Escape Velocity ( an 680x0 mac game)
quake 3/unreal tournament
UT 2003
doom 3
quake 4
farcry
World of warcraft
Fallout 3
Diablo 3

PC games only?

PC didn't abuse lookup tables until around '94... then 3d cards really got the ball rolling. That said PC didn't really blow me away much in the 2d games department, though looking back now I have learned to appreciate all the technical assembly torture that went into them making them scroll properly and the like trying to make a platform without a sprite layer perform as good as the consoles.

For me it was Wolfenstein 3D. Simply blew me away AND it was fast on my 386. A lot of games after that were graphically impressive but also forced you to upgrade and it wasn't until you had a 486DX2 that Doom was really awesome 😀

Prince of persia also really impressed me.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

For me it was Wolfenstein 3D. Simply blew me away AND it was fast on my 386.

I didn't get to play Wolfenstein 3D until after I had seen DOOM, and then it was kinda meh graphically, but I still enjoyed the gameplay 😀 My parents had no interest in getting a new computer and they just gave me a Genesis to shut me up (for awhile) 😜

leileilol is right that PC games didn't really get an edge over the consoles until the 3D cards came. After that I don't think any console game has blown me away. OK, I'll admit that the character models in Dead or Alive 3 on the original Xbox in 2001 was kinda neat. Also arcades used to really impress me, especially the SEGA ones. I spent too much money on Sega Rally Championship with my friends 😜

80's: Karateka
90's: Doom
00's: Fallout 3

Dunno the exact years, so I'll just omit those

C&C (looked so much better then Dune 2)
Unreal (The weapons looked so good, especially with the lighting and effects)
AVP2 (somewhat, it looked pretty good overall, no points that are outstanding)
Farcry (Jungle! 😁 )
BF2142 (especially the way land vehicles explode)
UT3 (especially the levels!)

The first game to really blow me away was Space Quest IV, because it was the first VGA game I ever saw. After that I had similar reactions to Doom, 7th Guest, and The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes.

Since then the only game to similarly impress me was No One Lives Forever, which was the first 3-D game I saw which didn't look blocky and chunky with uninteresting textures. After that, although games became far more advanced, I feel jaded. Going from EGA to VGA was transformational. Going from NOLF2 and UT2003 to any modern game just feels like a predictable progression.

First one that must have really impressed me must have been Atlantis : The Lost Tales. I was 5 or so when I sat down and watched my brother and a friend of his play that game and it looked amazing. The whole concept of Atlantis was new to me and I felt like I was in a different world somewhat. Fast Forward years later, the game still impresses me, but it kinda sucks 😁

The pixel shaded water on my GeForce FX in Morrowind also impressed me a bit. I was used to how the game looked on my brother's GeForce 2 MX and just didn't expect it! A couple of years later, when I was about 11, I went to my best friend's place one night and his brother was attempting to install a new game called Far Cry! So, we sat down and watched and when we finally got it running on High Settings, oh my god. Never before had I seen such a thing. I was totally taken aback, I remember looking at the water and thinking "Look at how real this looks...". After watching this, Doom 3 didn't make that much of an impression, although the first prerelease screenshots that I saw in a magazine in 2002 were very impressive 😉

A few years later, I got to play Oblivion. It wasn't really playable on GeForce FX, but I had a friend with a much better machine and again I was moved. Much like Morrowind, Oblivion looked amazing although not so much artistically. The game's landscapes and world always felt a bit barren and generic compared to Morrowind's "Mushroom Kingdom" 😜. That being said, it still looked fantastic. The game that impressed me most though has to be Crysis. I remember watching the trailers and thinking "This can't be ingame footage". Turns out it was! It must be one of the few games that attracted my dads attention, who has never played any video games. I showed him how you could chop trees down, interact with physics, create explosions. " So, what do you do in this game?", he asked. "Well, you pretty much kill people with guns".
That was the end of that 😜

vetz wrote:

leileilol is right that PC games didn't really get an edge over the consoles until the 3D cards came. After that I don't think any console game has blown me away.

I was a bit of back and forth for me.

The Amiga was King back home for a while. Then PC games started using VGA and offered better graphics. This happened with Monkey Island, Last Crusade and other games from that time.

So for me it was VGA graphics that really started pushing things. With EGA the Amiga simply had the edge.

