Boomers who experienced the shift from 2D to 3D

[Anonymous No.9778263]

Those who were alive and gaming in the 80s and early 90s, how did it feel to transition from 2D pixel games to Polygons with fully 3-Dimensional movement for the very first time? What were your reactions when seemingly every franchise including Mario started becoming 3D in the mid 90s?

[Anonymous No.9778298]

neat

[Anonymous No.9778305]

>>9778263
>What were your reactions when seemingly every franchise including Mario started becoming 3D in the mid 90s?
I hated it.
I loved new 3D games like Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, Crash, etc. but dropped a franchise if it transitioned to 3D. Even brand new series like Rayman lost all my interest when the sequel was 3D.

[Anonymous No.9778310]

It was fucking insane, and unless VR gets way better it's still not quite as much of a gamechanger somehow. 9/11 ruined so much of everything but the one silver lining to have been alive at that time that somewhat soothes the burn is bearing witness to 2D into 3D and how incredible that felt. I'm 33 and was raised sheltered so I got the full affect if a bit later than others.

[Anonymous No.9778321]

It wss an innovation, didnt think too much about it

[Anonymous No.9778325]

>>9778263
Well, I remember being pretty mesmerized by increasingly detailed 2D DOS and arcade games at the time, so blocky 3D didn't feel as interesting as media made it out to be.
Also outside of beffy consoles first 3D games were commonly running at 5-15 FPS, so...

[Anonymous No.9778352]

>>9778325
>Also outside of beffy consoles first 3D games were commonly running at 5-15 FPS, so...
/thread

Unless you were upgrading every two months, that was the pc experience of 3D games

[Anonymous No.9778358]

I never cared that much about 2d games, but i completely lost all interest in them the moment i experienced 3d.

[Anonymous No.9778369]

Doom was impressive. Super Mario 64 was jaw-dropping. It's kind of wild to me now that the "dream" of the N64 was realized with it's very first game and 3D Platformers decades later still more or less follow Super Mario 64's formula...
Even in the 3D era, I still held a strong appreciation for 2D games and was sad to see them more or less disappear - though they have made a big comeback in recent years.

I'll paraphrase a Penny Arcade blog post of all things "When they discovered sculpting, they didn't stop painting!" My love of 2D gaming helped me get into retro collecting though, something I really enjoyed for a number of years.

[Anonymous No.9778386]

>>9778263
It was truly a good time to be alive. Everything mattered. Every new console, innovation and sequel. It was all laced to the core with freshness and excitement. Look up the video of the kid unwrapping a Nintendo 64. We all felt that excitement inside, though only the autists showed it externally.
All the rhetoric about the 90s being better is true, young zoomie. You were born into a dark age and I feel bad 4 you. Please grow up to hasten the death of this sad world.

[Anonymous No.9778394]

>>9778263
>how did it feel to transition from 2D pixel games to Polygons with fully 3-Dimensional movement for the very first time?
As a computer gamer I experienced it as a pretty gradual transition. At first you got wireframe 3D. Then solid 3D with low framerates and then textured 3D with limited movement and finally full 3D movement. A much more shocking impression for me were prerendered 3D like Myst, because that weren't like anything you'd experienced before. Also with computer gaming, 2D remained relevant for a long time, especially with strategy games, coexisting side-by-side with 3D games.

It was probably different if you only played console games, where the shift between 4th and 5th gen was a very clear line between 2D and 3D.

[Anonymous No.9778396]

>>9778263
>these games seem a lot slower than 2D games
>oh well they're neat and fun even if they take longer.

[Anonymous No.9778404]

>>9778386
It can't be understated how fast things were evolving. There were so many formats, genres, graphical styles etc being produced and experimented with.
We went from Super Mario Bros 3 to Sonic Adventure in a decade. Mortal Kombat's digitization went from being cutting edge to looking extremely cheesy and outdated in less than 3 years.

[Anonymous No.9778412]

It was pretty cool. Loved Mario 64, hated Tomb Raider.

In some sense it was a gradual evolution, as I had experimented games like Alone in The Dark and other PC games before Mario 64.

[Anonymous No.9778449]

>>9778404
>We went from Super Mario Bros 3 to Sonic Adventure in a decade. Mortal Kombat's digitization went from being cutting edge to looking extremely cheesy and outdated in less than 3 years.
Then in the last decade we went from GTAV to GTAV, Skyrim to Skyrim, Last of Us to Last of Us...

[Anonymous No.9778462]

>>9778394
arcade chap reporting in, it was a gradual thing for us too

[Anonymous No.9778465]

>>9778394
Primitive 3D existed on more than PC. Elite had wireframe graphics on NES, SNES and Genesis famously had Starfox and the Sonic bonus stages but also Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, mixed 3D racing games, etc. Even early PSX and Saturn weren't that full 3D dedicated, Sony themselves was publishing stuff like ESPN Extreme Sports and NHL Faceoff with heavy sprite usage.

[Anonymous No.9778467]

[Anonymous No.9778480]

I went from megadrive to psx and it blew my fucking mind. First 3D game I remember playing was small soldiers, and i remember being mesmerised by how free and unconstrained movement felt. I spent hours running around the first hub world in spyro, just savoring the experience of being able to explore.
For the same reason, I didnt much care for crash, because it felt too "on rails" for a 3d game. I didnt play any N64 till much later, but people ive spoken to my age have similar stories of of just spending hours jumping around the castle courtyard because it felt so good

[Anonymous No.9778515]

>>9778263
Gaming revolutions happened every other year back then, so it wasn't *that* mind blowing.

[Anonymous No.9778519]

>>9778449
Yeah, I think it was last year I saw an elaborate trailer for the new version of...GTA V, a came that's been out since what...2013?

Not like I am much better, I mainly just play old games, or ports and updates of old games. Maybe the medium really is tapped out.

[Anonymous No.9778525]

>>9778404
>We went from Super Mario Bros 3 to Sonic Adventure in a decade.
Anyone remember being impressed with screenshots of SM RPG, and then Mario 64 dropped three months later?

3D games matured very fast, before Tomb Raider died and FPS and 3PS titles took over.

[Anonymous No.9778528]

>>9778263
Rough to say the least.

[Anonymous No.9778545]

>>9778305
Rayman 3 is a masterpiece tho. You should give it a try.

[Anonymous No.9778575]

>>9778263
I hated it because they were ugly as shit and most of them had terrible controls.

[Anonymous No.9778632]

>>9778263
Non-FPS full 3d was absolutely mind blowing in 1999. Watching NWN trailer on BG2 disc and imagining BG2 in FULL 3D. Playing Earth 2150 on Voodoo 5 and making screenshots of tank headlights and falling snow just before dawn. Dismissing Sudden Strike just because it is 2D. Laughing on Diablo 2 releasing in 640x480 2d. It was time of undoubted optimism, that we will have the same 2d masterpieces but in 3d. NWN will all its MMO-wannabe crap was a first harsh reality check.

[Anonymous No.9778678]

It fucking sucked. Everyone was worshiping these bland looking 3D games that ran at 15 FPS and weren't any fun but more of a chore to play. Good looking and fun games got left behind for more focus on narrative and wanking yourself off to how many polygons your player character had.

[Anonymous No.9778679]

>>9778321
surprised this isn't more common. i didn't really feel much wow factor beyond just playing a good game. mario, zelda, they were really good 3d games.

[Anonymous No.9778680]

Quake was a revelation, and then 3D accelerator cards were a revelation too.

If you were young… 3D was cool and 2D was a bit archaic.

Tech progressed so fast then though, graphics felt like they were advancing significantly every year.

It was pretty great desu.

[Anonymous No.9778692]

>>9778263
The games were neat and the good ones were groundbreaking but I didn't like how quickly 2D games started to disappear, it seems that 2D was relegated to handheld only and by the time the DS came out it was clear that 2D was being phased out on handhelds too

[Anonymous No.9778759]

>>9778310
I completely relate to your comment at 32 anon. Seeing PS1 and N64 for the first time as a 5/6 year old blew my mind coming from a SNES background. Feel bad for the kids that did not get to experience that

[Anonymous No.9778765]

>>9778680
Quake was a fucking godsend. I hear shambler screams in my head to this very day

[Anonymous No.9778769]

>>9778325
>Well, I remember being pretty mesmerized by increasingly detailed 2D DOS and arcade games at the time, so blocky 3D didn't feel as interesting as media made it out to be.
Very much this. I remember dropping Alone in the Dark and never looking back because of how fugly it was.

[Anonymous No.9778776]

In thirty years time. After the Great Collapse. When we're sitting round campfires in the ruins. Eating dog food out of rusty cans. The elders will tell the feral children of the Golden Age of the 1990s. After the Berlin Wall fell, but before the war on terror. A decade of peace and prosperity when the internet was still new and exciting, when Sega was still going strong, when 3D graphics were still new and exciting, when people collected CDs.

[Anonymous No.9778858]

>looks like shit
>fight camera instead of enemies
And literally nothing has changed.

[Anonymous No.9778879]

>>9778263
TRs were great, but I think my biggest "wow" moment was when I was playing Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine for the first time, right after it was released. And at one point I tilted my head, to see what's into a niche, then realising I'm playing a game and I need to move Indy to see what's there, not my own head. It probably sounds ridiculous from modern perspective, but that was the power of early, good looking 3D and the general "oh shit, we are in three dimensions!".
>What were your reactions when seemingly every franchise including Mario started becoming 3D in the mid 90s?
Absolutely dreadful experience. The early 3D was clunky and looked like shit when not done by a small handful of experience companies. From early 00s till about tail end of the decade, everything looked like crap due to forced 3D, strategy games in particular.

[Anonymous No.9778882]

I thought it was fascinating but not more than that. I appreciated 2D and still do and to me, 2D games from that era such as Castlevania: SOTN, X-Men vs Street Fighter, Broken Sword and Discworld 2 were simply jaw dropping. The only 3D games coming close to that were Final Fantasy VII-IX

[Anonymous No.9778883]

>>9778325
>>9778352
Which fucking year are you even projecting about? My '96 PC lasted me till '01. My '01 PC, which was a piece of shit, lasted me till '06, and that PC is still in regular use and running. That without bringing up Amiga, since that wasn't a PC.

[Anonymous No.9778885]

>>9778858
>t. zoomer trying to fit in

[Anonymous No.9778886]

>>9778310
>>9778759

I'm the same age as you guys, but I feel it's a bit dishonest to act like we even fully got to see this. We weren't old enough to remember the age when 2D was normal, because we always had both.

Doom was one of the first really smooth, playable 3D games, and it came out when I was 3 years old. Even my earliest memories of games, where it was my cousin's megadrive or the DOS games on my family's first PC, 3D was already around. I saw lots of 2D games, but I saw lots of 3D too.

With that in mind, 3D wasn't an amazing revelation or paradigm shift for me, it was just "graphics slowly getting better, like they always have". I never even thought about it until I was older and more conscious of the distinction.

I'd say someone had to be born in like '79-80 to really truly have felt this change.

[Anonymous No.9778889]

>>9778678
>Another zoom-zoom trying to fit in

[Anonymous No.9778902]

>>9778263
>Those who were alive and gaming in the 80s and early 90s
Bro 3D graphics existed in the 80s already

[Anonymous No.9778905]

>>9778776
Ok boomer

[Anonymous No.9778908]

>>9778902
Bro, Romans already had printing, wtf you masturbate to some Gutenberg guy?

[Anonymous No.9778936]

>>9778263
the shift from 3D to HD was much bigger than the switch from 2D to 3D, because it wasn't just a change in graphics, but a change in style and atmosphere of games, and not in a good way.
Games went from "childish games" to DARK AND MATUREZ GAMES FOR MATURE GAMERZ. and games went from being colorful fun and silly to being le dark and serious brown and piss cinematic garbage.

[Anonymous No.9778940]

>>9778936
Dumbest zoomer larp in this thread yet.

