Games That Push The Limits of the PlayStation (...and how they do it) 

11:31 Here's the promised (but undelivered) link to Modern Vintage Gamer's video about PS1's texture warp & wobble: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-x8TO-nrUtSI.html

I was/am a character modeler and I worked during the PS2 era when I first started and while PS1 was much lower poly, there was definitely the same art to getting arms and legs to look good with only 5-sided cylindrical shapes. It was all about those soft normals on the edges(gouraud shading) that the PS1 could do which would trick out the light to make it seem like there were more polygons than there actually were. I still do this today on certain projects designed for low spec hardware.

Believe it or not, but one game that really pushes the PS1 is actually the original Crash Bandicoot because of the method they used to load game data on the fly for the game. There's a whole video on the developers talking about their time with the game. It was quite fascinating. Because of how they streamed data off the disc, the game has few if any loading screens, something that seems impossible for a PS1 game.

VAGRANT STORY vagrant story Vagrant Story. Every best PS1 graphics list needs that game on it It achieves edge-rim lighting by rendering characters twice. It uses interpolated/blended pixels to achieve extraordinarily smooth face animations

I'm surprised Crash Bandicoot is not mentioned. The story of the game development is quite interesting. The method they employed so they can have so many polygons in the scene without a Z-buffer is rather crazy and unique. They calculated and stored which polygons are drawn and in which order, *for each camera position* of the level. That couldn't possibly fit in memory so it loaded the next or previous section from CD the moment the player moved the character forwards or backwards.

The original *Spyro* game should have been mentioned. It was the first big game to properly use Level Of Detail (LOD) rendering, i.e. use lower poly models for far away objects and scenery, so that it could show much larger open spaces. That game really blew me away.

Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, Wipeout 3, Tobal 2, Fear Effect, Vagrant Story, Einhander, Spyro etc

Chrono Cross is doing something weird - if you upscale the graphics, you find the worst texture warping I've seen in any PSOne game. It really mutates their faces. But in the original resolution? It's not noticeable. And you get some of the best character models in any RPG from that time period.

You said something about the reflection mapping in TR2. But the save crystals in the first game did that. Very interesting trick. I remember looking at them when i first played the game and wondered what kind of trick i was looking at. Then i fell down in a bear pit. So that was that.

I am probably the only one that thinks Tomb Raider controls perfectly fine. It's just different. You need to play by it's rules. Walk towards the edge, hop back, run and jump. Stuff like that. It's methodical and yes, slow. But if you play it like that... it just works. And I think they work a lot better than a lot of 3d controls from back then. We are just not used to them anymore. That said, they feel a bit better on a Saturn Controller or the PC keyboard IMO. Btw I finished my first classic TR just like three years ago. So no prior muscle memory here

Watching people play Tomb Raider who aren't used to the controls is painful. Especially when they blame the controls for being bad at it.

One thing with Tekken, on characters with bare legs like Xiaoyu, they skip using textures entirely and apply a single colour to the leg polys, which means they can be garoud shaded without the same performance hit as characters wearing textured trousers - noticeable especially in Tekken2 W/ Michelle where they appear to have started using this trick - she's inverted from the Tekken3 style, having a flat shaded upper body, and the untextured but garoud shaded leg rendering

I always found nice in Need For Speed 4 that you can see inside your car while using the external camera. The car has seats, dashboard console and a driver that even turns the wheel. The game is also very pretty.

I mean 4000 games on this machine, it's a deep well! :D So many great looking games for the era, amazing what they could drag out of it.

It's a crime to not mention Vagrant Story when you're discussing games that pushed the boundries of whats possible on the PS1. Pretty sure they used near the entire 2MB of RAM.

There are also some games that look great and push PS1 to the limit. There atre Crash Bandicoot 3, Spyro The Dragon 2,3, Tobal 2!, Vagrant Story

Interesting you didn’t mention Crash Bandicoot. Even ARS Technica did a whole hour long video on how naughty dog circumvented the memory and processing of PS1, pushing it to its limits.

