| Johnw1104 said: To be honest I still like some gen 2 games but they're graphically too simplistic to even know what you're looking at without the manual usually. To me, gen 3 (8 bit) is when the graphics are good enough to really enjoy the game, and 16 bit is the point at which I have no complaints about the visuals if it's well made. Really, I feel many (if not most) games in gen 5 are the only ones that have aged so poorly as to be difficult to revisit, as that first generation of 3D often had terrible controls and hideous textures. |
True, I could still play Intellivision games and enjoy them. 3rd and even better 4th gen gave devs enough to do a nice looking work overcoming resources limitations. That thing about 5th gen is quite true also on PC, where generations aren't clearly separated, and while controls weren't a big problem on PC, textures and other graphics shortcomings definiteli were. Also, very few gamers bought separated 3D accelerators, GPUs didn't exist yet and the best main graphics chipsets already accelerated all 2D functions, but just a few layers of the pipeline in 3D graphics, and they still lacked T&L that had to be done with the CPU, so devs had to accept a lot more compromises. There were also titles that ran out of funds before devs were able to do all they wanted, for example Lands of Lore III had very advanced, for its epoch, lighting, particularly choosing OpenGL instead of DirectX, but the rest of the graphics was really awful, particularly the woods, that actually were simple corridors with 2D scenery on the walls, while the few discrete trees in the foreground were, like most of the animals and foes, sets of 2D sprites representing them in a limited number of possible orientations.