[Anonymous No.9778947]

>>9778940
>>9778905
>>9778889
>>9778885
>t. 19 year old

[Anonymous No.9778950]

>>9778886
I'm the first anon - I literally did not know 3D games existed until going to my cousin's 7th or 8th birthday party where he had an N64, previous to that the most impressive console I knew of was the Genesis, at home we just had an NES. I had no idea and because of that I still got the experience.
>>9778759
There was nothing like it. First 3D games I played were Croc and Spyro, both felt otherworldly.

[Anonymous No.9778953]

>>9778678
Did anyone even care about FPS back then?

[Anonymous No.9778954]

>>9778940
>>9778947
Well I'm a zoomer but I fucking hate the 7th gen. Don't pretend the 7th gen didn't ruin gaming forever. The transition from 2D to 3D was just a graphical change. nothing more.
meanwhile 3D to HD:

>le dark and maturez style
>all brown and piss. no colors because DARK AND MATUREZ
>muh realism!
>no fun and catchy soundtracks. only ambience because DARK AND MATUREZ
>trying so hard to be movies instead of games
>nothing but shitty FPS and open world games
>DLCs and microtransactions

[Anonymous No.9778956]

>>9778263
crazy at first but at the end of the day my most played games were kof97-98, sf alpha 3 and megaman x4-x6
>>9778936
>DARK AND MATUREZ GAMES FOR MATURE GAMERZ
ps2 already did that, HD just made everything brown and reduce the amount of games released due to the cost of HD.

[Anonymous No.9778959]

>>9778956
yeah but the PS2 still had variety and cartoony games. it wasn't until the 7th gen when the DARK AND MATUREZ era truly kicked off.

[Anonymous No.9778962]

>>9778954
Sir this is /vr/, and furthermore you should consider actually playing the games the thread is about before posting.

[Anonymous No.9778972]

>>9778959
i think its more about the cost, japs had a hard time releasing their fuckery in HD and westerns were playing safe since dev cost sky rocketed.

[Anonymous No.9778983]

Those janky ass fucking 3D graphics of the 90s will forever give me a nostalgia boner.
The jank was an artstyle onto itself.

But I'm happy that in this day and age there are indie games and boomer shooters that "get it" and do a good job of replicating the soul of those days. Games like Cruely Squad, Signal Ops, Disco Elysium - they take me back. To internet cafes in basements and lan parties and lazy summer days spent flipping through videogame magazines.

[Anonymous No.9778984]

>>9778885
Shut it, z-child. They literally replaced the pinnacle of pixel art with ugly blocky trash. Nobody with a brain was impressed.

[Anonymous No.9778991]

Zoomers will NEVER know what it was like to experience the leap from small 2D sprites to enormous 3D characters. The smallest 3D environments, like Peach’s castle were full of wonder to explore. You WANTED to look around every inch of it just to see what details you could find. You don’t bat an eye at touches like butterflies floating around grass, or a waterfall above a moat, but they were literally awesome at the time. Everyone thinks their childhood was the best, but when it comes to video games, it was without a doubt the best time to experience gaming.

[Anonymous No.9778995]

>>9778991
well we did experience the transition to HD, which wasn't a good one
>>9778954

[Anonymous No.9778996]

>>9778984
>ugly blocky trash
So, webm related?

[Anonymous No.9779000]

>>9778991
Oh man, I get you. Interactive environments were the most unbelievable, next-level thing back then. I remember duke nukem 3D absolutely making my head melt because of random ways you could interact with the environment. Or like, seeing flies swarm around dead bodies in Quake 2.

[Anonymous No.9779007]

>>9778769
I had a similar experience. I remember all the magazines jizzing themselves over those early 3D games and they just looked like hideous blocky trash to me.

[Anonymous No.9779009]

>>9778947
>No, u
Weak

[Anonymous No.9779015]

Question:
Anyone got the TR2 vs TR'13 webm?

[Anonymous No.9779017]

>>9778953
Are you fucking serious? Everyone couldn't shut the fuck up about DOOM, and then Quake, and then Quake 2's MP, and then briefly UT, and then Quake "I set picmip to turn BFG into tile shooting gun" 3. There were many other good shooters too, but none were quite that popular, at least not on PC. I guess Dukefags deserve a mention as they were numerous and also pretty vocal, but the game never quite clicked with me unlike Blood for some reason.

[Anonymous No.9779019]

>>9778953
Wait, never mind, I'm retarded and you're asking about frames per second.

[Anonymous No.9779020]

>>9778953
No.
But zoomers today won't stop crying about "muh 15 FPS!"

[Anonymous No.9779025]

>>9779007
Blocky was one thing, I could mostly tolerate it in something like Tomb Raider, although early 3D being shit probably was one of the reasons I never became much of a fan of that game. But when parts of a body were pretty much elliptical? It hit some violently repulsive response in me.

[Anonymous No.9779026]

>>9778263
I thought it was alright, but I quickly found myself playing more SNES than N64. Games just felt more polished and I enjoyed the 2D art style better. Final Fantasy VI (3 in my day) and Chrono Trigger felt like complete masterpieces, while something like Pilotwings 64 felt like a glorified arcade game. I remember I got a new copy of Ocarina of Time and a used copy of Final Fantasy IV (2 back then) for Christmas one year, because both were on my list. I thought "wow, cool" for a bit with Zelda but ended up spending the majority of that Christmas break hooked on Final Fantasy.

As an adult now, practically the only modern games I play are 2D indies. I guess I just always liked them more.

[Anonymous No.9779027]

>>9779020
Q3 fags absolutely obsessed over frames per second. We didn't when we played Q2 over LAN, but then we weren't even wannabe pros, so what do I know. Eventually arena shooter fans (and I don't even remember that being a name, it was just "I like first-person shooters like Quake") started caring about it a great deal.

[Anonymous No.9779030]

>>9779017
DELTA. FUCKING. FORCE. 1&2 MULTIPLAYER, BABY

To this day I still have never experienced a similar multiplayer experience. Being a voxel nostalgiafag is a esoteric thing, because most people don't remember the glory of early-day voxel technology; they just think of gay minecraft and shit blocks.
But DF2... Anon remembers.

[Anonymous No.9779036]

>>9779020
The way zoomers obsess over goyslop computer parts these days is honestly sad.

[Anonymous No.9779037]

>>9779030
>DELTA. FUCKING. FORCE. 1&2 MULTIPLAYER, BABY
Yeah, it was definitely a thing. And I think there was some other tacticool game before Rainbow Six became a thing, can't quite remember the name.

>voxels
That was TibSun for me. I remember some guys reading a lot about it, exploring (mostly theorycrafting) what the tech could potentially bring once computing power catches up but for me it sounded like more work so I just tuned it out and enjoyed the game.

[Anonymous No.9779042]

>muh zoomies will never experience x
>muh childhood was better than your childhood

These threads are pathetically sad, and blatantly off-topic

[Anonymous No.9779050]

>>9779042
Every age has its golden moments that no one else will ever experience through a fresh lens, anon. It isn't about zoomers and whatnot.
The timeperiod discussed here, in particular, has significant importance because it was unique in the history of mankind. And it's worth documenting through continued discussion. Please don't make it a personal thing.

[Anonymous No.9779067]

>>9778263
I grew up with NES/SNES.
The first time my brain experience 3D enviroment was with Pilotwings and mario kart. But it wasnt really a big deal. During this time the PC was far more advanced and got some real 3D shit going on with wolfenstein and shit.
When N64 and PSX where released shit went into overdrive.
But it wasn't a real wow effect until the ps2 game GTA.

the real deal during this era was, the flight simulator.

[Anonymous No.9779068]

>Hello? Yes! I would like to go back now, please.

[Anonymous No.9779071]

>>9779042
>Be a zoomer
>Come to /vr/
For what reason?
In fact, I'm still confused the fuck hiro was trying to achieve by changing year quota for /vr/ to 2007. It allowed pic related to turn from meme into reality

[Anonymous No.9779083]

>>9778263
>Those who were alive and gaming in the 80s and early 90s, how did it feel to transition from 2D pixel games to Polygons with fully 3-Dimensional movement for the very first time? What were your reactions when seemingly every franchise including Mario started becoming 3D in the mid 90s?

I think after a couple generations of home consoles only delivering mostly 2D games, i think it was refreshing when 3D started to become more common. The 3DO, Jaguar and even the 32x were earlier attempts at wowing people with 3D. I know Road rash and even the original Need for Speed did turn some heads, but the 3DO price was a hurdle. there were quite a few polygon 3D games for various different PC platforms by 1993-1994, and of course arcade boards like Sega's Model 2. The 3DO was an interesting attempt at a 32bit console, and set the bar for what the Saturn and PS1 had leap over. The Jaguar looked interesting, but seemed to have some bad design choices? IDK. The 32x was a couple Hitachi SH2's with some additional hardware put into a mushroom shaped case. 3D really became mainstream with the Playstation and Saturn. Saturn is interesting hardware, but third parties were more interested in the Playstation 1. Early PS1 launch titles Toshienden, Ridge Racer, Wipeout, and so forth really helped sell people on the PS1. But by 1996, the PS1 was really outselling the Saturn, the N64 launched in September 1996 in NA. The N64 released close to the release date of Crash Bandicoot, Tomb Raider and NiGHTS into Dreams as well as other 3D platformers. But those gen 5 consoles were rough when it came to 3D. Each one had its' own set of problems. Though the PS1 seemed like it was the easiest to work with.

[Anonymous No.9779168]

>>9778263
The transition felt mosty gradual, with the occasional paradigm shifts.

I remember finally getting a PC and also getting a 3D graphics card and only like 4 games used it, and 3 of them came with the GPU, the other was Quake.

I remember having to mess with these little programs that would "emulate" other graphics cards and let me play incompatible games. I remember doing that for Croc and for that N64 emulator.

I remember my weak GPU not being compatible with Half Life, so I played it with the software renderer until I got a newer gpu
It was so smooth. I still remember that feeling. I remember just moving around and having fun not actually playing the game.

The last time I got that feeling was when I upgraded to a pentium 4 and whatever the high end GPU was at the time and I booted up UT2K3. All settings on max. All the grass! Just moving around with an insta gib in the tall grass while the music blasted. Felt good, man. After that things just started getting incrementally prettier and I stopped caring. Or I got jaded.

[Anonymous No.9779179]

>>9778394
>Then solid 3D with low framerates
Oh god, you're giving me Star Fox PTSD.

[Anonymous No.9779185]

>>9778954
Gaming did get over that phase but the throughline of it was here to stay, just not to the same obnoxious degree. It's really a Western thing. Japanese games (FromSoft aside) have been perfectly content continuing to be bright and colorful.

[Anonymous No.9779190]

>>9778996
Yes, and as I mentioned a minute ago it was laggy too.

[Anonymous No.9779202]

Honestly, it was Virtua Fighter and some of the early 3D games on PC that felt more impressive. Mario 64 had the refined application of movement in 3D, but I definitely think it's overstated if you were old enough to see the gradual shift beginning in 1993 or so. I was more blown away by the Dreamcast and when 3D felt more matured. Model 3 was a revelation. Virtua Fighter 3 in 1996 was mind blowing.

[Anonymous No.9779213]

>>9778984
I was. I played this every day after school Quick 30 mins to shit on Andross and then I was out playing in the streets until dark. You are the one who is projecting your zoomerism.

[Anonymous No.9779218]

>>9778991
Playing outside Peach's castle for at least an hour before doing anything else on first boot up.

[Anonymous No.9779232]

Video games weren't really set in stone. Even before 5th generation I went into a VR game once in Las Vegas. Everything was basic 3D, but it was neat. You were just use to things being pushed to the limit.

[Anonymous No.9779241]

>>9779179
Let me guess: You want MORE FPS?

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/09/so-long-slowdown-new-hack-runs-snes-star-fox-at-up-to-60-fps/

https://youtu.be/unMgSqO2ePo

[Anonymous No.9779247]

>>9778449
Getting to experience the leap from 2D to 3D, then a classic library (not just one good game) every year makes modern gaming innovations look quaint by comparison.

The fact people get excited for open world games is fucking tragic. It takes five times longer to develop, which means fewer games each year, and now there's a giant empty field between you and the actual content. Why is this better exactly?