How wasn't Tomb Raider 4 or 5 included here instead of 2? The graphics are leagues ahead of 2. Also, the controls are not bad. It's just that you haven't taken the time to learn it, without using the Analogue stick btw, since most analogue games with tank controls aren't nowhere near as precise as when you use the D-pad. Look, I'm a game developer, I love game design and could talk about it for hours. And at least for me, what sells it is the immersion of climbing, and both the amount of buttons and precision you need to have, and the weight of the animations conveys it. You're doing these amazing physical feats traversing these wild environments with weird layouts and traps and gameplay situations that are just cool. Leaving aside the plausible subjective immersion you may feel while controlling the characters, the controls are OBJECTIVELY learnable. What I mean by learnable, is that, once you understand how the game operates (It operates on a grid, and the grid expects you to do jumps perpendicular to its edges. Your different types of jumps take you different distances in terms of tiles. You need 1 tile to do a running jump, and walking to the border and tapping back puts you back exactly one tile. You don't need to do huge run-ups. There's a lot of ways you can chain jumps because it's intended too, and you don't need ANY of this explanation because the tutorial tells you basically the same thing) you can eke out consistent results, minimizing your fighting against the controls themselves and being able to enjoy the game as if you're the one moving through it. And this is also true of old RE games. I don't have the nostalgia factor for those ones like I do so much for Tomb Raider, because I didn't play them as a kid. And they're awesome. The tank controls are learnable as well, you can dodge most attacks consistently (and you will have to, these games are made more with the design sensibilities of more hardcore games, not quite Dark Souls but maybe old Zelda/Metroid. The atmosphere and level design is also top-notch, as is also in a lot of levels in TR games, it's apparent they went and did the best they could with the limitations and time constraints they had. They also iterated well on the different design ideas while also adding new stuff into the mix with each iteration. But in terms of atmosphere, for me the underwater levels in TR2, most of TR4, and some of the spookiest segments in all games that are both in TR3 and TR5 are genuinely chilling and WILL make your kids have nightmares. The low poly aesthetic certainly amplifies the horror aspect. To be fair also to you, TR2 is the one with most fighting in the whole game. And fighting for me is the worst part of old TR games. I appreciate that it's there some times? Absolutely. Some battles are pretty memorable, and TR4 for me nailed the combat by making most enemies have a unique gimmick to beat them. Like mummies being immortal unless blown up or thrown into water. Or skeletons being blown or shotgunned off a ledge (which the first time they introduce them to you, their pathfinding has them jumping over a few gaps so that you accidentally catch them mid-air, genius) or red ninjas have to be baited into lowering their swords and then there's the bosses as well. All this that being said, TR is at its best when you're not fighting, but you're exploring, platforming, finding secrets and solving puzzles. All of it while immersed by the moody atmosphere, or listening to the OST, which again, for me peaked at TR4 (I'm a fan of that one if you can't tell) which gets so dark at some points (like when entering a war and plague ravaged Cairo and it's ambiance music sounds like *death.* ) Welp, if you actually read through my ramblings I can't stress this enough: *Give tank controls another chance. People didn't give a second chance to the Alien game back in the day and they were pioneering a control scheme.*

MegaMan Legends and Vagrant Story are two games I always think of when I think "games that really took advantage of the PS1, ESPECIALLY their cutscene compositions and tricks

Rapid Racer comes to mind with its hi res and frame rate graphics, its physics is quite impressive too.

Excellent thank you. Definitely filling a niche with these approachable limit pushing videos!

Racing lagoon has some of the cleanest lighting I’ve seen on the ps1 or in any game of that era

Ridge Racer and Metal Gear Solid Pushed the limits of the PS1. Still use my PS1 today for nostalgia next to My Atari Jaguar

Thanks, Sharopolis, now we just need an N64 limit-pushing video, and we've got each of the big three fifth-gen systems! It's amazing how all three of them were so different from each other.

