What fascinates me is how we remember those old games vs how they actually look now. When I played the original Halo, I was blown away, and it looks so much more next gen in my memory than if I revisit it now, same with all the Dreamcast titles like soul calibur and crazy taxi. I guess this is because I grew up with the older gen consoles like SNES. Modern titles seem to focus mainly on graphics. For me, it peaked around the 360/PS3 era.
Yet another HEATER from Dan. I’ve come to expect nothing less than beautiful imagery and sound combined with top notch research and production from your channel. Shout out to Toonami x [as] that was a combination that made my childhood and adolescence so much more entertaining.
Developers from this era often had their own game engines so their game stylistically was unique to them plus they had to work out how to do something which lead to some really creative/interesting games. Now most games (AAA at least) are built in Unreal and Unity and all have a homogenous look. Indie games generally have more unique interesting visuals
5th and 6th gen were the true pinnacle of gaming. That entire era was filled with such creativity and innovation as people worked around the limitations of the hardware that is just missing these days, 7th gen was still good, but there was a distinct feeling that the spark was starting to fade.
Basically, low poly graphics have their own appeal. It can bring a certain warmth and energy. It can feel goofy and cartoony. It can be used to make the player feel like they are on the edge of reality and fantasy. The appeal can be felt by those even if they were not there to experience it. Additionally, these low poly games probably have unique gameplay as well.
I disagree with all of this. While I agree that stylized games usually are less outdated that realistic games, most older games are completely ugly to the average consumer. A modern Five Nights at Freddies game can be stylistic while looking better than ugly outdated retro games
A big part is that the ever increasing polygon counts have long reached the point of diminishing returns. PS1 to PS2 was a massive leap, 2 to 3 a decent jump, 3 to 4 a hop and 4 to 5 falling flat on its face. The average Joe simply cannot tell that you can see every skin pore and that water flows realistically, he just wants some fun after another crappy day at work. Devs have leant so heavily on realistic graphics for so long they've forgotten art direction.
A perfect example of low poly is Tesla's Cybertruck. A vehicle that belongs to the 086 PC era, when computers didn't even had hard disks so all games had to fit in floppy disks 🤣
Dawg the Saturn released half a year before the PS1 and the 3DO was released before the PS1 was even announced, SONY WAS NO WHERE NEAR THE FIRST TO RELEASE A 3D HOME CONSOLE