[Anonymous No.9779249]

>>9778263
It was pretty mind blowing but also felt shitty because early 3d stuff was clunky as hell.

[Anonymous No.9779251]

>>9778263
One thing you have to understand is that kids did not see Mario as a 2D collection of pixels. Yes, we knew it was a trick, yes we knew that cartoons were just drawings on cells. But to a kid playing Super Mario World, Mario may as well have been fully 3D back on the SNES. Especially on our poorly calibrated CRTs.

So rather than reinventing the wheel, Mario 64 was just enhancing what we always believed was already there. We did appreciate the enhancements. I distinctly remember seeing Mario blink in Mario 64 and thinking- "this is the apex of game development, the developers took the time to make Mario blink. This is almost Toy Story graphics. We will never get anything more advanced than Mario 64 because studios would blow their budget trying to make something better than this." And that was obviously wrong.

Also you need to realize that today we use terms like 2.5D but back then that didn't exist. Games were 3D or not. Wolfenstein 3D was 3D. Even some NES games were 3D. So it's not like we all woke up one day in the 90s and 3D was delivered to our doorstep. It had always been there in small increments.

[Anonymous No.9779278]

I played mainly Nintendo, though I had some PC games.

Star Fox was mindblowing. Mario 64 was amazing. That was about all I needed really. Obviously certain genres need 3D (FPS for example) and certain others pretty strongly benefit from it (racing for example), but the ones I care about most are better with primarily 2D worlds and can work fine with either 2D or 3D graphics. Since early 3D graphics were mostly ugly, the 2D choice was obviously preferable in those cases. So I was annoyed when developers kept on making the other choice because it was trendy and they were cowards.

I eventually made my peace with Civilization IV, which does look pretty nice and is a great game. I still probably technically prefer pixel art to 3D graphics, but that's no longer the menu these days; high display resolutions and amazing 3D technology have pushed pixel art into a niche. So, whatever, I'll judge case by case and take what looks nice to me.

But yeah, the original 3D revolution was more bad than good. I'd prefer for it not to have even happened, and I think that people like >>9778358 are basically inferior to the rest of us.

[Anonymous No.9779556]

I remember getting wowed by 3D graphics, but it wasn't by Mario 64. It wasn't a video game at all. I was at a demo party in Montreal, and they played this on the big screen, which had just won first place at another demo party in Europe. I think this was over a year before Mario 64 came out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtXxM0pezAs
As far as games... I didn't really take to 3D games until twin-stick control became standard. My favorite PS1 game was Symphony of the Night, and my favorite N64 game was Ogre Battle 64.

[Anonymous No.9779579]

>>9778263
I thought games had made the wrong move honestly. 2D spritework had just started getting good, so we were going from recognizable cartoon shapes to early 3D being vague origami representations. Late 5th gen stopped being so ugly with the 3D but the early 5th gen really felt like loss.

[Anonymous No.9779594]

>>9778263
it was amazing, there was a reason everyone tried to cram 3d even in non3d consoles, that was not a thing at homes

[Anonymous No.9779618]

>>9779083
>The 3DO

Open Lara on a real 3DO:
https://youtu.be/89xqKWEmPC4?t=160


Some devs were able to do some pretty good things on the 3DO. The 3DO came out at that time when interactive-multimedia was a buzzword, and FMV games were still being pushed as 'next gen'. The 3DO does have some pretty good FMV capabilities, and the ability to overlay FMV over other layers. It renders polygons as quads, like the Sega Saturn.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2ewqBXZE_I

[Anonymous No.9779669]

>>9778305
i feel a bit like this. Some games worked, wipeout, tekken, system shock, some flight sims, etc. But 3D platformers felt off to me and still do. The technical upgrades were cool and all, but it was like 3d cinema, seemed like a gimmick, if one that was going to take off because normies seemed to like it.

[Anonymous No.9779674]

>>9778310
i think you've never played a good vr game.

you *are* the controller anon. nothing currently even comes close. i have a full on driving sim and playing a "racing" game flatscreen is literally a joke now.

playing a first person shooter is a joke. the game reloads for you. the game keeps your aim PERFECT. play a game like h3vr and realize how every other game is a fucking joke now.

like i could still play 2d games after playing mario 64. i literally *cannot* play flatscreen racing or fps games now, they are that bad in comparison. just seeing how the horizon is perfectly flat is a fucking joke.

[Anonymous No.9779731]

>>9778263
Mindblowing. The shift to VR pales in comparison.

[Anonymous No.9779747]

>>9779015

[Anonymous No.9779753]

>>9778954
>The transition from 2D to 3D was just a graphical change.
Absolutely the fuck not. The entire soul and design philosophy of gaming changed. They went from being arcade driven, fast paced and challenging to story driven snore fests jerking off over polygon count and rendering techniques.

[Anonymous No.9779770]

>>9779753
Maybe, but at least they don't post gifs with no animation.

[Anonymous No.9779773]

>>9779747
2013 needs some explosions and ancient helicopters attacking that she jumps on and cuts in half before going back to climbing

[Anonymous No.9779832]

it was awesome to have something new and expectation shattering. and they gave you hope that games would keep evolving. looks like it didnt really happen.

[Anonymous No.9779858]

>>9778263
Some games properly utilized the 3D space and did things you couldn't really do in 2D. Super Mario 64 was a good example of this, so was Tomb Raider and many FPS games. That was pretty great to see since it brought an entire new dimension into gameplay.

Other games were pretty much played on a 2D plane but with 3D models and it was less impressive. Early 3D couldn't really stack up against well done 2D sprites and art, so certain games like Contra or many fighting games that didn't utilize the 3D space for anything looked bad with little payoff for the extra dimension. It took a lot of franchises time to figure out how to take advantage of it because many developers were still stuck in a classic mindset of how their game should be.

[Anonymous No.9780058]

Even back then my issue with early 3D games was controls. Developers didn't give a single flying damn about ergonomics of controls, or even made it as unintuitive as possible (as if on purpose). Also, even in full 3D games it was common to use static cameras that loved to frequently interchange at the most crucial moments.

I hate the way modern games share user visual interface (Skyrim, Witcher, Demon Souls etc.) but I'm grateful that they came to some general agreement on sensible controls in 3D environments.

[Anonymous No.9780063]

I'm tending towards this >>9778678
Yeah I thought it was amazing going from Sega Megadrive to PS1, but if I was an adult back then I would have realised right away that 3D capability is one thing, 3D performance is another.

[Anonymous No.9780110]

The best way to experience leaps in graphics and try to emulate the "boomer experience" is to play every King's Quest game from start to finish. The reason is that every King's Quest sequel made leaps in grapchics, from the very pixelated 8-bit graphics all the way to the transition to 3D and everything inbetween. While you're playing, imagine that it's just a year or two between the sequels and you'll get the feeling how rapid graphical technology went

[Anonymous No.9780118]

I wish I could remember the first 3D game I played. I guess it was probably Duke Nukem 3D, as sad as that is. Not exactly a looker, so I don't think I ever had a "whoooa" moment

[Anonymous No.9780175]

>>9778263
I was really moving my head left and right to avoid the fireball while playing Doom.

[Anonymous No.9780181]

>>9778263
i found early 3D to be pretty ugly in general. it took time for it to catch up.
back then i preferred the look of 2D still, despite the obvious limitations. 3D could do stuff that 2D could only fake to an extent(see Doom it's actually 2D)

[Anonymous No.9780286]

>>9778959
>>9778954
at least you admit you are a zoomer,and also your complaints mostly applied to the most casual friendly dude bro games,there was plenty of games that werent that dark you just dont look past the most mainstream shit.

[Anonymous No.9780323]

>>9779278
ah poor elitist tendie, you are so much better than us :(

[Anonymous No.9780427]

>>9778263
It was hit and miss with a fair amount of miss and I wasn't impressed by much of it. It felt like a downgrade in many cases. That was to be expected considering 2D had matured nicely and set against 3D in its experimental stages, the list of quality 3D games was very low in comparison. I wished for the z-axis to compliment 2D rather than become the de facto style desu.

[Anonymous No.9780538]

It was honestly an astounding paradigm shift. Even the shift from 8bit to 16 felt worlds apart but the shift to 3d massively changed the way games were designed and played in a way that can't be understated. I honestly can't imagine we'll ever see such a shift again. I mean what's the big thing now? Games can look slightly more realistic, there's slightly more lighting effects. We've been sort plateaud for far too long.

[Anonymous No.9780660]

>>9778263
It was cool, but probably the most interesting time was during those few liminal years when full 3d hadn’t quite been nailed, so various companies were experimenting with pseudo-3d tech to approximate the feeling of 3d (2.5D games, HyperCard/QuickTime/fmv stuff like myst, etc).

[Anonymous No.9780708]

>>9778263
I remember being absolutely blown away when lighting a flare in water in TR2. Those bubbles looked so real.

[Anonymous No.9780767]

>>9778883
I remember having 133 MHz Pentium 1 with Voodoo 1 and ~48 MB RAM in years '95-'02, and most 3D games (i.e. Quake, Pandemonium) were lagging or freezing on it.
If your machines worked stable then good for you.

[Anonymous No.9780827]

>>9778263

I wish I could remember. I started playing games in 1994 when I was 4-5 years old. I really can not remember how I felt when 3D games started popping up. All I remember is being thrilled with Spyro and being amazed when Sonic left footprints in the sand in Sonic Adventure.

[Anonymous No.9780831]

>>9778305

I remember thinking that there was no way Metroid would work in 3D, but I ended up loving Prime.

[Anonymous No.9780842]

>>9778321

I think this is basically how I looked at it. I was 7 when Super Mario 64 came out, so I hadn't really been around long enough to really appreciate the change.

[Anonymous No.9780865]

>>9778680

I sometimes regret missing PC gaming almost entirely back the since I was a console kid because it seems like a hell of a time. But at the same time, tech advanced so quickly and it sounds like upgrading every few years was an actual necessity instead of the luxury it is now.

[Anonymous No.9780872]

>>9778263
It felt shitty because gameplay usually suffered for the awesome new technology. Game worlds were less detailed and creativity went out the window.

[Anonymous No.9780884]

>>9778263
There's not really any frame of reference. It was just a completely new experience and amazing to play Mario 64 for the first time.

[Anonymous No.9780890]

>>9778940

People have been saying exactly that since the 7th gen though. Brown n' bloom really ruled that era.

[Anonymous No.9780892]

>>9778953

No, back then we argued over bits instead of FPS.

[Anonymous No.9780903]

>>9780110
>implying zoomers are going to play King's Quest series

Seriously? Listen to yourself old man

[Anonymous No.9780914]

Anyway as others have said, if you were really into video games and not just a console plebian, it was a gradual thing and "3D" was a gradual thing we kept hearing about since the 80's until it boomed after Doom.

As a kid though the one difference with 3D games is that they felt more immersive, and massive. It felt like there were no boundaries anymore. I remember playing Carmageddon and getting lost in those levels and loving to look everyone looking for secrets and new places to reach... I don't think this a feeling zoomer know, for reasons such as these >>9779747
but also because modern gaming players cry and lose attention, drop the game and go scroll on their favourite social media or swap to a F2P game on their phone, if faced with a game like that.

[Anonymous No.9780927]

>>9779071

That's because that's how the passage of time works. Someday even the modern era is going to be considered "retro". It happens to literally everything. In the future, 30 year olds are going to talk about the good ol' days with their PS5s and the majority won't even touch games older than that because they'll be too old and crusty to them. It's like how an idiot friend of a friend won't watch movies made before 1980 because they're "too old and outdated".

[Anonymous No.9780930]

>>9778263
it was really cool and hype, and shitty/janky controls were just tolerated and overlooked because we had no idea that they COULD be better.

ghouls and ghosts is extremely punishing and difficult. many people would consider it to be a shitty game, because it offers a painful and unrewarding experience. however, mario is significantly easier and less punishing, and everyone fucking loves it. most people would choose to play mario over ghouls and ghosts (contrarians need not respond. i said most. no need to get personally defensive).

now take 3d. even if the game is offering a generally painful experience with janky controls/camera, most people were quiet about it because they had nothing to compare it to and were just thrilled about the 3d part. they overlooked the jank.

these days, people have actually experienced refined 3d gameplay, design, and controls, so they can look back and say "yeah, it doesnt really hold up." or "its not that good".

intelligent people can look at ocarina of time and say "it was a landmark in video game history, and a pioneer in 3d game design" while also acknowledging "it is tremendously flawed and limited, and is in no way 'the best game of all time'."