The flow and the pacing and the chapter transitions of this video are top tier! Very very good man!

A game I've always thought looks amazing on the PS1 is Soul Reaver. Great models and environments, and particularly the real time warping of the environment when you shifted between spectral and material realm. Too bad the cost was that the game ran at like 8 frames per second

Omega Boost is an absolute must for this series. No debate one of the best looking games on Ps1 with possibly THE best reflections done of any game in that entire generation.

Man, there are a lot of cool tricks in this video! I never noticed before that Tekken 3 characters were lit in two ways, even though I noticed the flat shading on the clothes making them look blocky and the non-flat shading on the skin making them look smoother... I guess my brain just accepted it and moved on, lol. The Tesselation trick in Alien Resurrection is also one of those things I'm seen before - probably on one of your older videos! I think Wipeout does that on the Saturn, at least, but I always just wondered why you'd do that in older games besides in stuff like Wave Race where you needed a denser poly mesh near your character for deformation purposes. Again, I never really thought about the fact that it reduced texture warping/wobble. My brain just said, "Yup, this game looks good. Moving on" lol. This was all really fascinating! Loved to see these old PSX tricks shown off! And it's great to hear Racing Lagoon has been fan-translated finally; definitely gonna give that a shot!

Sheep Dog N' Wolf has a wonderful art and animation style, but it was also programmed really well. Though it runs at 25fps on a console (and sometimes lower), if you overclock the console in an emulator, you find the frame rate is vsynced but actually unlocked and independent of speed! You can run it at double the fps - 50fps (or 60 for those across the pond).

Love you brother, just discovered your channel and I'm a big fan of this series!

MDK was a big pusher for the PS1. It was even more impressive on the PC though. It would have been a great fit for the saturn as well.

mario kart used a similar framebuffer trick for the jumbotron in luigi's raceway, emulators stuggle with it

Dude love this channel so good I could watch your content for hours and hours and never loose interest

Majora’s Mask uses frame-buffer environment maps for various effects - such as the reflections in the Deku Link bubbles that you can blow. Should be quick enough to get to a spot in the very early game and check it out :) Great video as always, mate!

Great video as always sharo - the tomb raider bit was really fascinating! Keep it up good man!

My personal PS1 limit-pushers are Tekken 3, Ridge Racer Type 4, Ridge Racer Tech Demo and Metal Gear Solid. I don’t know how much they actually pushed the PS1, although they likely all benefited from the later profiling tools that helped developers know which parts of the code were bottlenecking. They do all count as the best looking games on the system for me and really showed not only how developers had learned to get the most out of the PS1 but also how their knowledge of 3D graphics was improving. Early PS1 games had little in the way of lighting or shading and most 3D characters were just individual pieces rather than having fully skinned textures. By the end, lots of games were using those techniques which really showed how much learning went on with that generation. In terms of the N64 using the frame buffer to map the environment to a texture, the closest example I know of is Mario Kart 64 where the Mario Raceway and Wario Stadium tracks display the frame buffer on a jumbotron screen above the track. The only noticeable problem is the framerate on those screens is quite poor, but you could map that texture onto a surface to make a reflection.

The "reflections" in Tomb Raider II were already in the first game with golden Lara and save crystals

Your videos give me an appreciation for these games on a whole other level

Alone in the Dark The New Nightmare has a fantastic lighting thing with the torch. It had pre rendered backgrounds and managed to get a really good looking torch effect. I assume there were 2 backgrounds and it would switch between them where the torch was shining.

You need to take a look into Ace Combat 3 and Delta Force: Urban Warfare.

great channel bro!! keep them coming

Always a good day when Sharopolis uploads :)

One game that did a decent job of pushing the boundaries of what was possible in the early PlayStation years has to be Crash Bandicoot. The developers broke every rule in the Sony guidebook by bypassing the Sony runtime libraries (and IIRC even taking memory normally occupied by runtime library code that the game didn't need and making use of it) but when Sony saw how good the game was (and how it could potentially become the mascot platformer Sony needed in order to take on Mario) they decided they were willing to overlook all the ways the devs broke the rules.

