TN:SFC in particular.+ other LG games
Only Dooms (and other Doom engine games - Hexen in particular).+ other id games
Nope.G
Sin:
Hey! That's the one I was looking for! Great game that.Wipeout 2097
You missed itNo one has posted Descent: Freespace? Or did I miss it?
The worst things about Chasm were:It looks a little bit like Quake but they used their own engine.
You slack-jawed Codex faggots disappoint me.
You picked literally THE most graphical advancingest time period in all of gaming history, and left out the best ones. Shamefur dispray.
There's one game that defined graphical excellence in 1998 for most. Better graphics were not seen until X: Beyond the Frontier, or in an FPS - Max Payne. This:
For me, there is nothing like the original Unreal, which started development in 1994, a record-breaking 4 year development cycle at the time. To be fair, Unreal levels were gi-fucking-normous and open, compared to HL's corridor levels (a relatively new mechanic in PC games at the time)
From there on, it was just a straight incline to 2006: The Year The Graphics Died. The consolepocalypse.
1. Too slow.
2. You've picked HL shots with HD pack, so it's sort of cheating.
3. HL GFX were actually inferior to Unreal (slightly but noticeably - no multitexturing, worse lighting model, no nifty procedurally animated textures) and most of the game provided few opportunities to showcase its (nevertheless massive) visual potential.
Well, you did say that no better graphics was seen until X/Max Payne.My post didn't mean to imply that HL graphics were better, just that that's the one most people remember.
The Sunspire is still one of the best FPS levels ever designed and it actually does show off the huge scale and detail that the Unreal Engine was capable of.
It seems silly now, but when you consider they had 8 or 16 MB VRAM back then and 64MB system RAM, it's p. impressive what they pulled off.
Sin looked pretty shit for its time.
It seems silly now
I didn't say the game was shit looking. I said it didn't have much opportunity to show off its good looks. Boxy corridors and crate rooms can only look so good, and apart from occasional destruction or interesting technical/lab flourish that's all you could get in HL in terms of environment. Sometimes you got both at once in terms of nice destructible environment or scripted scene going on in the background. HL areas were mostly expertly executed and backed by strong technical aspects of underlying engine and assets, but they were still mostly low key concepts.Same with Half Life. There were a lot of great looking areas in that game. It just isn't true that the game was shit looking until Xen.
I agree with everything apart from visuals. Sin's visuals were just weak (although there were a couple of things that shone - for example I loved how Quantum Destabilizer effect looked).At any rate, Sin was very competently made. It had nice visuals (not the best, but not shit either), solid game play once you get used to its rhythm, very good level design with lots of varied environments (including an underwater section) and overall a very underrated game who's success was marred by an unfortunate buggy release. When it first came out it scored only a few points away from Half Life whenever a reviewer was lucky enough not to experience any serious problem and i think the two games are not *that* far apart.
Distant runners up: Need for Speed 3:
Do you have any nice screenshots of the Unreal software renderer?
Cryo's Dreams, looked great in magazines but I never got around to playing i.t, would you recommend i.t?
Into the Shadows demo was impressive in 1995. Too bad that the game was cancelled.
-Triton are Swedish devs, this is their first game, they were previously active in the demo scene.
-They use an in-house engine called T.A.P.E. (Triton Advanced Physics Engine), they claim their engine is much faster than id's Quake engine. TAPE is written in Assembly. ITS will run on a 386 with 8MB ram but a 486dx2 or higher is recommended for smooth gameplay.
-ITS will have a SP campaign, an 8 (or maybe 12) player deathmatch multiplayer mode and a coop mode.
-You play the role of Erik Lionheart, a chaotic evil wizard kidnapped your sister...
-There will be around 20 motion captured enemies, each enemy will have unique combo moves.
-ITS has around 30 useable weapons and different armor types, there are also special moves.
-The journalist regrets that there is not much info on the most important part of the game, the gameplay
-The game is as good as finished. (ITS was never released, some members of Triton later formed Starbreeze Studios.)
Anyway, System Shock:
Damn, I don't remember SS looking anything like that, is it a high res texture pack or did you just need a monster computer at the time to run it like this?
Sadly, I'd have to run U1 in this mode and take some as I don't have any ATM.
Anyway, System Shock:
Q1 was already not too impressive visually