ITT: we post video games that look too good for the hardware

[Anonymous No.10201032]

I'll start off with an old favorite of mine...

It's "Deep Duck Trouble" starring Donald Duck (1993/Game Gear)

I mean, it's an 8-Bit handheld... and yet this looks damn near an early 16-Bit generation release!

[Anonymous No.10201079]

>>10201032
Thunderforce 4 would be a gorgeous game if it came out on the Genesis in the late 90s but the fact it came out in '92 must have been jaw dropping

[Anonymous No.10201538]

Fear Effect 2

[Anonymous No.10201539]

Valkyrie profile 2 on ps2

[Anonymous No.10201546]

>>10201539

[Anonymous No.10201556]

Resident evil revelation on 3ds

[Anonymous No.10201618]

[Anonymous No.10201729]

>>10201556
anon...

[Anonymous No.10202229]

>>10201032
>Airheart on apple ii
Astonishing and majestic

https://youtu.be/Nmzxg5WLsW0?si=mPAlI2TXfx2swA-6

[Anonymous No.10202259]

>>10202229
>zarch acorn archimedes
Wondrously charming

https://youtu.be/DbENFcmurbo?si=C2uggjD_5KlJQ3wH

[Anonymous No.10202281]

>>10201538
>>10201539
>>10201546
>upscaled emulation
Disingenuous at best.

[Anonymous No.10202296]

>>10201032
That's kind of an overstatement, but it should be noted that the GG featured a much wider color palette than even the Genesis' (4096 vs 512!) even if the actual on-screen number of colors was still a little over half the equivalent ability of the 16-bit system (32 vs 61). In comparison, the SMS shared the 32 on-screen limit but could chose among only among 64. So devs working for the GG could manage a very notable variety and richness in visuals for the different levels when considering the game as a whole, as demonstrated when presented side-by-side like in your image rather than individually.

Personally I think it was more impressive when they managed to create something that looked fantastic in both systems with no color tweaks. Granted, the rationale would mostly be about working more efficiently by using the more limited system's specs as framework.

[Anonymous No.10202324]

>>10201032
Astro Marine Corps is the most spectacular Spectrum game I have ever seen.
Colorful graphics, big sprites, scroll parallax and no clashing colors.

[Anonymous No.10202351]

>>10201032
>Kirby’s Advenure - NES
>X - Game Boy
>Star X - GBA
>Vectorman 2 - Genesis
>Virtua Racing - Genesis
>Geograph Seal - Sharp
>Starfox, Stunt Race and Vortex - SNES
>Panzer Dragoon Zwei - Saturn
>Quake - Saturn
>Conker’s Bad Fur Day - N64

Seeing even rudimentary 3d on a system with no business having it can be impressive. I think ive seem a port of Tomb Raider on gba thats pretty cool.

[Anonymous No.10202368]

Donkey Kong Country is an easy answer here but at the time of it's release, it really did compare very well to the other "next gen" game systems at the time and looked better than a lot of them.

[Anonymous No.10202510]

>>10201538
I'm still mad they cancelled the ps2 game.

[Anonymous No.10202667]

Vagrant Story replicates a lighting system that shouldn't be possible on PS1 hardware

[Anonymous No.10202970]

>>10201539
>>10201546
It's too bad the VP series are shit ass games.

[Anonymous No.10203009]

>>10202259
The Acorn Archimedes was a very powerful system for the time, anon.

Zarch looks good on it, but it was even later ported to the Spectrum.

Something like Starfighter 3000 pushes it a bit further

https://youtu.be/gKEaX4RjWkk

[Anonymous No.10203028]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsrtw3gA3rU

Never got an officially release because they couldn't find a publisher (and probably because of the blatant plagiarism) but the ROM finally got leaked a while ago.