[Anonymous No.9780938]

>>9780890
5th gen probably had the darkest games because it was full of black voids, fog, muddy textures, and simplistic lighting. Like look at Gran Turismo 2 compared to GT3 and GT5. In 7th gen you have the most popular games being Call of Duty and it dragging FPS shovelware to more attention up along with it, but in terms of what was actually being made it didn't change that much. Like the brightest game by far in the Halo series is Halo 3, H2 looks smeared in poo by comparison. FFXIII is way less brown and washed out than FFXII. The first thing that brown n' bloom brings to mind in racing games is NFS Most Wanted and Burnout.

[Anonymous No.9780941]

>>9779249

I remember trying Tomb Raider II when it was new and even back then I hated the controls. I eventually played the first three Tomb Raiders a few years ago, but I still don't like the controls.

[Anonymous No.9780965]

>>9780538

Some places keep trying to push 3D, but unless we get some sci-fi levels of 3D gaming and feedback, I can't imagine 3D is going to be the game changer some think it will be either.

[Anonymous No.9781002]

When I was a kid I hated RPGs because up until that point I was mostly used to level based 2D side scrolling games only, so the idea of these big maps where you move freely in 8 (or 4, whatever) directions with the path you have to take not being immediately obvious seemed super daunting and confusing. I remember seeing the first pictures of Mario 64 in a magazine, looking at the 3D gameplay and being disappointed because the series left its 2D side scroller roots in favor of this new 3D free movement bullshit and thinking to myself "It's gonna suck! It's basically an RPG now"

[Anonymous No.9781045]

Early 3D was 99% fucking shit.
It took a while before it got good, but in the meanwhile several franchises suffered devastating transitions into 3D, with results that were downright downgrades from their 2D predecessors.

[Anonymous No.9781063]

>>9778263
It was more gradual than people tend to remember. Gaming isn't an island. Going from Atari 2600 to NES was a leap but not massive unless you were late to it and played much later games first. Same basic thing here. Playing things like Doom put you in 3D (sorta) before the big jump. We all had played RE or FF7 so we had transition. Not to mention CG in shows or films or even commercials getting us used to it before it really truly hit.

The biggest jump was SNES to PS1 for me. Sprites in flat worlds and suddenly a day later I'm playing as a 3D character on lush gorgeous backgrounds, some with moving fans or steam from sewers. That was huge. And there wasn't really a transition either. Just bam, here's a massive jump forward. Similar timing but different game type. Full 3D didn't look good for a long while. Prerendered absolutely did.

[Anonymous No.9781071]

it was based
being able to explore "freely" was something everyone subconsciously wanted in vidya
couldnt tell you how many early 3D games i spent just wandering the hubworlds, trying to get oob or over/under some invisible wall with friends

it also changed the relationship people had with vidya
in ye olden days a la atari, all games were usually just "play for score", or till it looped
then in the later 8-bit and 16-bit gens it became "to beat the game", and 1cc if you were a real badass
after 3D, now you could simply "exist in the game", which is something you couldnt do outside of CRPGs like ultima or daggerfall

[Anonymous No.9781076]

>>9781045
How much of that is you looking back in hindsight? A lot of people here like to shit on Mario 64, for example, but when that thing first came out it was amazing. This was still a few years before the PC lapped the graphical capabilities of consoles, too. It both looked and ran better than most 3D PC titles.

[Anonymous No.9781091]

It was pretty mindblowing, I remember pouring over the screenshots and videos of Mario 64.
Though I'm not so jaded that I hate gaming or think it has to be one way, I can still enjoy old and new things.

[Anonymous No.9781098]

>>9781076
>This was still a few years before the PC lapped the graphical capabilities of consoles, too
this isnt true
it depended heavily on your personal hardware but games were being made specifically for 3d acceleration graphics cards, which was cutting edge tech, in the mid to late 90s
if you didnt have a card like that, sure ps1 was better, and you were stuck playing doom could be worse
a good example is rogue squadron 3d on PC vs the N64 port. PC version came out first and if you had the right hardware it looked absolutely spectacular for 98
the N64 port, while a literal marvel they were able to fit it on those tiny carts, was VASTLY inferior by every metric

ffs the first time i ever even played ps1 was on bleem emulating it on my computer and i was fucking upscaling it, simply it because i could. so no they were not more powerful

my first memory of being humbled by a consoles graphics was the dreamcast, so several years into the phenomenon, and by then it was more my fault in not having a job and being able to upgrade my computer

[Anonymous No.9781125]

I was 8 when super mario 64 came out and I felt VERY confused by its 3D, I still remember the first time I played and I was getting lost in bob omb battlefield

[Anonymous No.9781146]

>>9778305
Same, the games with "3D" in the title ended up being lackluster but this was forced by publishers everywhere.

[Anonymous No.9781219]

>>9778263

It was awesome, especially since we had just gone from 8 bit to 16 bit like 3 years before

going from the NES to the Super NES was a "holy shit" moment. Going from like 16 colors to 256+ with transparent things, millions of sprites on screen and then rendered sprites etc, and sound that wasn't bleeps and bloops, having 6 buttons instead of 2 etc that was all cool as hell. I remember going from Mario 3 to SMW and Mario Kart and just being blown away

and then Sega CD had actual music that sounded like actual music, and FMV was cool even if it was grainy as hell. I was a little jelly of my friend who got one of those

and then suddenly 3D in like 16 million colors. All of that happened within like 4 years. I'll never forget playing Mario 64 and realizing that if you only push the stick forward a little bit, Mario will sneak instead of running, so you could creep past the sleeping chompers

now my back hurts all the time

[Anonymous No.9781271]

>>9778263
It felt like video games had been reinvented. Can't explain it better than that, young man.
These games that redefined gaming for me include:
>Goldeneye
>Shadows of the Empire
>Super Mario 64
>Turok: Dinosaur Hunter
and last but not least
>Ocarina of Time
All of these games, but especially OoT really transformed games from simple quaint affairs to something of a hybrid between the grand theatrical productions of old and new media.

Games like pic related as stiff fun as fuck, but they're not deep, at all.

[Anonymous No.9781316]

"3D" had been around for a while, ie. Doom release wasn't that far from Super Mario Bros. on the NES. The idea of a polygon was like "yeah, of course." so the transition meant nothing to me.

The key distinction here is that these were all "games." It didn't matter if I was playing Secret of Mana or Wolfenstein 3D or Nights into Dreams on the Sega Saturn, everything was fundamentally a "game". Simply activity engaged in for diversion or amusement conducted according to rules defined by the game itself.

It was late, in 2003 when the visuals of 3D took over and I noted it consciously. I was running Morrowind on PC for the first time. My cousin walked by and she looked at it and said "wow, the graphics, that looks almost real". Looking back, obviously it didn't, but that's when the 3D realization of creating and being in virtual "world" overtook the idea of just entertaining myself with a "game". Even much earlier 3D games noted for their graphical attention never had me consider video games in a different way.

[Anonymous No.9781440]

>>9778263
It was a great moment of artistic and technical effervescence. You had brand new genres like FPS and other genres that did a massive jump in quality (such as racing games).
On the other hand, I also disliked the hate 2D games released in the second half of the 90's were sometimes getting (they didn't look "next gen" enough). Some people would get surprised to see that some of the 2D PSX or Saturn games people worship today got rather "meh" reviews back in the day, all while trashy 3D games were being valued higher.

[Anonymous No.9781443]

It seems to me that fighting games were the only genre to truly benefit from the 3-D transition, as demonstrated by Soul Calibur 2.

[Anonymous No.9781461]

>>9778310
Sadly, I think that we are in the golden age of virtual reality. Once the technology is sufficiently advanced, the spark of novelty from early adopters will be gone.

[Anonymous No.9781480]

>>9779747
Thanks Uncharted! What a boring gay piece of shit current TR is.

[Anonymous No.9781492]

>>9781480

I avoided the new series for years because everyone said it was like Uncharted, so I pictures a battle with 600 enemies every time I turned a corner. Turns out, there isn't nearly as much battling as in Uncharted, and I had a lot of fun with the exploration in TR2013. Less so in Rise because of those huge areas that took forever to comb over and the sheer amount of collectables. Shadow I barely recall though, it did not leave much of an impression.

[Anonymous No.9781532]

https://i.imgur.com/zpbJV0a.mp4

[Anonymous No.9781553]

>>9781443
lmao
for real though, aside from first person shooters, i think racing benefited the most.

[Anonymous No.9781562]

>>9780903
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DlTexEXxLQ

[Anonymous No.9781585]

I had played a few games like Spectre and Wolf 3D by the early-to-mid 90s and they were thoroughly "neat" but did not change my life. There is a WW1 flight sim called Red Baron released in 1990 but I did not play it until a few years after that. Red Baron had defined missions but the flying was completely free roam and open ended. Flying endlessly over fields and farmhouses made of extremely primitive polygons felt like inhabiting a new world that went on forever. Even though I had played several "open world" games like Ultima, the immersion in Red Baron was the first moment I felt like something had fundamentally changed.

feelsgoodman

[Anonymous No.9781601]

>>9781585
I'll add that playing Virtua Racing in the arcade shortly afterwards was another formative 3D gaming experience. There had been a few 3D racers before, but they were novelties compared to Virtua Racing. It was fast, steady, beautiful in its own way, and had linked up sit-down cabs. Virtua Racing and the DDR craze are probably my favorite arcade memories.

[Anonymous No.9781615]

I was absolutely adamant that 2D franchises like Mario and Zelda couldn't work in 3D. The huge push for everything needing to be 3D really rubbed me the wrong way. PS1 demo units showcased Crash Bandicoot which I thought sucked, and the N64 and Saturn demo units didn't make me want those consoles either. So I just ended up playing games on PC and my Game Boy Color that gen for the most part.

[Anonymous No.9781626]

>>9778263
i got bullied into getting a psx, and tekken was my first 3d game.

so i was a pretty normal autismo kid. i remember being at my "friend's" smoky 3-bedroom house with his dad near comatose, and the neighborhood white would-be gangster with a petty theft crime record throwing pennies at me. tekken looked pretty cool and sounded awesome on their huge tv (they were fucking rednecks--dirt poor but their tv was immaculate).

anyway this "friend", i told him i was gonna get an n64. that was the logical choice because i'd played mario 64 at a toys r us and thought it was incredible. and he was like "mario?! fuck that shit! tekken!" and i had to admit tekken was pretty cool, and i'd always been more inclined toward arcade games than at-home games. also for some reason i would change my opinion on a dime if someone pushed even a little, so i ended up with a psx. actually the reason is mental illness.

well, i thought tekken looked good, and so did nights, mario 64... but after a while i had to admit i didn't care for the look of primitive 3d. i was more excited by stuff like mega man 8 or mega man x4 which had anime cutscenes, and really nice looking sprites. that's not to say some of the early 3d games that looked like shit played like shit. i thought colony wars was pretty fun, although it plays like shit so never mind. hell, i don't think even mgs really played particularly well. i tend to think of that era of 3d as a necessary evil. this is why these days i always say i would've been more satisfied with a saturn and a neo geo/neo geo cd than any other console at the time. not that the saturn really had a fuckton more 2d games. and not that my fuckin parents would spring for an expensive console, let alone two...

well whatever really the psx was probably a better choice, but the novelty of 3d wore off pretty quick for me. it wasn't until ps2 era that i started to like it.

[Anonymous No.9781831]

>>9778263
amazingly based and bad ass. i was born i 86, which i think is the perfect age for a gamer. i was 3 when i got my NES and played the shit out of it. i was 11 when i got ffvii, just 1 or 2 years older or younger and it would not have hit the same. all of 6th grade i played golden eye with pals. i was in middle school when i got half-life and started online gaming with team fortress/counter-strike. PS2 came out my first year of high school, and yes, world of warcraft came out my freshman year of college when i was getting my own money and had lots of freedom.... if i was a zoomer or gen x-er i probably wouldnt even care about videogames, but all the genre defining games somehow released right when i was most primed for them.

