That bit in I think Assassin’s Creed 2 where Leonardo offers Ezio a hug in a QTE, and if you don’t press it he looks really sad. Absolutely crushed me at the time.
That’s got phong shading for a start. Was pretty advanced for a PS1 game. Before that each poly had it’s own normals, so everything looked blockier. Think Tekken 3 vs Tekken 2.
Maybe it’s not phong. Possibly gouraud? My memory is getting hazy since it’s like 25 years since any of this was current and actually spoken about in those terms.
It’s castlevania 64, on the N64. Not a ps1 game at all. The N64 was a lot more powerful than the PS1, it was just held back by the cartridge limiting texture sizes.
Child imagination and crt picture do wonders, while i agree with you that it wasn’t peak performance, my childhood memories show me that this picture was way better than current AAA titles
Actually, the early 3D didn’t look ‘great’ even on CRT. Particularly PS1 had affine texture mapping and a very “wobbly” low precision geometry operations, in addition to the obvious limitations of polygon count and texture resolution. It was “neat” and “novel” to see that be attempted, but it felt in some ways kind of like a step back from where 2D games had gotten by that point. Both visually and control wise (very awkward control/camera schemes were attempted back then).
Much of the “but it looks great on CRT” applies to pretty deliberately crafted pixel art given knowledge of how NTSC or PAL feeding into a CRT behaved. The artistic design knew precisely how it was going to be presented and used that for interesting tricks in how things got blurred (e.g. faux translucency by putting stripy sprites on top of each other and letting the blur fake the translucency). In the 3D land, the textures and models were going to be distorted before presentation so they couldn’t do a lot of “leaning into the CRT” in their design. Consolation being that the hardware could now actually pull off the efects they were formerly relying on the CRT blur to pull off.
I’ll second that… I always found PS1 3D games to be pure eye-cancer even when played on a CRT TV back in the day. N64 was good-but-not-great by comparison.
The first time I thought I was seeing real life on the screen was NFS3 on PC, which… well, looking back, I was clearly wrong, but it’s decent-looking at least. The next time was when I briefly mistook my cousins playing NFL2K on Dreamcast for a Christmas day football game back in '99, and I feel like that generation of console (Dreamcast/PS2/Gamecube/OG XBox) is about where 3D games are, graphically at least, still palatable.
Yeah, pretty much right with you. N64 had the perspective correct texture mapping and more precise geometry calculation which did wonders for it to be good. The low geometry and tiny textures still made it like you said ‘good, not great’, and I’ll concur that the generation you cited is the key part where I didn’t feel like a step back from 2D games graphically.
I was little when the OG Ace Combat game came out on the PS1 right? Polygonal jet engines & everything lol
Until i was like 11, whenever i saw real pictures of actual aircraft that were in the game i thought they were fake because their engines weren’t polygonal enough 🤣🤣🤣
I just decided I was going to play moonlighter last night as an easy pickup game. I checked the inventory once and remembered I would have to sort and store stuff and immediately turned it off.
We're all still chasing our fondest video game and other memories. I - god help me - i actually miss the original Harry Potter game for PS1. Yes, that godawful game that nobody could beat because it was unplayable, yet I had fun with it. I'm not sure why I want to put myself through that grind again. There were times I wanted to break the damn console and rid myself of this curse for good.
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