Even without the hardware limitations, there was so much jank to PS1 games. Like we had an idea of what a 3D game could be, but we were no where near where we are today. Controls are all over the place. It was the wild west. Alien Resurrection was the first time we had left stick to move and right stick to look, and it felt bizarre at the time. It’s probably the only FPS from the era that’s still playable.
ALttP and Chrono Trigger are some of the best designed, highly polished titles on the system, though. We have to remember that while everyone harps on FF4 and FF6, Chrono Trigger, Super Metroid, Mega Man X, A Link To the Past, Bahumut Lagoon, Donkey Kong Country, etc. as if they defined the quality of the SNES library, we’re looking back through nostalgia tinted goggles and those games in fact… didn’t. They were the exceptional outliers in, as ever, a wide field of mediocrity.
What I’m saying is, there are a lot of gonk-ass games on the SNES. A lot. We just selectively don’t remember them anymore because they were crap.
For every one of the gems above there were ten or twenty of the likes of Pugley’s Scavenger Hunt, Cliffhanger, Pit Fighter, Mario is Missing, Revolution X, Bebe’s Kids, Rise of the Robots, Captain Novolin, Double Dragon 5, Ren and Stimpy, Chester Cheetah… Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball… etc., etc. And that’s just the North American titles. There was some wonky niche shit released in Japan that could have just as well been on the original NES.
No one is talking about how good the games are, here. Just how they looked. Mario is Missing was a shit game, but the graphics and art style still look absolutely fine and dandy to play. Same for Ren & Stimpy and any of the other games on your list I recognize. The games were bad, but not the looks. Hence why people absolutely love a pixel art fame like Stardew Valley or Terraria but no one is playing games that look like WWF Smackdown! For PS1.
Deserve to be held up visually and remembered fondly next to the likes of Chrono Trigger? They really aged better than the best of the early PS1? Yeah. No. These games not only played like ass, they looked like ass, too. Even for their time. That’s my point. The ones that weren’t outright offensive were just plain old bland.
The operative word in pixel art is “art.” Just because something is 2D does not mean it automatically needs to be revered to the exclusion of earlier or later titles or visual styles. What we got out of these games visually is a direct result of what was put in by the designers, and in the majority of cases what was put in was not very much.
Mario Is Missing is an exceptional case because it manages to have worse spritework than Mario World, a game which it directly ripped off for its sprites. And any sprites did did not directly copy (minus a couple of pallete colors, for some reason) wound up looking like these chumps:
Edit: I forgot Captain Novolin. Really, how could I? I mean, this.
They’re saying that a lot of the contemporary cutting edge 3D graphics of the PS1 era looked ugly. But they did it to be cutting edge.
However, if they’d stuck to more traditional art styles (e.g, as could be seen in games like Chrono Trigger), then the games could’ve still looked good today.
They’re not saying all SNES games look better than all PS1 games. They’re saying that we had the capability to make games that still look good today, and we had that capability for years before the PS1 came out. They chose not to use that capability to be cutting edge. And the other commenters are lamenting that.
Of course, I can’t blame them for pushing 3D graphics back then. Especially because they would’ve needed to practice with them before they could get better. Late PS1 games had some decent looking 3D, IIRC.
So many PS1-era games look so bad it hurts the experience. While SNES games like Link to the Past and Chrono Trigger look great even today.
Even without the hardware limitations, there was so much jank to PS1 games. Like we had an idea of what a 3D game could be, but we were no where near where we are today. Controls are all over the place. It was the wild west. Alien Resurrection was the first time we had left stick to move and right stick to look, and it felt bizarre at the time. It’s probably the only FPS from the era that’s still playable.
ALttP and Chrono Trigger are some of the best designed, highly polished titles on the system, though. We have to remember that while everyone harps on FF4 and FF6, Chrono Trigger, Super Metroid, Mega Man X, A Link To the Past, Bahumut Lagoon, Donkey Kong Country, etc. as if they defined the quality of the SNES library, we’re looking back through nostalgia tinted goggles and those games in fact… didn’t. They were the exceptional outliers in, as ever, a wide field of mediocrity.
What I’m saying is, there are a lot of gonk-ass games on the SNES. A lot. We just selectively don’t remember them anymore because they were crap.
For every one of the gems above there were ten or twenty of the likes of Pugley’s Scavenger Hunt, Cliffhanger, Pit Fighter, Mario is Missing, Revolution X, Bebe’s Kids, Rise of the Robots, Captain Novolin, Double Dragon 5, Ren and Stimpy, Chester Cheetah… Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball… etc., etc. And that’s just the North American titles. There was some wonky niche shit released in Japan that could have just as well been on the original NES.
No one is talking about how good the games are, here. Just how they looked. Mario is Missing was a shit game, but the graphics and art style still look absolutely fine and dandy to play. Same for Ren & Stimpy and any of the other games on your list I recognize. The games were bad, but not the looks. Hence why people absolutely love a pixel art fame like Stardew Valley or Terraria but no one is playing games that look like WWF Smackdown! For PS1.
You’re telling me that the likes of Pit Fighter…
…And Revolution X…
…Or Pugsley’s Scavenger Hunt…
…Or Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball…
Deserve to be held up visually and remembered fondly next to the likes of Chrono Trigger? They really aged better than the best of the early PS1? Yeah. No. These games not only played like ass, they looked like ass, too. Even for their time. That’s my point. The ones that weren’t outright offensive were just plain old bland.
The operative word in pixel art is “art.” Just because something is 2D does not mean it automatically needs to be revered to the exclusion of earlier or later titles or visual styles. What we got out of these games visually is a direct result of what was put in by the designers, and in the majority of cases what was put in was not very much.
Mario Is Missing is an exceptional case because it manages to have worse spritework than Mario World, a game which it directly ripped off for its sprites. And any sprites did did not directly copy (minus a couple of pallete colors, for some reason) wound up looking like these chumps:
Edit: I forgot Captain Novolin. Really, how could I? I mean, this.
Come on.
Yep.
They’re saying that a lot of the contemporary cutting edge 3D graphics of the PS1 era looked ugly. But they did it to be cutting edge.
However, if they’d stuck to more traditional art styles (e.g, as could be seen in games like Chrono Trigger), then the games could’ve still looked good today.
They’re not saying all SNES games look better than all PS1 games. They’re saying that we had the capability to make games that still look good today, and we had that capability for years before the PS1 came out. They chose not to use that capability to be cutting edge. And the other commenters are lamenting that.
Of course, I can’t blame them for pushing 3D graphics back then. Especially because they would’ve needed to practice with them before they could get better. Late PS1 games had some decent looking 3D, IIRC.