One game that I saw in a computer chain and that really blew me away was The Heart of China. The graphics were so good back in the day. They are still pretty good I think.

Games that impressed me for their graphics In Their Day. My first store bought PC was a Timex/Sinclair 1000, and that was in 1982. Thirty years ago. It would be some years later that graphics got "good" IMO. While the 'top-down side-scrollers' were fun, I wasn't impressed. I had a PC custom built in 1987, a 286-12 mHz with 4 *MEGS* DRAM on the motherboard (in 24 2 meg chips!), an ATI VGA Wonder 1.0 vid card and a 20 meg Seagate MFM HD. This system was NOT "fast" by that days standards. It was just what I could afford that would run Deluxe Paint II Enhanced well. I saw ads for many games in the computer magazines, and a few of them looked interesting. The one I was drooling over was the original Wing Commander. They even had a TV ad! So I bought it. And I had barely enough CPU to run it. It wanted a '386 at 20mHz minimum for full graphics.
Some 3 years later I did upgrade to a 386 DX 40mhz and put 8 megs ram in it, still using the VGA Wonder. But it ran Wing Commander great and with all the eye candy full on. I was happy, for a while. The next "big" thing that happened was the Wolfenstein 3D downloadable demo. And then; DOOM and DOOM2. But I wasn't really impressed yet. Nothing used some of the little tricks and goodies that Origin did with WC. I had other games sure, Terminator: 2029 and other forgettable titles. Nothing really impressed. Until 1995. Two games came out that year that DID impress me with both their gameplay and quality of graphics. Tombraider and Quake. They were as different as night and day, but they were both fun. I played the demos ferociously until the full games were released. I'd pre-ordered TR, and I got my Quake via telephone order/personal check ($50!). I recieved it three days later and played through it the first weekend. But it was a little slow and 320 x 240 8 bit palette (VGA mode) seemed a little grainy on my old multisync. Yet, I was just dying to play CTF online with everyone. SO, Quake was the ONLY thing I built a computer specifically FOR. The 486-DX4 100 had PCI slots, and the vid card I got (used) was from Soundblaster, a Verite 1000 3D accelerated card. Now Quake was screaming along at 1024x768 16 bit color! Yaaay! At that resolution, you had the illusion of Depth Perception. THAT was a First for the day, and one of THE biggest things in 3D gaming.
From that point on, the Quake games weren't about being impressive visually, but in their gameplay. Even Q3A was lacking by the days standards. Doom3 and Quake4 DID impress me visually. Half Life was impressive graphically because of the animations. The characters talked, and their mouths moved. Half-Life 2 was even more impressive overall. Been a decade now, and Valve is still working on Steam and Source, but no new visuals. And I still play HL2 DM online and enjoy it.
Next to impress me was Morrowind. Three years later, Oblivion blew everything else away! And now, I can't wait to get hold of Skyrim, just for the graphics! 😁
McG.

Mcgrandpa uses wall-of-text.
IT'S SUPER EFFECTIVE!
Luckybob feints!

But seriously, you do make a good point. I had completely forgotten about HL2.

SQ4 was also one of the first VGA games I played, after having to live for a year with Hercules due to my EGA monitor blowing up.

TES: Arena seemed very realistic at the time compared to other games that were out. X-Wing was amazing. Doom was awesome, but I could only play it at my dad's office on weekends for a long time because our home computer was too old (8MHz 286). Unreal was stunning and one of my first hardware-accelerated 3D games, but it took a long time for Epic and nVidia to make it run well on my TNT1.

No love for Ultima Underworld?

Then again I never really played that in '92 and i've seen the sequel marketed more (the usual bad luck Looking Glass always had). It has that late, "adopted" fanbase that probably learned from it in CGW's Hall of Fame induction. I'm being generous here 😁

Magic Carpet did blow me away in '94 though, and today it still does hold me in awe because of how optimized all that was. I don't know where to begin to program routines for waving, reflecting water in fog for a 486.

I never tried to play UU until much later, when it was no longer so impressive.

I've never played Magic Carpet, period, but I'm well aware of it. Part of the problem was that I was stuck with an 8MHz 286 until I finally scrounged a 386DX-33 around 1992 that allowed me to enter the 32-bit PC gaming era. A similar situation befell me later, when I was stuck with a 550MHz PIII system with a Geforce 2 MX until around 2004; this gave me sour early experiences with Morrowind and DOSBox among other things.