[Anonymous No.10203029]

Ringo on the ZX Spectrum

https://youtu.be/6ksyIl1NVc8

[Anonymous No.10203041]

Elite on the NES

https://youtu.be/LsrCrPx0HN4

[Anonymous No.10203049]

Vortex on the SNES

https://youtu.be/It06rHKyDvw

[Anonymous No.10203056]

Mayhem in Monsterland on the Commodore 64

https://youtu.be/ldo2ewLBt3Y

[Anonymous No.10203063]

The Colony (1988) on the original Macintosh

https://youtu.be/90Sbb9CeQtY

[Anonymous No.10203069]

Breathless on the Amiga

https://youtu.be/05j_BlsIbBM

[Anonymous No.10203085]

Solaris on the Atari 2600

https://youtu.be/f68IjW7_w98

[Anonymous No.10203096]

Asterix and Obelix XXL on the GBA

https://youtu.be/b0pknb4ghUA

[Anonymous No.10203097]

Legends of Valour blew my tits off on the Atari ST. Not so much the wolf3d graphics per se but the fact they were able to get a rich full RPG with NPCs walking around working on that system. Sadly the ST was notoriously difficult to get working with pirate disks and my copy couldn't go more than 20 seconds without crashing.

[Anonymous No.10203102]

>>10203097
They even had transparent windows in this game. Suck on that, Skyrim!

[Anonymous No.10203105]

Driv3r on the GBA

https://youtu.be/AOwDTE2m3vY

[Anonymous No.10203109]

>>10202667
Wellll "replicates" and "system" may be too strong words. It's a couple specific tricks with a handful of applications that go beyond quote unquote lighting, and then they only work in very controlled situations such as cutscenes with specific camera angles. But yeah, it's pretty ingenious.

[Anonymous No.10203137]

>>10202324
See also:
Valley of Rains for the ZX Spectrum

https://youtu.be/I6nPqgR0PK8

[Anonymous No.10203152]

>>10201032
That Donald Duck game does look amazing. Maui Mallard in Cold Shadow on the Gameboy, on the other hand... https://youtu.be/hFRm7wRHNCo?t=146

[Anonymous No.10203385]

>>10203105

[Anonymous No.10203464]

>>10201079
too much slowdown

[Anonymous No.10203740]

>>10203109
Explain what it's doing that's so impressive. I don't know a whole lot about lighting in games.

[Anonymous No.10203774]

>>10203740
there's no actual "lighting" it's all done with vertex shading

[Anonymous No.10203797]

>>10203774
That's not exactly what's the examples are illustrating; and vertex shading is "fake" lighting but still based on shading features, simple as they were compared to modern realtime lighting (which aside from realtime raytracing, it's still based on approximations simplified for performance and it's technically just as "fake"). The actually remarkable thing about these Vagrant Story effects is that they have nothing to do with lighting/shading features:

>>10203740
This >>10202667 is "simply" duplicating and offsetting the character model in the cutscene with a much brighter surface applied to the copy below to create a visual effect similar to cinematic "rim lighting". In this cutscene in particular, the brightness of the surface of the model in front is also manipulated individually to suggest the columns in the background are blocking a direct source of light (that doesn't actually exist as such in a technical sense)

This >>10203109 is using the same principle to superimpose the model in the foreground several times to fake a camera lens depth of field effect.

These cinematic effects would become popular in realtime graphics in later generations, but they'd use entirely different and more flexible and adaptive methods; in VS both effects were visually brute-forced out of unrelated technical features and weren't really compatible with the actually interactive parts of the game. The game did also implement a sort of "motion blur" effect (like Metal Gear Solid) using the GPU's framebuffer, and that would actually be somewhat similar to the way such effects work today.

[Anonymous No.10203836]

>>10203797
Thanks. What was it in particular that makes this impressive for the PS1?

[Anonymous No.10203842]

>>10201032
Could have fooled me into thinking that was a gba game.

[Anonymous No.10203865]

>>10203836
Ingenuity I guess. Not sure what's the working definition for "impressive" in this thread, but you can't do more than that when you're working with hardware designed with specific features and limitations.