[Anonymous No.9782132]

>>9778950
You still saw 3D in arcades
You weren't blown away by 3D. That abon is right. You have to be from early 80s to comment on the transition.

[Anonymous No.9782141]

>>9778991
For me it was how the camera seemed to have a life of its own, and would react when mario turned or was doing an animation. To me it felt too visceral, like someone really WAS watching you play, like there were characters around you constantly overlooking your progress

[Anonymous No.9782935]

>>9782132
>You weren't blown away by 3D
Yes we were, the 3D in arcades before 1998 was a joke. Still is a joke. Arcades are great, but not for 3D.

[Anonymous No.9782961]

>>9782935
I think as players we had big but separate reactions to 3D tech and 3D world design. 3D in arcades was relatively advanced by 1998: Daytona was in 94, Time Crisis II was in 97, etc. The difference is that there were not a lot of 3D worlds in the way we think of console 3D platformers. Your examples (Croc and Spyro) both have immersive 3D worlds with great art design (especially Spyro!) even though the tech is not really up to what Sega and Namco were doing in arcades at that time. My first big reaction to 3D tech was probably Virtua Racing or Ridge Racer in the arcade, but the first time 3D worlds clicked and felt transportive was much later with Ocarina.

[Anonymous No.9782983]

>>9778263
Bullshit pushed onto consumers through magazines. Glad we're through that phase.

[Anonymous No.9783073]

As a kid I thought Quake looked like mush when compared to Doom or Duke 3D. By the early 00's with games like Max Payne, MoHAA, and SoF2 things were starting to look nice, but Painkiller was the first one that really blew my eyes out with the huge maps and bosses.

>>9781316
>1993 wasn't that far from 1985
Stop being a retard.

[Anonymous No.9783120]

>>9781443
>fighting games
>truly benefit from the 3-D transition
Only the developers benefitted because it meant creating new costumes for infinite DLC was easy as fuck while motions could be dealt with motion tracking.

[Anonymous No.9783136]

>>9778263
I thought most of the early 3d games were a gimmick and a step down. The 2d games were getting really good at pixel art.

[Anonymous No.9783138]

>>9783073
>1993 wasn't that far from 1985
in the USA it wasn't

[Anonymous No.9783241]

>>9778263
It was kind of cool and janky when stuff came out before Star Fox came out. It was a gimmick and not very graphically impressive before that. Once Star Fox came out it was the first game that actually was good and felt like the gameplay was enhanced with the 3D graphics. Even then, we were excited because it looked like shit in today's eyes but knew it was only going to get better from there on, and it did. Better framerate, more polygons, better textures etc.

Early 3D games on computers, PS1 and Saturn especially were kind of novelties. Besides games like Quake, which was an evolution of the psuedo 3D Doom, the games were not very graphically impressive or impressive themselves. Very pixilated and the wobbly textures ruined the immersion. It wasn't until Super Mario 64 came out and the dithered, anti aliased and z-buffered graphics came out that we finally felt like the future 3D graphics were really here. Game was amazing, no doubt, but the graphics were finally at a good starting point. It was basic, but the fundamentals were all there. Clear lines, good textures that weren't a wobbly pixilated mess, and a smooth framerate.

Being a 40 year old oldfag, SM64 was the biggest wow moment in gaming for me.

[Anonymous No.9783275]

>>9780865
Yeah I don't really know how you could be a kid and get into PC gaming unless your parents made good money or were into it themselves. We got our first computer in 99, some Gateway garbage that was probably expensive as fuck, and I was only playing flash games and some cheap educational stuff. Easier to just get a console every 5-6 years at Christmas. I was pretty content with it, but looking back it would have been cool to play some of those older PC games as they were getting released.

[Anonymous No.9783712]

>>9778263
Well Pokemon Red was my childhood defining game. Not sure why most gamers are graphics fags. A good game is a good game regardless. Unless for some reason it looks so shit that its hard to play due to looking so bad graphics wise but I almost never encountered a game like that.

[Anonymous No.9784042]

1993 to 1995 was a pretty wild time. So many new pieces of hardware getting released at once. But by 1996, it felt like Sony had the market locked down with Nintendo fighting for second place marketshare with their N64. 3DO were still working on the M2. But Atari was basically bankrupt.

https://archive.org/details/nextgen-issue-007/mode/2up

[Anonymous No.9784056]

>>9784042

From the same issue. Saturn not selling as well as expected in Japan. Mediocre reception for the ports of Daytona USA and Virtua Fighter. On the same page: Konami decided to put more development behind the Playstation because of Namco's success.

[Anonymous No.9784058]

I'm 33, but still remember Mario 64 while I still had Sega. Wanted to save up for a dream cast but ended up getting a play station.

It was 4th grade when I played tomb raider, which is basically unplayable now.

I don't complain about games. After slogging through shitty Sega and nes games and their false advertising, today's games at least look nice.

[Anonymous No.9785660]

I was more mesmerized by what graphical accelerators could do. 3D before that looked pretty grim.

[Anonymous No.9785681]

>>9778515
yep, we took it for granted back then. it's only in hindsight that the transition feels so much more profound after the post-2000 diminishing returns

[Anonymous No.9785816]

>>9778369
>Doom was impressive. Super Mario 64 was jaw-dropping.
By the time Doom came out PC's were too expensive where I live, so I had to play it on weekdays in my computer classes. And that was better, because I was able to multiplay through LAN. I remember playing other 3D games like Descent and Quarantine. I later rented the Doom for SNES and remembered enjoying it. Was only after playing real 3D games like Super Mario 64 that Doom started to look like shit

[Anonymous No.9786773]

>>9778263
You had to be there to experience it. And you had to be born sometime in the 80's at the very least

[Anonymous No.9786776]

>>9778263
I remember being excited, but not mind blown. It was the progression of video game technology, and I had an understanding that this was the way it was supposed to be, games were going to get better and better, and there was an unlimited amount of fun on the horizon.

[Anonymous No.9786791]

>>9780938
wow. i dont remember that game looking so shit.

[Anonymous No.9786907]

>>9778263
'86fag here. Doom was one of the first 3D games I saw, even if it was pseudo-3D. It was crazy immersive to my nine year old brain, far more than the 2D console games I had at home. I also found those DOS corridors and the sounds etc quite frightening. It didn't quite have a "wow effect" on me though because I kinda recognised on some level that it wasn't "real" 3D and everything looked pixelated and there were lots of 2D things like the sprites etc.

Now the first time I saw PlayStation games at my friend's house was really something. He told me in the school bus that his dad had brought him a PlayStation. I had no idea what that even was, I thought it was something you sat in and played with toys and crap. After school we went back to his place and seeing those graphics were really something. He had Tekken 2 and Twisted Metal. All fucking day we played those games lmao, seriously so much fun and the graphics just looked ridiculously amazing to me. Going back to The Lion King on my SNES was painful that day.

A few years later I remember seeing Extreme G on my friend's N64. That also looked incredible.

[Anonymous No.9787670]

As someone who started gaming in the 80s with a 2600, it was pretty rough at first and I wasn't a fan in the beginning. The 3D was slow, had a bad framerate, and didn't look that impressive. 3D controls lacked the responsiveness you'd get in a 2D game and I had issues navigating 3D environments. I think the first time I remember 3D impressing me was watching my friend play FF8. I thought the summons were very impressive when it came out. I don't think I ever really adapted to enjoying exploring fully 3D and not just 2D and 3D combo environments until years and years later with Monster Hunter Tri. I have a lot more fun going back and playing early 3D games now.

[Anonymous No.9787705]

I didn't really like it.
Most 3d games looked quite idiotic due to the people not being able to procduce good lower polygon models - Quake being the most notable exception though. Overall I prefer, and preferred, Doom's visuals over any other "3d" game.

[Anonymous No.9788472]

>>9778263
It was fun but probably the biggest issue was controls took awhile to get really good since devs weren't sure how to go about making 3D games with great controls. It seems ridiculous in hindsight that they had such issues and took so long to make it good.

[Anonymous No.9788686]

Played Doom like crazy when it first came out. When Quake arrived, I remember getting a hold of the demo floppy and installing it not knowing much about it. I moved the mouse by accident and when the goddamn screen actually pointed *up*, I about shit. I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe I could look all around the room.

[Anonymous No.9788713]

>>9778263
not quite a boomer, in my early 30s. grew up only with an NES, no SNES or anything else. then 64 came out.

i'll never forget trying mario 64 for the first time at my cousin's house. first time seeing and playing a 3D game. it absolutely blew my mind. i was hooked for life in that instant. there was a family gathering going on and i just remember running around in circles in the courtyard the entire time, just totally blown away. it was such an exciting time.

that generation of games was such a thrill of wonder and discovery. i remember being so excited for the next generation of consoles, seeing them take 3D even further. with each successive generation, though, things stopped changing so much. graphics just got slightly better each time, and games started to become really safe and formulaic. very predictable. there are still exciting moments, but i think a lot of what made the late 80s, 90s, and early 00s incredibly exciting for gaming is now mostly gone.

[Anonymous No.9788791]

>>9778883
yeah because the amiga is so renowned for it's 3D games. I will say Hunter was impressive as fuck but i think the context makes it clear that OP is talking about opengl style 3D.

[Anonymous No.9789108]

1996 was quite the year. Mario, Quake, House of the Dead, Nights, Tomb Raider.

As amazing as it was, it all still felt very jank. 3D didn't really feel like it came into its own until 1998 where we saw the mass adoption of 3D accelerator cards and the NAOMI hardware launched.

[Karin Hawkins No.9789137]

> This is an actual PC game screenshot !!
Yes son it was wild times, pure soulful hype<div class="xa23b"><span class="xa23t"></span><span class="xa23i"></span></div>

[Anonymous No.9789352]

>>9789137

https://archive.org/details/nextgen-issue-26/page/n69/mode/2up

[Anonymous No.9789356]

>>9789352

[Anonymous No.9789467]

>>9778310
I had super Mario rpg on the SNES which was a full 3d game. The game itself had a video card chip in the cartridge to expand the SNES' capabilities. I remember being blown away by that when all of my other snes games were nothing like that.

[Anonymous No.9789478]

>>9779218
Ha I would spend time playing the demos at sam's club while my parents shopped. Really only ever just explored the damn castle. I have yet to actually play the real game. Time to change that.

[Lillie Roy No.9789530]

>>9778263
I had a Super Nintendo and PS1, but spent most of my time with 2D DOS games on my PC. In the end it came down to what was accessible, console games were too expensive for my family so I only had a handful, and a 56k modem meant I could download video games for free on PC. I also got a lot of demo disks (attached to magazines) because it was a cheap way to play a bunch of games.

I'm pretty sure I never had strong opinions about 3D games vs 2D games. I seriously would just take whatever I could get because my god it was a different world back then in terms of lack of entertainment. Nowadays there's too much entertainment but back then I played with ants and leaves in the backyard and hit things with sticks. I still remember the extreme amounts of boredom back then, fucking hell the contrast in entertainment choice is crazy.<div class="xa23b"><span class="xa23t"></span><span class="xa23i"></span></div>

[Anonymous No.9791062]

>>9789137
Next gen had some nice quality magazine paper. I had that same one.

[Anonymous No.9791081]

>>9778263
It sucked. Almost all 3D games just blew hard back then. Mario 64 was cool, and a lot of shooters and racers were good, but most of the 3D platformers were unplayable garbage. Even games that had huge marketing budgets sucked ass, like Nightmare Creatures and Blasto. You went from the SNES with Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy 4 and 6, and all those great platformers, and then you get a PSX and 85% of the games you rent are just lousy. Games like Pandemonium and Battle Arena Toshiden. PSx was a big let down at first. once later gen games started showing up, it was much better, but the first 2 years with the PSX were shit. Some good games came out, but the vast majority people do not play or talk about anymore.