STUN Runner looked really cool in the arcade.

I also was quite impressed by Michael Jordan In-Flight, once.

I'm not going to limit my list to just pc, because really there's been all sorts of titles that have blown me away that were released over all sorts of platforms.
Arcade wise:
Ikari Warriors
Rastan
Punch Out
Narc
Bad Dudes
Mortal Kombat 1-3
Killer Instinct
TMNT
Mechanized Attack
Operation Wolf
Tron
POW
Wrestlewar
Outrun
Ninja Warriors
X-Men COTA
Time Killers
Street Fighter The Movie
Art Of Fighting
Samurai Showdown 1 and 4
King of Fighters 95
SF Rush
Tekken 3
Primal Rage

Nes:
Mega Man 3
Double Dragon II
Ninja Gaiden 1 and 2
Super C
Tecmo World Wrestling
Lifeforce
Super Mario 2
Shatterhand

Snes:
Super Mario World
Super Metroid
Contra III
Super Castlevania 4
Pilot Wings
Super R-Type
Gradius III

Genesis:
Altered Beast
Splatterhouse 3
Castlevania Bloodlines
ShadowDancer
Pit-Fighter
Sonic 2
Lightning Force

Jaguar:
AVP
Doom
Wolfenstein 3D
Ultra Vortek

3DO:
Way of the Warrior
Gex
Shockwave 2
Crash and Burn
Wing Commander III
Need for Speed
Road Rash
Total Eclipse
Off-World Interceptor
Star Blade
Guardian War
D

Turbografx 16/Pc-Engine:
Ninja Spirit
Splatterhouse
Street Fighter 2 Champion Edition
Galaga 90
Bonk 2
Exile
all the Neo ports on Arcade Card cd
L-Dis
Dracula X
Vasteel
AeroBlasters
Alien Crush
Raiden

32X:
Star Wars Arcade
Virtua Racing

Saturn:
Battle Monsters
Virtua Fighter 2
Dead or Alive
Panzer Dragoon 2
Shin Shinobi Den
Daytona USA
Virtua Cop 1 and 2
Shining Force III
Thunder Force V
All Japan Pro Wrestling Featuring Virtua
Fire Pro Wrestling S
Akumajou Dracula X
Radiant Silvergun

Playstation:
Ridge Racer 1 and 4
Tekken 2 and 3
Twisted Metal 1
Metal Gear Solid
Guilty Gear
Resident Evil

Dreamcast:
Giant Gram series
Sword of the Berserk
DOA 2
Giga Wing 2
Guilty Gear X
D2
RE: Code Veronica
Le Mans 24 Hours

PC:
Mega Race
Wolfenstein 3D
Quake
Quake 3
Serious Sam First Encounter
Max Payne
Carmageddon 2-3
MOH Allied Assault and Airborne
COD 2, 4 and WAW
Unreal 2
Doom 3
NFS:High Stakes
DethKarz
RTCW
Unreal Tournament 2k3
---------------------------------

I'm going to end it there for right now. Newer pc stuff really I'd need to give a couple more years, go back, and see if they still impress me like the stuff I listed above.

Comanche: Maximum Overkill and Ultima 6 were the two that really impressed me, graphic-wise, when they came around.

I'll name the big jumps that for me, personally, made me wanna buy a new rig:

1995: Warcraft 2
1997: Quake 2/ NFS2
1998 & 1999: HL/ Caesar III/ Dungeon Keeper/ SS2/ Pharaoh
2000: Giants: CK/ NFS:PU/ NOLF
2001 & 2002- Black & White/ Max Payne / Warcraft III/ NOLF2
2003 - 2005: Max Payne 2/ Far Cry/ HL2/ Black & White 2/ F.E.A.R
2006: Oblivion

anything that can play Oblivion at full HD, max settings at a steady 60fps is able to keep up with most, if not all games from 2007-2010 until, that is:

2011: The Witcher 2

I'm surprised nobody but me has mentioned Crysis so far. Go to any other forum and everyone will mention that game. People don't play newer games much here I take it? 😜 😉

When you get out of the forest and see the sunlight for the first time my jaw dropped to the floor because of the graphics. It's just extremely beautiful.