Crash Team Racing CTR also was a pretty good limit pusher, it had Level Of Detail (LOD) rendering for larger and more detailed tracks AND a 4 player splitscreen mode

Love these types of videos from you 🙂 keep them up!

Your videos are great mate. Looking forward to watching this one very much

Wipe3out (wipeout 3) looked a-mazing on the PS1, it was high res, had a full 16x9 widescreen mode and ran silky smooth. Beetle Adventure Racing on the N64 has real time reflections on the player car (or a good facsimile of them!)

Racing Lagoon is an absolute gem, such a fun game with great music and hilariously meme-worthy cutscenes.

That Terracon game shown in final footage is such a technical marvel of a game. It is absolutely unknown gem way ahead of its' time. A PS1 Halo with huge open levels with draw distances up to horizon. Looking like an early Dreamcast title (especially during cutscenes). Utilising every known PS1 visual effect and adding some more. For example that fish-eye lense effect when aiming - I thought it was only possible on PS2-era consoles. Or footprints with bump-mapping-like effect (first you need to step in water, then make some footprints on the sand, switch to close camera and rotate it around the character to see the effect - it is very subtle but it is there). Cutscenes also create a kind of depth of field effect but it was implemented earlier in MGS and Vagrant Story.

So TR2 used a primitive form of Screen-Space reflections! That's cool!

That tomb raider example must be the earliest version of Screen Space Reflections ever! I wonder if it would be possible to do the effect on a car if you selected the area of the screen carefully enough.

There are some games that are missing here, but one that i wanted to share that probably no one knows is Choro Q Wonderful (thank god one guy released an english patch). It is probably the most impressive open world i ever seen in a PS1 game alongside Spyro 3 and Crash Team Racing, no noticeable LOD, no noticeable popping, high draw distances, extremely detailed and very big overall.

...another outstanding video!! Love console technical explanations !

You should take a look at Urban Chaos for the PS1

Supposedly "Blasto" (Sony Interactive Studios America) was the ultimate limit pusher on the PSX. None of the existing Sony graphics libraries were used to make it - everything was made from the ground up to get extra speed and features. Levels were comprised of anything between 70 thousand and 150 thousand polygons, vertex lighting was abundant (and adaptive), hundreds of animations were employed for each enemy (thousands for Blasto himself), joint skinning in models, contextual music (part forced due to data streaming preventing CD audio from being used), true environment mapping, variable transparency, and even a software Z buffer, all being output in 512x240. As a game it's kind-of a let down, and the humour (Blasto being voiced by the late Phil Hartman - you might remember him from such TV shows as "The Simpsons" and "News Radio") isn't to everyone's taste so may not keep you invested. The PAL version is also missing level 3 due to needing more space for extra languages. But it really does seem like a technical marvel.

Colony Wars is a PS1 game that I never understood how it looked so damn good compared to other similar titles on the platform.

For all the things you've dismissed even slightly, you can't with the gran turismo series. These are true masterpieces. I don't know if you truly experienced how astounding Gran Turismo was when it debuted onto the scene. It still transcends the grainy pixels and the other rough edges of the PS1 graphics hardware and if you squint your eyes it almost looks real!

Wow. "Every button does something you don't want it to do". That's a classic line right there.

I love your perspective man! Your personality is mapped perfectly on to a rich body of nostalgia. Cheers buddy!

Could you look at the original Crash Bandicoot if you do a follow up too? Naughty Dog found a way to stream the game from the disc rather than use memory. Sony apparantly hated them doing it as they were worried it would burn out people's drives.

