Games that impressed you with technology

[:Flash:]

Most of the stuff I would have said has been posted already.

But one game is missing: Sam's Journey
I think too few people realize how absolutely mind-blowing it is that this runs on a stock C64

 

[Nutmeg]

That looks like a surprisingly decent Mario clone.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

Remember entering the local smoky arcades and seeing this. Took me whole day just to get in line to try it out.

pit fighter went already there.

 

[what am i doing]

Serious Sam engine, the demo for TSE took two halves of two levels from the full game and glued them together making one map that was several kilometers long. The valley at the end alone is over 1km across.
Also the directional gravity.

Guild Wars.
Mostly the way they had zero-downtime patching by using an active vs standby server system (something that's apparently too hard for many modern MMO devs, who have to take their servers down to patch),

Or maybe it's because GW wasn't an MMO.

Guild Wars 2 uses the same architecture and also doesn't have downtime for patches, while having the open world that you mistakenly think is a prerequisite for being an MMO.

It's not because GW isn't an MMO (although it is an MMO), it's because other MMO devs are incompetent and/or lazy.

 

[Gerrard]

Oh nevermind. You are retarded

No, you just don't know what MMO means, dumbfuck. And neither does the above one.

 

[sser]

Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine was the first game we played on a 'modern' PC and it blew us away.

This is mostly coming off of the Amiga, so it went from things like Prince of Persia, Corridor 7, Dragon's Lair, etc. to that. Our other PC could run things like Close Combat, wargames, really old stuff like Alone in the Dark maybe, etc. So Infernal Machine's brought graphics and awesome water effects etc. were really cool to see on a home computer. Other games from that era were pretty wowing, like Shogun Total War's putting a buncha dudes on screen, for example. We had a 9-gig harddrive and I remember Shogun being the first game to really press me for space. Adjacent to it was the Braveheart game, though it was totally wrecked by bugs. Morrowind was probably the last from that timeline. It was my first experience in an open-world 3D RPG so the idea of just walking wherever you wanted to and it was all in first-person with a little dude who physically equipped armor and stuff kinda blew my mind.


Half-Life 2 had some innovations like physics and the speech/mouths that felt like a leap ahead. Purely on visuals alone, Ninja Gaiden and Splinter Cell Chaos Theory really wowed me at release. Chaos Theory especially looked like the fukkin' truth of graphics, totally future fantastic, future so bright, etc. but instead consoles ended up stalling out and I don't feel like they ever really got that far beyond it. There were a few tech demos from this era that were also quite enthralling, like the TF2 stuff before it went into cartoon mode, Duke Nukem Forever's tech demos, even things like the Call of Cthulhu Dark Corners of the Earth tech demos, which ended up looking nothing like the game but the DNA for all these things was there. Company of Heroes I think was the last game to wow me in a technical sense. At release, it looked absurdly good for an RTS game. I even remember the PC Gamer shots of it trying to explain that yes, they were in-game, and yes it wasn't an FPS. Lot of other pretty games from that era, but nothing else that really got my attention in a technical sense.

edit: Oh and Silent Storm, which was another Chaos Theory-type moment where I thought it was the future, but instead it just died on its own, an insanely advanced computational engine that got fed into two sequels, a game called Tin or something, and a Russian movie spinoff of vampires or whatever. Such a disappointment, much like the middle 5 pages of this thread.

 

[Axie]

pit fighter went already there.

Thanks for pointing it out, though I went with the thread title’s impressed you in this case.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

yeah, sorry, i noticed too late the whole thread is made up of "i'm an ignorant newfag little shit and i've been most impressed by the first thing i've seen while completely oblivious to history".

 

[abija]

Not to mention unreal ended up being king of the arena shooter market(which annoyed me at the time since I liked fps single player games as a kid, Q3 annoyed me for similar reasons although UT and Q3 were still tons of fun).

Bitch pls, maybe in bot fighting communities...

UT has way more players than OG quake/quake2/quake3 (probably combined).
I'm not counting quake live because it's not OG.

Quake Live is Q3, funny ommision from your part since most Q3 players moved to it for better support.

