VOGONS


Technically & artistically impressive games

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Reply 20 of 60, by d1stortion

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PS2 graphics are tremendously limited by its 4 MB VRAM and no texture compression. It also does not have HW T&L. They always claimed that the vector units in the CPU would make up for it, but it was a lot of work for developers to properly program them. They never could really get around the main limitation though, PS2 textures have that muddy N64 feel to them for the most part. Xbox and GC really played in a different league hardware wise. They even had their own forms of anti-aliasing, while the PS2s lack of that was pretty infamous.

This video sums it up pretty nicely.

Reply 22 of 60, by d1stortion

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Not in hardware. All of those fancy features that GC/Xbox had built in could only be done in software on PS2. In fact I've heard that the Graphics Synthesizer is just 16 PSX GPUs glued together, with fewer features than Voodoo2...

Reply 25 of 60, by silikone

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Silent Hill 4 is the best example for PS2 I know of.

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Reply 26 of 60, by m1so

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d1stortion wrote:

Yeah the PSX Duke port is painfully slow at times. PAL version is even worse than NTSC I think. Still I played through all of it 🤣 some interesting spoofs in those exclusive levels.

Also I doubt Build ran great on a 133 MHz Pentium in 800x600. Here it runs on a 233MMX and you can see some stutter here and there. Probably just 640x480 as well. Blood gets really laggy even on P3s in 1024x768.

I bet K6 CPUs do pretty good at Build, not far off from a P6.

Actually that guy is running it in 1024x768, which explain the occasional stutter.

Note that the whole video was captured from authentic 1996 (very early 1997) hardware, no emulation, no DOSBox. The Duke3D version is a 100% unmodified DOS version with the ingame resolution set to 1024x768. In the first half of the video, I just let the demo mode play and there seem to be some slowdowns. The second half is actual gameplay.

I can see why you'd be confused tho, he only mentions it in the second video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzU1EH3u0X0 .

Reply 27 of 60, by LunarG

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d1stortion wrote:

Yeah the PSX Duke port is painfully slow at times. PAL version is even worse than NTSC I think. Still I played through all of it 🤣 some interesting spoofs in those exclusive levels.

Also I doubt Build ran great on a 133 MHz Pentium in 800x600. Here it runs on a 233MMX and you can see some stutter here and there. Probably just 640x480 as well. Blood gets really laggy even on P3s in 1024x768.

I bet K6 CPUs do pretty good at Build, not far off from a P6.

Back in the days I played Duke3D on a Pentium 120MHz, 16MB RAM and Trio 64V+ 2MB, at 800x600. It always seemed smooth to me.

WinXP : PIII 1.4GHz, 512MB RAM, 73GB SCSI HDD, Matrox Parhelia, SB Audigy 2.
Win98se : K6-3+ 500MHz, 256MB RAM, 80GB HDD, Matrox Millennium G400 MAX, Voodoo 2, SW1000XG.
DOS6.22 : Intel DX4, 64MB RAM, 1.6GB HDD, Diamond Stealth64 DRAM, GUS 1MB, SB16.

Reply 28 of 60, by m1so

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The guy there run it in 1024x768, that's why it lagged a bit even on a 233 Mhz Pentium. I was already accustomed to my main 1 Ghz Celeron computer at the time I played Duke 3D on my mom's laptop, so it couldn't have been "low standards".

Reply 29 of 60, by mr_bigmouth_502

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Odin Sphere has some of the best looking 2D graphics I've ever seen on the PS2, and without a doubt some of the best art direction I've ever seen in any game ever. The gameplay is great too, but the visuals are what really make it stand out.

Reply 31 of 60, by m1so

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d1stortion wrote:

An all-time favorite: Spyro the Dragon. Amazing and very fluent graphics for PSX standards and a nice soundtrack by Stewart Copeland (drummer of The Police) 😀

Amen to that. It really looks amazing, especially on a CRT TV, and is really smooth even on my PAL region PSone. A true classic, and whoever says it is just for kids can go "genty caress" themselves 😀 .

Spyro 2 and 3 look even better through.

Out of curiousity, what resolution does it use? Crash Bandicoot uses 512x240 and it shows, does it use that too, or just regular 320x240 with an amazing style?