Silent Hill is a really interesting case because when you load it up in an emulator and switch on all the HLE bells and whistles like perspective correction and higher res output it starts looking WORSE. Native res, no upscaling and dithering enabled might look chunky and the textures and models might wobble around but "improving" it just makes everything look smeary and more cartoonish. It's like finding a restored master of an original Star Trek episode and displaying it in HD only to realize just how bad the practical effects are and seeing all the uniforms have huge stains on them.

One great one that pushed the limits imo that I'm kind of surprised didn't make it onto the list is Einhänder, the models and animations, even the environments looked great, and it all ran at a solid 60 fps.

Since you sort of touched on the warping textures in Alien Resurrection, one thing I'd like to mention is that Doom on the PS1 actually managed to entirely eliminate the warping texture issue by having each polygon be a 1-pixel wide vertical strip.

Mario Kart 64 is often used as an emulation benchmark due to it using frame buffering in one of the tracks's signs.

Delta Force: Urban Warfare is an often-overlooked game that isn't amazing in-terms of gameplay, but visually it's surprisingly impressive despite a less-than-ideal framerate, with some really ambitious lighting effects and facial animation by PS1 standards. Omega Boost is also amazingly good-looking and smooth for a PS1 game, could easily pass-off as a Dreamcast or early PS2 title with all its particle effects, same developers behind Gran Turismo too.

Cheers shar! Appreciate you taking the time to get ePSXe going - that wasn't the easiest software to wrangle even when it was fresh.

The Saturn can do proper environment mapping reflections. Look up "XL2" and his game engine, he got it working

I had never considered the idea of using flat shading and Gouraud shading on the same character.

Funny you mentioning Tomb Raider II, I just finished it last week or so. It's a classic which I enjoyed a lot as a teenager. I'm surprised on how many content creators which talk about games, can barely play something so basic like this game, tank controls were the standard for many games, Resident Evil, Tomb Raider, Syphon Filter, Dino Crisis and many more. Can't you really adapt to the controls after 10 minutes trying, what prevents you from doing so? I mean no offence at all, it's just very surprising. People watching gaming channels often expect the creator of the video to at least play video games with a decent amount of skills. Same for Sonic R, Courier Crisis and many more games which get a bad rep mostly because those who reviewed those games could never actually learn how to properly play them, otherwise their opinion would be the opposite. Otherwise, I enjoy the more in-depth technical aspects you take on these systems and I've been following the content for over a year now.

You should have a look to Rollcage and Terracon.

Majora's Mask does environment mapping on the bubble you blow as the Deku Scrub, I'm sure there's plenty of examples besides ~ Great vid tho, loved the deeper look into my Playstation favs!

Have you ever played FFT? Probably not something anyone will do a video on these days, but it's one of my favorite games for any system and I still play it to this day. Keep trying to get the perfect team. Lately I've been doing lengthy battles in Zeklaus Desert where I level down a character as a bard using the level degenerator trap, then level them up from 1 to 99 using the various stat boosting jobs, like priest, ninja, thief and monk. Haven't been able to do Ramza that way because I need his yell skill external to the character I build, but if anyone has a more efficient method I'm open to any ideas. My two best characters top off just shy of 500 hp without any equipment and can hit for enough to kill most monsters in 1 hit, let alone 2 with two swords equipped.

Love the technology explaining part!

Also ending the video recommending any Spyro and MGS was amazing.

The PC reflections you mentioned in TR2 do only only exist but are better on PC.

Spyro: Year of the Dragon looked awesome, woukd love to see it in a more in depth video

It was a really interesting video thank you.

In theory, N64 could do the same kind of framebuffer effects. Majora's Mask uses a similar technique for its blur effect. I don't know if any game used it for reflections like Tomb Raider did. The problem is N64 memory is excruciatingly slow and shared between CPU and video, so such an effect would cost a huge amount of performance. (The Zelda games ran at a measly 20 FPS!) There was of course the giant mirror in Super Mario 64, but that's fake; it's simply a copy of the environment plus a Mario clone mimicking your movements. If you want a Nintendo example, Star Fox Adventures on GameCube does use the same reflection trick for all reflective surfaces. It looks good enough most of the time, but sometimes you can see things that are quite wrong, like your character's reflection being above them instead of in front of them, or popup icons that aren't actually part of the game world being reflected. (I should check if the N64 beta leaked version has this effect too...) Also why have I never heard of this idea before, of tessellating the polygons on the fly based on distance? I guess it's not really useful outside of PSX due to its janky texture mapping? Seems like it would be great for LOD though...