 

[Axie]

.

yeah, sorry, i noticed too late the whole thread is made up of "i'm an ignorant newfag little shit and i've been most impressed by the first thing i've seen while completely oblivious to history".

Il Numero Uno chill out, I was impressed – I was 10-11 at the time.

 

[SlamDunk]

Of the modern ones:

Any a game that has no pop in/out of any kind, flickering shadows or other such distractors. Any an open-world game that does not have loading pauses of any kind while in the game.

I get mighty impressed by a game that does not break the immersion it is trying to achieve.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

yeah, sorry, i noticed too late the whole thread is made up of "i'm an ignorant newfag little shit and i've been most impressed by the first thing i've seen while completely oblivious to history".

That's a strange statement from a guy who said you don't actually need to play old games because they're shit.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

source?

 

[Gostak]

Most of the stuff I would have said has been posted already.

But one game is missing: Sam's Journey
I think too few people realize how absolutely mind-blowing it is that this runs on a stock C64

Cool.
I hope these got mentioned, too:


Seems to only show the plan executions:


Loved this coupled with a mod to bring some Doom stuff to Quake and other mods; per pixel lighting Tenebrae:


Noctis IV

and

(Guy aparently does not have the option on where you have to dismiss popped up speech)


Well, far too many actually.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

yeah, sorry, i noticed too late the whole thread is made up of "i'm an ignorant newfag little shit and i've been most impressed by the first thing i've seen while completely oblivious to history".

That's a strange statement from a guy who said you don't actually need to play old games because they're shit.

source?

 

[Louis_Cypher]

The original X-COM.

I'm sure there are others, but I can't think right now. Mostly indie games impress the hell out of my these days for being so polished and playable.

 

[Borelli]

Dungeon Siege 1 no loading times. Quite impressive for its time.

 

[adddeed]

Black and White - AI, physics, zoom levels, gesture driven

 

[JamesDixon]

Mechwarrior 1 dude to it's fake 3d worlds and combat arenas.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind adapted the gameplay of its two predecessors to an Open World environment, where the player-character directly traversed a scaled-down world, as in Faery Tale Adventure except 3D. This shifted exploration from being dungeon-dominated to being more focused on the overworld, while changing the method of generation from procedural to hand-crafted.

 

[Lucumo]

Black and White - AI, physics, zoom levels, gesture driven

Yeah, no clue why it gets so much flak in retrospect. Maybe because it became in to shit on Molyneux? Claiming that the gestures etc didn't work etc etc, despite everything working pretty well.

 

[Eirinjas]

Shenmue (1999). Whatever you think of the gameplay, the game itself was ahead of its time in a number of ways. Cutscenes are rendered in real-time without FMV. You inhabit a world that was realistically crafted with character models that are far more detailed than anything else at the time, including on PC. Voices are lip-synched, eyes moved independent of the head, hands had fully articulated fingers, etc. All the movements are motion-captures of actual martial artists, so the character animations are fluid and realistic. Yokosuka, where the game takes place, is modeled on a real city district. And everyone in this city has a schedule - they go to work, they go shopping, they do chores, etc. The level of detail and interactivity attached to the minutiae of the world is still impressive. You can pick up and otherwise interact with practically everything. There are meta games within the game, like going into the arcade to play arcade games from the 1980s, or collecting the collectibles from those gumball machines, taking a part-time job, or all the phone conversations you can have with your girlfriend. Heck, it even replicates the exact weather conditions each day of the historical meteorological conditions in Japan in 1986. The levels of autism it took to produce Shenmue and Shenmue 2 warms the cockles of my heart to this day.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

yeah, sorry, i noticed too late the whole thread is made up of "i'm an ignorant newfag little shit and i've been most impressed by the first thing i've seen while completely oblivious to history".

That's a strange statement from a guy who said you don't actually need to play old games because they're shit.

source?

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

as i knew, you were just spewing made up retarded bullshit. i wish you a happy stumbling on a landmine soon.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

as i knew, you were just spewing made up retarded bullshit. i wish you a happy stumbling on a landmine soon.

I really don't care enough about it to bother looking up your old posts, but your constant demands for a source means you know pretty well that it's true.