[Anonymous No.9792592]

>>9778263
I couldn't believe it. I stopped gaming at the Amiga 500. When Lara slides down the shoot and I could control her and move her head from side to side it was like 'Oh.mygod'.

[Anonymous No.9792602]

As a side commentary, from someone out of the target of the OP ('98fag here), I did have my "holy shit" moments with two games, given that I grew up playing ZSNES and AoE II almost exclusively. Return to Castle Wolfenstein and SM64 DS blew my mind, the latter not in dissimilar ways from what older anons have told us about the original game (I genuinely spent too much time running and jumping around the castle just to enjoy the feeling of it). I was but a wee lad, 100% clueless on vidya stuff, but I'm glad I did experience that, sort of. Of course, it wasn't a generalised social sentiment, it's just that I was totally out of the loop of what was going on outside of my little bubble, so I still could skip a beat looking at 3D graphics in 2006/2007. The bubble burst around then.

[Anonymous No.9792608]

>>9778386
Facebook like.

[Anonymous No.9792623]

>>9778449
Totally. It's like people that paint photorealism, they're paintings! They're supposed to look like paintings! Same with video games, they're supposed to look like a video game, that is what a video game is.

[Anonymous No.9792624]

Anyone saying "oh I knew this or that wasn't real 3D" is not only larping, but has no idea what 3D even means

[Anonymous No.9792629]

>>9778404
I'm still impressed by mortal kombat personally.

[Anonymous No.9792641]

>>9778575
Don't hurt animals.

[Anonymous No.9792652]

>>9778776
Gen xyz to the end man.

[Anonymous No.9792654]

>>9778263
My first experience with 3D gaming was on a PC demo that was set up at Walmart running Descent. It was pretty crazy. When the N64 came out a few years later and they set up the demo with Mario 64, that was straight up mind blowing. Up to that point, I had fantasized about what a 3D Mario game would be like, but I couldn't imagine how control would work well in a 3D space until I actually played Mario 64. I got an N64 for Christmas the year it came out, with Mario 64 and I believe that I also got Shadows of the Empire and maybe Pilotwings (my birthday is only a couple of months after Christmas and I know that I got some N64 games then as well, and I'm not sure which ones were for that or for Christmas). They were all pretty incredible at the time, even though people dislike Shadows of the Empire in retrospect. I sunk dozens of hours into it, often just playing that final space battle over and over again.

I got a PS1 the following year, my first games for it were Final Fantasy VII, Tomb Raider 2 and Monster Rancher. Again, an incredible time, though by that point 3D wasn't new to me. FFVII's pre-rendered cutscenes were nuts at the time though, and Monster Rancher's monster generation was obviously a big thing. My parents actually gave those to me the night of Christmas Eve, as I was a tween by that point, and I stayed up a good chunk of the night playing FFVII (I got to the train graveyard that night) and generating monsters in Monster Rancher with my CD collection. I remember that Black Sabbath's Paranoid generated a Boxer, which was very powerful.

Over the course of that generation I came to enjoy how experimental developers were at the time. The PS1 in particular was filled with really strange and unique titles that were never replicated. The sandbox-like freedom of games like Mario 64 and OoT felt very new as well, and I could often just sit there screwing around for hours on end in a way that I could not with 2D games.

[Anonymous No.9792691]

I remember playing the original duke nukems then I got to play wolfenstein and doom and eventually duke nukem 3d. The concept of 3d never really blew me away even as a kid. I think we just thought like oh graphics are getting crazy good now.

[Anonymous No.9792703]

>>9792691
We had a paper version when I was young.

[Anonymous No.9792713]

>>9792592
Chute?

[Anonymous No.9792751]

>>9778310
I generally agree with your point on VR, given that 3D innovation was so rampant with "killer apps" littering so many genres, but Astro Bot was to VR platforming as SM64 was to 3D IMHO. There are similarly innovative VR games (Keep Talking... is an extremely fun party game once you get everyone on board, while Superhot was brought to its fullest expression in VR), but the tech faces two headwinds: first, it requires an additional commitment of both money and time/energy unlike the transition from 2D to 3D*; second, most of the innovation was already done in 3D's transitional period.

*Obviously, the switch to 3D was expensive for PC gamers and for console gamers that had to navigate hardware upgrades (64DD, 32X), but the 5th-gen consoles streamlined the market in a way that VR has yet to see.

[Anonymous No.9792834]

>>9779747
Climbing ladders in TR2 isn't exciting either to be fair.
Main difference between the Core and CD games is the ridiculous handholding. Yes, LAU is shit as well.

[Anonymous No.9792835]

>>9792641
Don't try to be funny.

[Anonymous No.9793339]

>>9792602
Nah mate I was there for the peak, you got the most equivalent experience possible I'd say, the fact you were in a bubble is what makes it valid. It's not like I was in the loop socially, it was purely just something I experienced with my immediate family, my cousin, and like one kid from school. The novelty and amazement you experience as an individual is what counts. The world was better when people didn't know or care about what was happening in the world at large or what strangers hundreds or thousands of miles away were up to in any broad sense other than like war or some shit. We weren't built to deal with all the social noise we're subjected to now and the further I divorce myself from it to the extent I'm able, the more at peace I feel. Disregard social media, embrace playing platformers on old technology that has no interest or ability to spy on you largely for the purpose of selling you shit you don't need.

[Anonymous No.9793346]

>>9792691
They had rows and rows of CRTs playing that screensaver at my local Circuit City and I was so fascinated by it as a kid, I wanted it to be a game so bad.

[Anonymous No.9793397]

>>9782961
>My first big reaction to 3D tech was probably Virtua Racing or Ridge Racer in the arcade, but the first time 3D worlds clicked and felt transportive was much later with Ocarina.
That about sums it up, I agree. Me too.
The arcades let us play around a tiny here and there in 3D words, but it wasn't until Ocarina that you left a part of it and could explore it.

[Anonymous No.9793405]

>>9782961
That about sums it up, I agree. Me too.
The arcades let us play around a tiny bit here and there in 3D words, but it wasn't until Ocarina that you left a part of it and could explore it.
[fixed]

[Anonymous No.9793904]

>>9793339
Thank you anon, these days I try to do just that. In the chaos of social media, I've found solace fleeing to "antiquated" places like this one, smaller forums (the ones that still are up) and playing old, single-player vidya. Time constraints become more common as I occupy myself in my studies/job so really the incentive to keep up with the mess that is the latest & greatest of social media and gaming is close to zero for me. The people I know do make extensive use of current media so there's still the little bug itching me to give up and go all-out on the social noise. Thankfully, the idea becomes ever more alien.

In a way, I'm glad I grew up secluded in that bubble. Really made things magical for me as I came into contact with newer games.

[Anonymous No.9793982]

>>9778263
not as big of a deal as you think. Wolfestein 3D was already out in 1991.

[Anonymous No.9793998]

>>9778298
This

[Anonymous No.9794092]

>>9792703
Holy, I've done choose your own adventure text books but not picture ones. Looks cool man.

[Anonymous No.9794136]

As a kid my first console was the Atari 2600 or some sort of clone of that, then the SNES. I played Super Mario World all day as well as SF2 Turbo.
From that I went to f*cking Duke Nukem 3D. What can I say? to this day playing that game still gives me a special feel, I always check user maps. I played Doom 2 after that, it wasn't as inmersive, but I loved the more fast paced brute fights with tons of enemies.
Then Quake but it wasn't the same. I played then Q2 and Q3.
Duke will always have that special feel, it's some sort of combination between the engine, the textures, the level design which was the first one to have realistic scenarios, the weapons and enemies, the Duke character, the music, sounds.. everything just works.

[Anonymous No.9794196]

>>9792623
Only indies seem to understand that art direction > photorealism
Think of all the cool ahir we could have if AAA execs wouldn't scoff at any new idea and only greenlight games with men and guns and/or ultraphotorealism

[Anonymous No.9794875]

>>9792623
But photorealism is amazing...

[Anonymous No.9794887]

I got my first 3d card, Half Life, and cable internet on the same day. Needless to say, my high school studies suffered badly.

[Anonymous No.9794906]

>>9778263
The jump fron 2D to 3D was amazing, but I think most gamers of the era knew it was coming. The jump from Atari to Nintendo was the real shocker.

[Anonymous No.9795127]

>>9778263
I was like 5 but it was amazing. Going from my genesis to these full 3d worlds gave my brain crazy dopamine hits. Later on around 2000 when I discovered final fantasy I was even more blown away.

[Anonymous No.9795163]

>>9778263
I remember nit being very amazed. I love in a third world country at the time, I was maybe 7 or so. I went to a local videogame renting place, you pay to play a console for 30 minutes, hour, etc. Anyway I remember seeing a ps1, and I didn't understand what it was, it looked like a vcr or something to me, I only played SNES back then. I saw someone playing RE2 or RE3 can't remember, and I thought it was scary because it move around the scene, not just up and down. I thought wow that's cool but RE scared me. I remember playing RE3 for the first time and being scared walking up to the store because it was so weird, full of monsters. It was weird.

[Anonymous No.9795171]

>>9795163
Also I remember not being that impressed, but really liking it, later on I played Ctash Bandicoot. Later on I saw a n64 for the first time, someone playing Ocarina Of Time and that really blew me away because it was all 3d and the guy was moving between rooms, it was like a movie to me, that was crazier. Especially cause I had never seen an n64 before that. I remember it to this day, because I think I asked the guy playing if I could play and he said no, lmao.

[Anonymous No.9795594]

>>9792691
My Uncle had that exact screensaver as a kid and I would just sit there and watch it.
I think that's probably the moment the Megami Tensei brain poison set in.

[Anonymous No.9795601]

It was neat seeing first-gen 3D, but I am old enough to remember Atari VCS blocky graphics, so I compared it to that

[Anonymous No.9795832]

I learned to read (94/95) around the same time all the gaming magazines started hyping 3D gaming as the future. I remember being more blown away by Dreamcast graphics than the leap from SNES to N64.

[Anonymous No.9795850]

>>9792608
Shut the fuck up already.

[Anonymous No.9795996]

>>9778263
Made me stop playing RTS games completely for quite a while during that period where EVERY SINGLE ONE ABSOLUTELY HAD TO BE IN 3D.

[Anonymous No.9796152]

I did not experience it properly because PCs were expensive and you had to change it at least once per every two years in order to be able to keep up. I was aware of Tomb Raider being pushed extremely hard by media publications - it turned out to be a decent game though. My first encounter with 3D was this vector tennis / ping pong video game that I actually can't recall and / or Google, but it was fine, along with Alone in the Dark. I managed to miss the psx era because I was focused on HoMM, Blizzard games and cRPGs. Most of my subsequent encounters with 3D mainly served to sully established 2D franchises. I don't hold that opinon anymore, but I was disgusted with Warcraft 3, for example even though that was later and did not care much for Grim Fandango either compared to Full Throttle and the like.

Perhaps the first inkling of how good 3D could be was Descent, but that game never got expanded upon much by anyone.

[Anonymous No.9797067]

>>9778449
>In a decade we went from Dragon Quest IV to.... Dragon Quest IV

[Anonymous No.9797086]

>>9778263
I still remember booting up my new PS1 for the first time and being blown away by the FMVs and polygonal graphics, I'd only played SNES/genesis and older consoles at that point.

[Anonymous No.9797230]

>>9794875
Yes, but it's novelty wears of faster in comparison with experimental approaches.

[Anonymous No.9797343]

>>9778263
As a zoom zoom (24) growing up with all the good consoles from the time (SNES, N64, Mega Drive, PS1 and PS2) and a PC early 3D was crusty as fuck and only few games managed to actually make it look good through heavy stylization (Harvest Moon for the PS1 or Warcraft III being good examples), 3D only really came into its own with the PS2 and there's a reason that thing sold so many units, DVD player meme aside.

[Anonymous No.9797389]

>>9778263
Pretty mad. One thing that sticks out now was how quickly SNES and Mega Drive became "retro." It felt like it happened overnight.

[Anonymous No.9797401]

>>9797067
in that time DQ5, 6, and 7 came out

where's Elder Scrolls 6, 7, and 8?