Im surprised kings field 2 (3 Japan) wasn’t on here. It was HUGE with interlocking areas with hidden paths. And also, had zero loading screens between areas.

Consider showcasing ps1 games on a crt or at least a good scanlines filter, all this games were designed with that in mind. The dithering in Silent Hill in particular looks like actual shading under scanlines, and all messy textures blend together.

The games I miss is Bloody Roar 2, which even ran at hires (something like 480i ) and even was 60fps(!) We also had some techdmeos like the Ridge Racer on the type4 which was way more arcade accurate this time, than the first release.

Crash Bandicoot squeezed out extra memory by cutting out unneeded code from the PS1 SDK.

Tomb Raider ? So many games released later at the life cycle of the concole looks absolutly gorgeous. There games are never mentioned.

Oh yes, more of that please. Wipeout3 SE and R4 are of course the technical pinnacle of PSone games. I'd say there are plenty more of graphically impressive PSone games to warrant further episodes.

This makes me want to replay my old ps1 games!

A minute in i already like this chanel, straight to the point, no bs. 👍

Thanks! You do excellent analyses. It’s an education!

Lots of people mentioning Crash Bandicoot because is one of the only games that really pushed the limits of PS1. It seems Sharopolis didn't do his homework for this one.

I would say that FFIX (and even VIII) very much pushed the PS to its limits, especially with some of the summons. Got you on the recommended tab today, not a bad suggestion from youtube for once. subbed.

10:33 Ah, the backwards shuffle when you know the devs love monster closets and don't want to get backstabbed. See also: Doom 3

Noone talks about tekken 2. To be honest that counts too with 3. WONDERFUL soundtrack with clear audio. (More faves in 2 than 3 (some tracks in 3 overuse distortion making them sound more odd to me. Definitely improved the models over 2 but both are over 1. ) character number is larger in 3 so thats good. Both have a place in my heart

WaveRace 64 does some good environment mapping.

Gran Turismo II was mind blowing to me as a 7th grader.

Awesome! Please do MSG 1 and/or Silent Hill 1! Not partial to Konami, promise! This was the first video I’ve watched on the channel, brilliant! Now a subscriber. ;)

nice man!

No mention of Lara Croft's impressive ponytail? That thing is pretty much using rag-doll physics... on a PS1 game! When you mentioned Tomb Raider 2, I was convinced that you were going to bring that up, especially since Tomb Raider 1 didn't have the ponytail. Also, the clunky controls on Tomb Raider are as good now as they were then. As clunky as they may be, you just couldn't have that gameplay with any other kind of controls. It was in many ways, an evolution of the cinematic platformer, requiring perfect precision in navigation. It almost makes me wish for a new game with the same type of gameplay. But unfortunately people don't want games which require skill to play, unless it's by FromSoft. Still a great video by the way. :)

GT2 had my thought of entertainment and powers. The game used here is amazing here. Also the limitations explained here had me really making happy about this game.

Another excellent, very nicely gauged video! These PS1 games definitely still impress me now, despite having recently bought a shiny new 5.

Spyro definitely deserves to be on this list for it's long draw distances while keeping the frame rate up. Maybe I'm remembering wrong but I don't recall many psone games with such long draw distances before it, but after Spyro came out even low budget psone games started showing up with the typical darkness or fog used to hide pop in pushed way back or gone entirely. Sure you'd still see details pop in or textures switching from low to high resolution but the newer games really took advantage of level of detail to move that draw distance back.

Very well researched. I hope most people notice that effort.