[Anonymous No.10204020]

>>10203009
>>10203063
>>10203041
>>10203085
>>10203096
>>10203105
>>10203137
Fantastic
I’ll raise you it came from the desert on amiger

[Anonymous No.10204027]

>>10204020
https://youtu.be/C6ReirjYiac?si=Y6MlXyLE2LUwx5A_

[Anonymous No.10204117]

>>10204027

[Anonymous No.10204121]

>>10204117

[Anonymous No.10204123]

[Anonymous No.10204127]

>>10204123
Why did the snes version suck so slow

[Anonymous No.10204480]

>>10204127
Notice the FPS counter on the bottom left

[Anonymous No.10204550]

https://youtu.be/4XiUvMowedA?si=3q5sBlHVeb8oBpNk

Dragon's Lair on Game Boy Color is pretty impressive.

[Anonymous No.10204707]

>>10203137
Spectrum waifu, amazing

[Anonymous No.10204731]

>>10202281
The Fear Effect one isn't upscaled.

[Anonymous No.10204835]

Populous on sms, it barely looks different to the 16 bit versions and is far faster than the gb version. It came out later so they were able to take their time to make optimizations and streamline the graphics to suit the hardware. When the map is almost full the game slows down a bit but not its not too bad and that even happens on the amiga.

>>10203085
nice, I knew someone would say this

>>10202296
I think ristar on gg has a more subtle pallete than the genesis version but the limitation is it is posslbe to have 2 sprites use every colour in the pallete

>>10203009
I think it was on 3do too

[Anonymous No.10204865]

>>10203797
Huh. I hadn't heard of this.
That's some pretty impressive coding.

[Anonymous No.10204907]

>>10204020
What about Trapped 2? It also runs on the Amiga OCS

https://youtu.be/-05s0UaMxoU

[Anonymous No.10204909]

Tower of Babel for the Atari ST

https://youtu.be/7XZY6ErlysM

[Anonymous No.10204915]

>>10204909
Or Mercenary 3 for the Atari ST perhaps?
So much of it feels like a modern, retro-styled game

https://youtu.be/vBRPT6Gq1Ew

[Anonymous No.10204921]

>>10202229
>>10202324
>>10202510
>>10202667
>>10203009
>>10203029
>>10203049
>>10203056
>>10203063
>>10203069
>>10203085
>>10203096
>>10203105
>>10203109
>>10203137
>>10204123
>>10204835
>>10204907
>>10204909
Deep fried gaming

[Anonymous No.10204981]

>>10203385
if you think thats wild you should see this!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GVSLcqGP7g&t=652s

[Anonymous No.10205026]

FF12, I still remember the strong sense of disappointment when I saw what the game actually looks like on my PS2 after years of crispy clean marketing screenshots. It was simply too good looking for the hardware, heavy aliasing killed the look of the game just to cope with the workload on PS2.

[Anonymous No.10205732]

>>10201079
>Amiga color pallet
No thanks.

[Anonymous No.10205749]

always wondered why retro indie games like shovel knight looked way better than any real nes game I had seen. turns out they were all just copying little samson.

[Anonymous No.10205775]

>>10203102
gamebryo lmao

[Anonymous No.10205783]

ZAS on game boy, gotta play it on a DMG or something that emulates its screen accurately to get the full effect however

[Anonymous No.10205847]

>>10203097
Is that a black NPC in an 80s medieval RPG?

[Anonymous No.10207674]

>>10204907
>>10204909
Good
>>10204909
Epic
I didn't even know there was a mercenary after Damocles

[Anonymous No.10207872]

>>10202667
>the entire building is shaking
God damn PS1 games looked like shit.

[Anonymous No.10207972]

>>10207872
You're hardly making the most of your own inability to perform floating-point calculations anon.

[Anonymous No.10209518]

>>10202296
>that gif
land of illusion was so much fun
one of my all time favorites

[Anonymous No.10209916]

>>10203049
Aka, Starfox's Sister

[Anonymous No.10209948]

>>10203385
Check out COP: the Recruit
A fucking GTA clone on the DS.