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Forums - Gaming - What's the oldest gen that still looks fine to you graphically?

 

...?

1st gen (Pong) 20 3.55%
 
2nd gen (Atari 2600) 5 0.89%
 
3rd gen (NES) 113 20.04%
 
4th gen (SNES) 190 33.69%
 
5th gen (PS1/N64) 24 4.26%
 
6th gen (PS2/Xbox/GC) 128 22.70%
 
Last gen 65 11.52%
 
Current gen 19 3.37%
 
Total:564
KLXVER on 12 June 2016

3rd gen. I love the look of many NES and Master System games.



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Proxy-Pie on 12 June 2016

Funnily enough, Gen 4 games look better than Gen 5 games :P



lordsynbios on 12 June 2016

SNES, improving tech has given us some arguably better looking 2D games but none which make SNES games look bad. Whereas 3D thus far, with improving tech, has always made previous generations look worse as a result.



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Uabit on 12 June 2016

For me it's not a matter of gen anymore, it's a matter of resolution. Almost any game from 1st gen to 8th can be played on PC and upscaled to at least 1080p.



Alby_da_Wolf on 12 June 2016
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.



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DeusXmachina on 12 June 2016

I can easily play anything from gen 3 and beyond but nothing before that.



Pemalite on 12 June 2016
mountaindewslave said:
Pemalite said:
Starting with the 4th gen/SNES era there were games that aged stupidly well... And others. Not so much.
Case in point: Donkey Kong and Killer Instinct have aged well. StarFox? Not so much.

On the Nintendo 64, Smash Brothers still looks decent. Golden Eye? Nope.

On the PS1, Final Fantasy 8 still looks great, mostly thanks to the pre-rendered backdrops.

So for me, it's not really the generation so much as the art and technical techniques used to render the games... Besides being a PC gamer you tend not to look at things in generations anyway.

but picking games that were innovative for their time would be silly. Of course the first of its kind often looks poor. Star Fox for the SNES was extremely ambitious at the time and even had a unique chip component added (SFX?) to make it possible

Goldeneye was essentially the first home console game of its style and arguably built the FPS genre. I would also argue that Goldeneye is extremely replayable and views fine.

Now if you play 007 Goldeneye on a giant television toay that stretches the resolution, yes, it will look terrible. but the same applies to practically any games from that era. It looks pretty good on a CRT TV to me today

FF Viii has good cutscenes. main game appearance? ehhh. I would argue the PS1 Final Fantasy games have aged poorly. Most PS1 titles have

You are only re-affirming my point, it's not so much the platform or generation that matters, but the individual game itself.

As for Final Fantasy 8, I had it on PC back then, not Playstation... And we could use 3dfx Glide too, so my rose coloured glasses have a different tint. :P




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MikeRox on 12 June 2016
Alby_da_Wolf said:
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.

Oh man, I had a Voodoo 2 3D Accelerator. PC Need for Speed 3: Hot Pursuit vs the PS1 version was unbelievable!



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Mr Puggsly on 12 June 2016

No offense, but this is a bad question.

It just depends on the art style of the games and how its working with limitations, not the console generation per se.

Sega Genesis is a great example of how games can look great or shitty pretty much just on the sprites and colors.



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j.thomaz on 12 June 2016
Alex_The_Hedgehog said:

Some SNES games are still very beautiful to me:

 

Absolutely