[Anonymous No.9797409]

>>9780927
Up until 5 years ago retro meant an era, not a measure of time in the past.

[Anonymous No.9797451]

>>9797409
I think the "retro is older than * years" definition just becomes less helpful the older gaming becomes.

[Anonymous No.9798251]

>>9780118
Are you fucking kidding me. Duke 3D was the first game ever to give you a sense of being in a real 3d space. Looking up and seeing the massive skycrapers was insane. You clearly are frauding because coming from 2d games to Duke 3D, with only Wolf 3D and Doom as intermediary steps, were huge steps in innovation. This was unironically your reaction when you saw the building explode in map 2:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW75ikLOg34

[Anonymous No.9798323]

>>9780927
I got a ban for posting something like this. Said it was for complaining about how things are run.

[Anonymous No.9798330]

>>9798323
Meant for
>>9779071

Not that other idiot. "Retro" is never used for anything but things that are actually retro, even in modern games it refers to sprites or low poly renders.

[Anonymous No.9798401]

>>9778953
almost nobody

[Anonymous No.9798404]

>>9778954
kid little piece of advice, close this tab in your browser and never visit this shithole again. try to make normalish friends, and do normalish things. retro games are fine, but this place is a dump. it's not too late for you.

[Anonymous No.9798412]

>>9779025
bro tomb raider is still good today

[Anonymous No.9798420]

>>9779050
>Every age has its golden moments that no one else will ever experience through a fresh lens
>plz no make personal
im in my 30s but that applies to zoomers too, because despite how miserable, bitter and out of touch most of the users here are zoomers also have unique and interesting cultural experiences that will also be looked back upon through a rosey lens.

and the comments are almost always by definition personal.

[Anonymous No.9798429]

>>9798404
We both know he's already in too deep.

[Anonymous No.9798537]

Anons desperate to validate their experience over younger generations make a big deal out of it but it was just pretty neat, really not that big of a deal.

[Anonymous No.9798738]

>>9798420
>zoomers also have unique and interesting cultural experiences that will also be looked back upon through a rosey lens.
The difference is that we'll still be in that era. Part of the "looking back" is that you're doing the looking from another time. We're still in the same world that the Zoomers were born and raised in.

[Anonymous No.9798751]

>>9778263
It wasn't as mindblowing as you might think. 3D Animations had been around since the late 80s at least
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmE4IWPaULE

Most of us who were experiencing the switch from 2D to 3D had seen Toy Story when it came out in '95 and we all knew that videogames would one day look like that. Thing is videogame magazines would show promo shots for 3D games that looked like Toy Story, but then when you'd play the game it would look like a bunch of janky bullshit.

This was especially true for those of us who were Playstation owners. Instead of the slick polygons of Goldeneye 64 we got fuzzy jagged edges. It wasn't impressive at all.

The first two games that really blew me away were Metal Gear Solid 2 and Half Life. When you picked up the .357 in Half Life and could see the reflections on the cylinder that shit blew my mind, but that was in 2001 because no one except the richest neckbeards owned a computer that could run that game when it first came out. It was a Staples bargain bin special for years, and it just happened to look and play better than most games that came after it for years.

[Anonymous No.9798752]

>>9798251
>Duke 3D was the first game ever to give you a sense of being in a real 3d space
>>9798251
>Looking up


Duke Nukem 3D didn't actually have a Z-Axis for looking up and down, so the Build engine fakes it by using some nasty screen stretching effect. The engine is a lot like Doom's in many ways. As it renders everything through sectors, or portals. When you build a map, everything is extruded from either the floor or the ceiling. I guess you could still build "3D" objects like bridges (and the game does) with billboarded sprites. Ofcourse going under water actually teleport Duke to a different location on the map. the engine itself can do all sorts of weird overlapping geometry that could never actually exist in real 3D space. Duke Nukem 3D for the Saturn uses a polygon 3D engine (well quads) and the maps had to be redesigned to fit into prop[er 3D space. same with the N64 version of Duke Nukem 3D, that also renders in polygons. 3D Realms released the source Code for Duke Nukem 3D in 2003, Ken Silverman's polymost engine add polygon rendering as well as a proper z-axis look up and down.. I was one of the people who created a lot of textures for the HD texture pack, and I still see them in use. There was a fan made Duke 3D remake that used them. I use to hang out at the 3D Realms forums all the time.

[Anonymous No.9798768]

1996-2005 were the best years ever. Every year a new game came out it looked SIGNIFICANTLY better. Unfortunately PC hardware also needed significant upgrades. Usually it meant you'd just play games on medium or low graphics then get a new comp a year or two later then go back and play the same games on max graphics.

BTW my list stopped at 2006 cause that's when BROWN N BLOOM was invented

[Anonymous No.9798776]

>>9778263
>the shift
I assume you mean on consoles?

[Anonymous No.9798823]

>>9798752
Build works completely different from Doom, and Duke Nukem 3D still is a 3D game. There is a Z axis for all gameplay elements, sectors, walls, sprites

>same with the N64 version of Duke Nukem 3D

The N64 version does use Build. It's similar to how Polymost works.

[Anonymous No.9798843]

>>9778263
It was the cancer that killed franchises.

[Anonymous No.9798857]

>>9798251
I disagree. I think Duke 3d looks like shit. The only realy great thing about it are the guns. They look good and sound really good

[Anonymous No.9798872]

>>9778263

a whole group of gamers were enticed to play games that had not played games before when the experience was only 2D. Their overlap tended toward pc gamers too, who would've had more disposable income than console kiddies of the day.

It was frustrating to watch as someone who liked most of the games that had come to us up until that point because the money-cannon got aimed at producing those titles way more, and anything else was see as old, repetitive, or the worst thing in the west; childish.

to be sure, 3D has strong argument for certain genres of games like racing especially. But there was an entire magazine staff who thought the overfocus on 3d games was bullshit, Gamefan. Starfox was neat, but that didn't magically mean that all new games needed to look like that. Then the FF6 test renders were published in Nintendo Power, it didn't excite much...

the PS had basically 3 titles that were 2d at launch. NBA Jam, Rayman(sorta), and SF the movie. The Saturn had Clockwork Knights(sorta) at launch and that was it. But all the publishers were definitely on their bandwagon.

[Anonymous No.9798972]

>>9778263
It was literal magic.
You will never experience anything even close to it.
Sad.

[Anonymous No.9799080]

>>9778263
Can't speak for Westerners, but, here in Eastern Yurp, 3D GPUs were expensive as fuck until circa the early-00s. Most people in the mid-late-90s still used some sort of 2D card in their home PCs, and played 2D stuff, like C&C/Red Alert/Warcraft2/Starcraft/HoM&M2/HoM&M3 (ever wonder why it's so popular among us east yuropeons?).
If you wanted to play 3D games (in 3D, not software accel) you had to go to a PC-cafe. I remember seeing Quake 2, Unreal, Descent Freespace, among other games. Unreal looked better to me than Quake 2, the latter had a bit too much brown.

[Anonymous No.9799306]

>>9798857
Nah it looks great. The combination of the engine and textures have a certain vibe to it. You are judging from 2023 POV. What was the Duke 3D competition in 1997? exactly nothing.
>>9798752
I know all of that but this tread is what you thought at the time. At the time that was 3D, you wouldn't overthink about how oh its 2.5 not 3D.

[Anonymous No.9799331]

>>9799306
> At the time that was 3D

It was 3D and it still is 3D. Calling it "2.5D" is nonsense spread by people who think 3D can only be polygonal; and fed by marketing in the mid to late 90's who didn't know how to advertise their new 3D techniques in laymans terms so they went like "oh but now we have REAL three-dee, that 3D we sold you before that we said was 3D? Naah we were lying all along, but see now it's REAL!".

Duke3D has X-Y-Z axis and the Z axis is used extensively both in level design and in gameplay. That's all that matters for it being by definition 3D; the technique used for it is irelevant.

[Anonymous No.9799483]

>>9799331
Yeah even Doom was 3d by non aspie standards. Or even Wolf 3d compared to Mario. But yeah Doom took it to the next level, then Duke 3d was mindblowing. Quake was pretty insane but that one did actually look like shit in terms of looking like it had that brown tone everywhere all the time. I enjoyed Duke 3d more than Quake because it had a more varied level design. You were on earth then on the moon then back to earth. In Quake it was always these weird dungeons.

[Anonymous No.9799484]

>>9778886
>>9782132
>We weren't old enough to remember the age when 2D was normal, because we always had both
>You have to be from early 80s to comment on the transition.

I'm 34, but I grew up in a small town in British Columbia where we were always at least one generation behind. My first console was a Super Nintendo which my parents bought in 1996. We also had a computer (a 68k Macintosh from Sears in the US), but I didn't have any 3D games for that (Myst was 3D rendered and those graphics absolutely blew my mind). While 3D games were out, I lived in a time warp where 2D games were normal and pretty much all that existed, as far as I was concerned. So yeah, I got to experience the full force of 3D, it was definitely not a matter of "graphics slowly getting better" for me, I definitely don't need to be born in the 80s to comment on what it felt like.

>>9778950
>I literally did not know 3D games existed until going to my cousin's 7th or 8th birthday party where he had an N64

Same for me, the first time I experienced the N64 was at a relative's house in the summer of 2000. We played Star Wars Episode I Racer and it absolutely blew my mind. To date it is the most impressive shift I've seen in video games. Goldeneye was also amazing, the ability to move in all directions was completely revolutionary for me. It was like controlling the main character in a movie.

>>9792654
>The sandbox-like freedom of games like Mario 64 and OoT felt very new as well, and I could often just sit there screwing around for hours on end in a way that I could not with 2D games
Yeah, I remember this was something I also liked about 3D games when I first experienced them. The ability to go around and explore a world was pretty cool.

[Anonymous No.9799509]

it felt liked I lived through the golden age of gaming because I did.

[Anonymous No.9799532]

>>9779747
Modern 3D game design dogma: 3D is too difficult, how can we simplify it so it works like 2D?
Most 3D spaces play like 2d planes or long corridors with limited movement

[Anonymous No.9799542]

>>9778263
Honestly for a lot of it we didn't even care which it was. It was just another kind of game.
Like if you moved from Across to LBA1 or Tomb Raider you weren't mind blown by the graphics most of the time, it was usually the different play style that did it.
For most of us we still played NEW 2D games (like those on playstation or the endless ones on PC) even as the gamejournos, and certain subset of people, were completely obsessed with 3D and denigrating anything 2D just cause.
You could be wowed by the graphics at the time (I remember this being true Ocarina of Time) but a lot of it was the opposite. When you went from PEAK 2D pixel art to the absolute dregs of 3D it absolutely sucked like moving from Simon the Sorcerer 2 to Simon the Sorcerer 3D.

[Anonymous No.9800676]

>>9799306
>I know all of that but this tread is what you thought at the time. At the time that was 3D, you wouldn't overthink about how oh its 2.5 not 3D.

Even at the time, there was a clear distinction between Quake (1996) and Duke Nukem 3D. Duke nukem 3D does have an engine much closer to that of Doom's. If I am not mistaken, ken Silverman made his Build 3D engine based on John Carmack's Doom engine, and they have a lot of similarities. Though ken's engine uses a lot of weird hacks to achieve various different things, like sector over sector, slopped floors (a features that was promoted as something the Doom engine couldn't do) , teleporter tricks to create things like under water areas. Duke doesn't even have a real 'free camera' for looking up and down. No Z-buffer. Duke Nukem 3D and Doom use to make me motion sick, because of the way the engines worked. Quake engine has none of the limitations that the Build engine has actual 360 camera movement. actual rooms over rooms, and vertical gameplay. Lightmap engine and some form of dynamic lighting. Duke 3D just uses lighter or darker shaded sectors. Duke 3D fakes a lot of its vertical maps by telliporting the player to different locations. But it does look seamless in the game. I'm not a coder, so I won;t pretend to know how these engines work in general. But even ken on the old 3DRealms forums would say things like the engine wasn't true 3D. Polymost did make it closer to proper 3D engine.