Reply 32 of 60, by d1stortion

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I played through this game again just recently. Yes the gameplay is simplistic and it's not quite the same experience as it was as a first grader in '98 but still good fun 😀

To see the mode they used I think you'd need to run the game through ePSXe or something like that cuz IIRC that one shows the internal resolution. Clearly the best graphical feature about this game is not the resolution but the LOD system they implemented though. Made the fogging on stuff like Turok on the N64 look like shit.

The games that regularly come up as far as hi-res goes are Wipeout 3 and Tekken 3. The former even has a widescreen option, and that in 1999! It's said to run in 512x512 which sounds crazy for a 2 meg of RAM console. The output is 240p/288p as far as I can tell so I have no clue how it would scale to this resolution. Maybe I should check it out to put the rumors to rest.

For Tekken 3 364x480 is said which makes more sense because it outputs 480i/576i.

Reply 33 of 60, by m1so

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I guess it is a better experience for me then, because as a child I only played it at a friends house minutes at a time, and preferred Crash Bandicoot as I thought Spyro was a "game for girls". Now I can sit down and enjoy it properly, without prejudice. It is simple, but isn't that the point of old 3D platformers? I don't think games like Spyro should be much more "complex" or so. It also shows that nostalgia glasses can be negative as well, as I often enjoy the games that I didn't play much back then the most. It is often better to play an old game that is "new" to you rather than replaying your old games (although I will probably be replaying Morrowind and System Shock 2 on my deathbed after I have great-grandchildren). I love Crash for example, but the level design is a prison compared to Spyro. Mario 64 fans should look at Spyro and then say how "PSX sux".

When we're on the subject of N64, it is funny how most of the games have hectolitres of fog and a vaseline coated display. N64 had a CPU 3x faster than the PSX, if the power was used more to improve fludity and draw distance we might have gotten ports of PSX games that had huge draw distances and 60/50 fps framerate. Instead, N64 is virtually unplayable in Europe AFAIK, as most games are 20-25 fps in NTSC already and PAL brings that down to 15-20 fps or worse.

Reply 34 of 60, by d1stortion

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I got a N64 some time ago because it was something that I was kinda drooling over at that time. I'm quite disappointed by it. The framerate is indeed bad in most games but that's not the biggest issue. The thing that literally kills it is the analog stick. It's like the worst controller design in history because inevitably the bowl that holds the stick in place will be grinded into white powder and since like 99% of games depend on it you can't play anything. I even got a reproduction controller, but the analog stick on it sucks just as much. Another thing about it is that many games use battery-backed SRAM that will die eventually.

Not sure what to do about it all. I'm thinking I should have gone with a Dreamcast instead 🙄

Reply 35 of 60, by megatron-uk

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d1stortion wrote:

Not sure what to do about it all. I'm thinking I should have gone with a Dreamcast instead 🙄

I've really got a soft spot for the Dreamcast - probably my favourite console of all those I've owned (and I've owned/still own a lot). Such a shame it was canned before it got into its stride, still, there are some outstanding (and technically impressive) games for it.

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Reply 37 of 60, by d1stortion

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megatron-uk wrote:
d1stortion wrote:

Not sure what to do about it all. I'm thinking I should have gone with a Dreamcast instead 🙄

I've really got a soft spot for the Dreamcast - probably my favourite console of all those I've owned (and I've owned/still own a lot). Such a shame it was canned before it got into its stride, still, there are some outstanding (and technically impressive) games for it.

Yeah, certainly the system had a lot of potential left in it. Just see the excellent looking commercial homebrew games they came up with in recent times.

Reply 38 of 60, by sliderider

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megatron-uk wrote:
d1stortion wrote:

Not sure what to do about it all. I'm thinking I should have gone with a Dreamcast instead 🙄

I've really got a soft spot for the Dreamcast - probably my favourite console of all those I've owned (and I've owned/still own a lot). Such a shame it was canned before it got into its stride, still, there are some outstanding (and technically impressive) games for it.

True, this. I played my Dreamcast for a long time even after I had a PS2 and XBox. I even bought a CD that allows booting of foreign games so I could play the UK release of Shenmue 2 on DC before the XBox version was released. They say that it was EA boycotting the system that ultimately led to it's demise but I managed to find plenty of good games even without EA. The sports games from 2K were easily as much fun to play as anything EA Sports was selling for other systems at the time.

Reply 39 of 60, by Mau1wurf1977

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Currently playing GTA 5 on my PS3 and the graphics are simply amazing for such an old console.

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