The visuals have a certain crispness to them. Then again, having decent gameplay helps it.

One thing that makes me LOL is how the 2nd boss' destruction makes a noise like Jack from Tekken falling to the floor (or a bucket of bricks being dropped on the ground).

[Lord Satori]

...and of course it turns into a nostalgia thread.

[Ed Oscuro]

PS1 games, on the other hand have not aged well at all.

Some have - I'm not the world's biggest fan of Silent Bomber (edit: Dunno why that one came into my head - I didn't read Obi's post above before this), but Vagrant Story still merits occasional plays, and I still enjoy the Tenchu titles occasionally (actually I'm still somewhere along on my second playthrough). And Ape Escape was unexpectedly good when I first tried it out recently.

I think the best way to think of this is like anything that goes through an evolutionary process. The first attempts might look laughable or their mandibles might be funny looking, but that's not the end of the story. Those silly early 3D games were at least a stepping stone - and probably their mistakes, just like their successful experiments, were necessary to get to where we are now.

The real story is that there actually was a lot of early experimentation with 3D in gaming, primarily in the US and to some degree in Europe I suppose - with systems like the 3DO and unported early PC games, though, you can see a little of why that legacy isn't widely remembered. That stuff at least had an impact on the development of software, even though few franchises of note were developed in those days (Shockwave: Beyond the Gate?)

But yeah, there was some iffy engineering going on in software back then, as always. But I guess that's to be expected after you go from the fresh outta high school level programming talent seen in many 16-bit era games, to trying to get to the developed middleware and proliferating profiling tools regularly used today.

I liked MGS on PC in 1024x768 (forced AF&AA), though, but then that game was meant to look "cleaner" than Silent Hill, I think.

Without a doubt - the kind of simple style with strong outlines and high contrast textures is still alive in the series, i.e. in the look of Peace Walker on the PSP.

It's detailed - but of course if you look at the environments from the standpoint of originality, then you say "but it's just a bunch of metal and concrete rooms." Different focuses. As Jon Ingram has said, Silent Hill's work is put into unsettling the players with original things which don't lend themselves easily to a workmanlike development process.

One thing that makes me LOL is how the 2nd boss' destruction makes a noise like Jack from Tekken falling to the floor (or a bucket of bricks being dropped on the ground).

That is my favorite kind of stuff.

[Marc]

I'd love to see another racer presented in the style of VR. The clean minimalism of thoso type of polys appeals to me greatly in the same way as vectors. Early PS stuff looks like a mess in comparison.

[Ixmucane2]

There are two good ways to do 3D game graphics.
The old style, which could be described as "3D pixel art" and whose finest examples include Tempest, Outrun, Elite, Wolfenstein and to a lesser degree Doom, is stylized; you draw abstract sprites, lines and polygons retaining almost complete control over their simple appearance and constrained views. It goes without saying that good-looking "retro" games like Fez or Minecraft can use modern technology to do what they want easily.
The new style, which is still a goal but can be achieved in easy cases, is hyperrealism: making everything look like in the real world, without attempting abstract and conventional representations. Detailed but deliberately unrealistic models and lighting for artistic reasons (as we are starting to see in CGI cartoons) rather than because of technical or budget limitations will be the logical way forward, but we aren't there yet.

Most PS1, GameCube etc. games tumble ruinously into the "uncanny valley" between abstract and realistic graphics: they promise realism, mainly because of the common setup of a character walking and looking around freely in a virtual environment, but deliver unrealistic flat polygons and jaggies. Superior graphical power becomes a trap, creating impossible quality expectations.

[Xyga]

It's kind of funny to remember that these ugly games came out around the time that 2D graphics were just about perfected:
Third Strike, JoJo, MvC, Garou, all beautiful in their own right.

And then there's games like Silent Hill, Metal Gear, Tomb Raider etc., all of which are godless atrocities to the human-eye.

While I agree regarding Garou, the other three have more than questionable character design, guess you gotta love American comics to appreciate those.
Also I am another one who was never impressed with 3rd strike, if the craftsmanship is indeed impressive, the movements are ridiculously exaggerated to the point some moves even get in the way of perception and make the whole thing look like a messy brawl. It's not all characters but take Chun Li for instance: she's almost 100% for shows.

Now the PS1 3D 'flagships'... I find those absolutely gorgeous. Not in every part and corner of course, but I admire what the guys behind those were able to create with the limitations of the hardware and such low resolution.
There's a lot of inventive design and clever attempts at mixing pixel art and shading/lighting to make up for low polygon count, take Soul Reaver, Vagrant Story, GT 1&2, R4, Wip3out, Rollcage games, Crash games, TR (especially 1 and 4), FF VIII & IX, Medal of Honor games, Driver games, R-Type Delta, Einhänder, G-Darius, Tony Hawk Games, Ray Storm/Crisis, Omega Boost, Chrono Cross, Xenogears, Tenchu 2, Ace Combat 3, Tomba, etc etc...
There's actually a monstrous list of beautifully crafted and/or innovative low-res 3D games on the PS1, many I had never even heard about until recent years and I still get good surprises, there's a lot of shit also but that's not the point, if you lived that era and played those on proper rgb televisions it was a feast for the eyes and fucktons of new things to experience.

At the time PC games with obvious superior 3D were few and decent computers still quite expensive, I mean it was still a time when you needed quite the cash to run the best games and it was mostly FPSes and western role playing games (funnily things haven't changed much, it's just that now PC hardware is more affordable for the masses).
What else then ? The N64 which pretty much was a success only in the US and I still don't understand why in regards of the much more limited library, and Saturn which was already struggling because of its non-3D-friendly architecture.
So the PS1 was the major platform for 'early' 3D to spread its wings, and I am still amazed at all the efforts game companies made to exploit it.
Later console generation were less impressive either because of the 480i shit or the beginnings of higher-res 3D that was already too obviously 'similar but inferior' to what was available on PC.

32-bit era 3D ? fuck yeah !

[LEGENOARYNINLIA]

Just to add a few more amazing 3D titles for the Playstation:

Motortoon Grand Prix 2 (the first one is nice too)
Running High (playing this right now)
Tobal No 1 (and 2, but the first one has more style)

Also, the very first version of Phantasy Star Online on the DC > every other version of PSO when it comes to visuals.

[HydrogLox]

http://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.ph ... 9#p1063279

In the thread about low-poly 3d games possibly becoming the new "thing" I mentioned highly-stylised, almost neon, 3d action games. Exhibit A right here.

And the already available Futuridium EP (since 2013-06-19) doesn't qualify because it's based on the 2D Uridium (C64) and Uridium 2 (Amiga) games? PS4, PS Vita, iOS

[LEGENOARYNINLIA]

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

Crappy Wind Waker ish graphics = evokes "N64" era games?

Nope.