[Anonymous No.9801136]

>>9780927

I fucking HATE the attitude of most women where they won't watch and 'old' film. I cannot comprehend a mind that is so unwilling to experience something of a different age. Many older movies still hold up to this day. Especially Jurassic Park and I would wager even The Abyss.

[Anonymous No.9801337]

>>9780927
Yes, but when "retro" gets to be a larger and larger category it becomes less and less helpful as a designation. Retro is already a 30+ year period, with only 20 or so "modern" years. The next "update" to the definition based on "the passage of time" would have twice as many "retro" years as "modern." You can say "duur time you boomer" but that doesn't help discussion about video game history, or how it has changed through the years.

[Anonymous No.9801375]

>>9801337
Then use something actually descriptive you dumb. I know you just want to chuck everything from before you turned 16 under one blanket but tough shit. In theory it would be ideal to have multiple old game boards, but that would require them actually being fast enough to support it, the same way Pong has always had to share a board with Metal Gear Solid.

[Anonymous No.9801391]

>>9801375
>immediatly leaps in with "durr time you boomer"
Anyway, if I was going to define eras, I'm basically have three. You're right, having MGS with Pong IS dumb, and I've always argued that [era 1] would be basically from the dawn in the 70s to the release of the PS1, which totally ended that era.
Then I'd have the fifth generation to the seventh as its own era, where people were trying to work out what this whole "3D" thing even was. By the end of the PS360 for better or for worse everyone had come to an agreement about what that would be, which ends [era 2] and starts the current era. [era 3].
As for era names, I'd go "Classic" or "Old School", then "Early Modern," then "Modern."

[Anonymous No.9801917]

>>9800676
This was already discussed. The final effect is 3d, we had no Quake before 1997 as a reference. Compare Duke 3D to anything else before Quake and coming from 2d scrollers to Duke 3D was a massive leap and considered 3d.

[Anonymous No.9801919]

>>9801917
Also, Doom and Duke 3d never gave me any motion sickness even to this day I still play and enjoy them.

[Anonymous No.9801920]

>>9800676
> If I am not mistaken, ken Silverman made his Build 3D engine based on John Carmack's Doom engine, and they have a lot of similarities.

You are mistaken. Work on Build started before Doom was released.

[Anonymous No.9801939]

>>9800676
> actual rooms over rooms, and vertical gameplay. [...]. Duke 3D fakes a lot of its vertical maps by telliporting the player to different locations.

This is also a common misconception. Build is able to have as many rooms over rooms as you want as long as the player isn't able to see two overlapping sectors at once, like the projection room in Hollywood Holocaust actually being above the corridor below, on a higher Z level.
There are some teleporting done in some cases but far from all rooms over rooms are teleports, it was usually done for conviniency rather than necessity. Sector over sector isn't a "hack" like you call it, it's a feature inherent to the engine due to how it works

Duke3D was all about vertical gameplay, it's everywhere in the game.

>No Z-buffer.
Now you're just being ridiculous, like you think Build is the equivalent of Rad Racer on NES

anyway you sound like one of those people who put arbritary things in the definition of 3D like "if it doesn't have polygon or dynamic lights it's not 3D"

[Anonymous No.9801951]

>>9801939
It's the Nvidia definition of a GPU, which was of course the Geforce 256. All those display processors, video processors, and 3DFX/ATis competing architecture at the time? Well, they aren't actually GPUs now are they! The moment someone mentions a z-buffer being a requirement discard their entire post.

[Anonymous No.9802098]

>>9801136
Normies don't consume entertainment to be entertained, they just do it to fit in. They need to be able to follow normie conversations so they need to consume all the normie movies, shows and games.

[Anonymous No.9802331]

>>9778263
honestly, it just wasn't that impressive me. Sure, the magazines will talk about it, but being stylish, having good aesthetics or well-done pixel art like SFA2 or metal slug idk really was more impressive. Adding to that, Playstation-era polygons just don't look that good. They just make the perception of it go down even further. I think I'd be impressed by graphics if it was a Switch game literally made right now, sure. Like, it took until...today, for 3D to be impressive. But the discussion is explicitly of the transition, isn't it?
>wow so amazing
All people itt saying this are larpers.

[Anonymous No.9802352]

>>9802331
Is this really how you entertain yourself

[Anonymous No.9802361]

>>9802331
>took until...today, for 3D to be impressive
Yeah right. If you weren't blown away by Half-life 2s E3 demo you weren't born early enough. There definitely were impressive jumps in 3D graphics along the way. I wouldn't say early 3D was that mindblowing at the time because of how gradual it was. But for me jump to Quake 1 was impressive, PS2 character models were very impressive to me, and then HL2 and Doom 3.

[Anonymous No.9802681]

>>9778449
RDR2 was a big wow moment though, never played an open world game that was that immersive and convincing ever in my life.

[Anonymous No.9803352]

>>9801136
that's not even a woman thing, most normies just care about The Now

[Anonymous No.9803404]

>>9802331
t. zoomer

[Anonymous No.9803410]

>>9778263
I wasn't against it but I knew there would be growing pains, would talk about how it looks like shit compared to pixel art but we'll get there. some 2D series did get ruined by 3D though, Sonic, Rayman, etc.

[Anonymous No.9803419]

>>9778449
For me it's Bayonetta 2 to Bayonetta 3.

[Anonymous No.9803485]

>>9803419
Kek yeah, 3 looks actually worse in some aspects.

[Anonymous No.9803549]

Western games were always better at 3D level design.

This is a fact.

Starting with Doom, Western games tried to achieve new levels of depth in a 3D space by using verticality, environment, interactivity, etc. The earliest Japanese 3D games were unambitious. Final Fantasy and Resident Evil were essentially still 2D games, just with 3D graphics. An obvious hallmark of Japanese 3D games is that they are largely based around 2D arenas and flat level design. This was true in the era of the PS1, and it still continued far into the 2000s, never evolving. There are only some exceptions in Japanese game design, like Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time.

Japanese designers never mastered 3D design like the West did. Quake, Thief, Half-Life, Doom, Duke Nukem, Unreal.

[Anonymous No.9803594]

>>9803549
>I only know literally 10 games from the 90s: the post

[Anonymous No.9803621]

>>9778263
Near-50 gamer here. I won't speak for all /vr/ but I'll just report what I remember.
Over the late 1990s (my early 20s) I enjoyed the improvements in screen-resolution and in colour but I was not an Action gamer. I was playing glorified text-adventures (Legend's Gateway and Death Gate), Star Control II, some RPGs, Betrayal at Krondor, Sierra's Woodruff and Torin. I knew Doom existed but I considered it ugly.
Quake and Quake II came out which I sort-of liked but mostly for the soundtracks because Trent Reznor. I skipped Dark Forces (I'm playing it now).
I did play Kings Quest VIII in 1998(?). It was shit.
I think the earlier (good) parts of Shadows of the Empire and - much more so - DF2: Jedi Knight got me to thinking, hey, it's not just mindless shooting ugly polygons, there can be a story here as well.

tl;dr for the oldfags in our 40s, the 3D revolution was meh, because we saw it as a gimmick to market overrated games like Doom and bad games like KQ8. The storytelling caught up ~1999 with Jedi Knight and then Alice, maybe FAKK although I still haven't played that one.

[Anonymous No.9803640]

>>9778953
Not at all. Most people funny enough did not notice unless it was in the tens. Those who talk about PC gaming are the ones who notice this a lot.

[Anonymous No.9803646]

It felt like the future
I remember in like.... 97 fogging became a very obvious problem on the ps1 and the N64

The Dreamcast was.... Fucking mind-blowing in that regard

Gta3 similarly was truly mind blowing

The only time I've been actually unsure if it was CGI or in game graphics was the first time I saw gears of war.... Seeing the 360 gears of war after being on the PS2 was.... Wow

[Anonymous No.9803648]

>>9803594
Basically it's the same posts ad nauseum about Quake and Doom. And almost the same Genre.

[Anonymous No.9805298]

>>9803549
Computer games are more American and more definite and concrete by nature, which separates them completely from the design and nature of classic Videogames. The sheer amount of abstract world-building which went into Final Fantasy titles probably escapes most people until it becomes rendered in HD.

>We criticize Americans for not being able either to analyse or conceptualize. But this is a wrong-headed critique. It is we who imagine that everything culminates in transcendence, and that nothing exists which has not been conceptualized. Not only do they care little for such a view, but their perspective is the very opposite: it is not conceptualizing reality, but realizing concepts and materializing ideas, that interests them.

[Anonymous No.9806073]

>there are people on this website who were alive in the 80s

[Anonymous No.9806264]

>>9806073
>board dedicated to old games
>surprised old people who played old games growing up are here
If you're under 30 you should be out enjoying your youth, not staring at a screen anyway.

[Anonymous No.9806480]

it was pretty great.

[Anonymous No.9806974]

>>9778263
It was hit and miss franchise by franchise.
Some did 2D-3D really well like Zelda and Mario and later Metroid. Some did it horribly like Castlevania and Mega Man (inb4 legends fags come to defend that shitshow)
as for the shift technology wise, it wasn't bad because it was gradual, even during 8 bit days there were games that tried to do 3D gameplay, and there were tricks in games and consoles, namely mode 7 graphics on the SNES, but also things like wolfenstein 3D where it was sprites rotating in a 3D environment.
So by 1996, we were already kinda used to 3D it was just improved and no longer tricks to make 2D seem 3D it was just 3D.
I think the first 3D polygonal game I played was Star Fox on the SNES.

[Anonymous No.9807001]

>>9781615
what a hot take, they had some of the best possible transitions to 3D.
Metroid as well.
For some reason other famous 2D franchises couldn't cross over as well. Sonic, though maybe it's better now but the early 3D sonic games were awful, Mega Man, Castlevania..

[Anonymous No.9807041]

>>9778305
>I hated it.
>I loved new 3D games like Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, Crash, etc. but dropped a franchise if it transitioned to 3D.
Same with me. I loved 3D in the new games like Tomb Raider, Tony Hawk and Golden Eye. However, I was raging like a madmen when it came to Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time etc. Until this day I have not played a 3D Mario jump and run.

[Anonymous No.9807765]

>>9778263
I hated it. Tomb raider is the prime definition of jank and still to this day, including the anniv. edition I didn't play ANY pre remake games.
I'm 40 and I hate that piece of shit along with Blood omen 2.

[Anonymous No.9807908]

>>9807765
>boomer age
>has the skill level of a zoomer
the worst of both worlds

[Anonymous No.9808376]

>>9800676
>Duke nukem 3D does have an engine much closer to that of Doom's.
Sorta, in that they do 3D without any perspective correction, slice the levels up into segments, and use 2D sprites for the majority of actors and objects, but the binary space partitioning and portal rendering stuff is pretty different.

>If I am not mistaken, ken Silverman made his Build 3D engine based on John Carmack's Doom engine, and they have a lot of similarities.
You are mistaken, Silverman was noodling away at his Build engine before Doom hit the shelves, and he didn't have Carmack's code to look at. Carmack outright started with a portal approach (of his own) for Doom, thinking it'd probably be fine, until Romero created some geometry which gave it fits, causing him to stop his work and go do research, where he found binary space partitioning.

>Ken's engine uses a lot of weird hacks to achieve various different things, like sector over sector, slopped floors
Build didn't need silent teleports or stuff like that to do room over room, most of the time that trick was used for creating the underwater spaces. One of the secret levels in Duke 3D is a 720 degree circle, where two circular structures occupy the same space, and you move from one to the other by finishing a loop around.
There's also a number of platform objects situated above ground, which you can move above and below.

>(a features that was promoted as something the Doom engine couldn't do)
Doom as it ships doesn't do slopes, but there's nothing which stops you from just adding it to the engine, just like how Heretic rounds out monster and player collision by adding one simple line to that calculation.
Raven's Shadowcaster, which Carmack did the engine for, had slopes, and having them in Doom was pondered, they just opted not to.

>Duke 3D fakes a lot of its vertical maps by telliporting the player to different locations.
Sometimes, it does that, but not always.

[Anonymous No.9808401]

>>9807765
i played it for the first time this year and it was great. stick to your playstation 5