What are the games that blew your mind when you saw them *spawn

[Cyan]

the original Unreal was incredible, when I saw that intro, with the transparencies, the coronas of the lights, overall lighting, the "clean" textures.... My Voodoo Monster 3DFX showed its value.

Resident Evil. The graphics looked really good on an accelerated gpu.

I'd add Oblivion, when you could see the mountains and actually go there. I also gathered my siblings to show them.

Age of Empires, the original game, when you saw those landscapes, that made you feel there, in their simplicity, wishing you lived in that era, the freedom, the awe of discovery...

Skyrim, the volumetric cloud and super detailed mountains.

The original Quake, which art style has never been matched, not even by Quake itself. Probably Quake 2 is more popular, but imho, art style wise is not even close.

Need for Speed III Hot Pursuit. (PC) The graphics accelerated version and its reflections on the cars looked so amazing at the time.

Broken Sword 2. That 2D art was soooooo gorgeous.

Flight Simulator 2020. I loved to play it just to fly over my village in real life.

Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo. MS-DOS version played under Windows 95. What can I say. My first fighting game, purchased in 1997 or so. A totally faithful port -graphics wise, there were slight gameplay changes- of the arcade but with CD music. Never beaten Akuma though.

Sould Blade. My best childhood friend had that game on the PS1. When I saw that intro, with that music, and the epic music of almost every combat...., it was an incredible feeling playing that game.

Sega Worldwide Soccer. Got it in 1997 (PC) and I loved the graphics of that game. Not a perfect game but I liked how it looked.

Actua Soccer (PC). Lots of fun and the 3D cameras were super impressive at the time, the goals felt as if you scored them yourself at times.

Heroes of Might & Magic 2. The art style of the game is something forever pasted in the album of my memory xD. Also super fun.

Resident Evil 2 Remake. The characters looked almost real to me, like a movie. Claire will always be my favourite videogame character to date.

As for arcades: the original Fatal Fury -loved the art style-, Art of Fighting -probably the best graphics of a fighting game I've ever seen, AoF 2 also qualifies-, Soccer Brawl and Super Sidekicks -the Netherlands has two aces-, Hammerin' Harry -totally loved the art style-

I forget some games, but well....

 

[techuse]

Mario 64 was, hands down, the biggest “Holy shit! What am I looking at?” moment I’ve ever had. I wish I could experience that feeling again.

 

[see colon]

Mario 64 was, hands down, the biggest “Holy shit! What am I looking at?” moment I’ve ever had. I wish I could experience that feeling again.

Waverace's water comes to mind in this discussion. Looking back, I remember being really impressed with Quake, then Unreal, and I don't think I was that impressed until I played Farcry. I think that game really had a great look at the time, and graphically, really took the wind out of HL2 and Doom 3 for me. After that, maybe Crysis... And that's probably where things end for me. I think Hellblade 2 is probably the best looking game I've ever played, but even saying that, I don't think the graphical leap is *that* impressive.

That might have been a bit PC focused. I do remember when I saw Gran Turismo for the first time. Being a Saturn fan, I always had a bit of a bias when comparing Saturn and PS1 games, but as soon as I saw GT, I knew. Not only did I see the tech being better in that game, I also knew that if anyone could push a Saturn racing game to even approach GT's image quality, it would be an internal Sega studio, but they were just going to do parts of Sega arcade games. And while a lot of those games (this was the Model 2 era) were mighty impressive in their own right, the lighting and that fake specular on the cars in GT were top notch at the time.

As for 2d games, I remember when I first saw Art of Fighting 3's animation. That was awesome looking for the time. I couldn't believe it was still the same hardware.

 

[techuse]

Waverace's water comes to mind in this discussion. Looking back, I remember being really impressed with Quake, then Unreal, and I don't think I was that impressed until I played Farcry. I think that game really had a great look at the time, and graphically, really took the wind out of HL2 and Doom 3 for me. After that, maybe Crysis... And that's probably where things end for me. I think Hellblade 2 is probably the best looking game I've ever played, but even saying that, I don't think the graphical leap is *that* impressive.

That might have been a bit PC focused. I do remember when I saw Gran Turismo for the first time. Being a Saturn fan, I always had a bit of a bias when comparing Saturn and PS1 games, but as soon as I saw GT, I knew. Not only did I see the tech being better in that game, I also knew that if anyone could push a Saturn racing game to even approach GT's image quality, it would be an internal Sega studio, but they were just going to do parts of Sega arcade games. And while a lot of those games (this was the Model 2 era) were mighty impressive in their own right, the lighting and that fake specular on the cars in GT were top notch at the time.

As for 2d games, I remember when I first saw Art of Fighting 3's animation. That was awesome looking for the time. I couldn't believe it was still the same hardware.

Wave race was amazing too, but Mario 64 certainly blunted the wow factor a fair amount.

 

[Nesh]

Wipeout 1 totally marked the beginning of the 32bit era in all fronts. Sound, graphics physics and art.

 

[Karamazov]

Ridge Racer and Tekken started this for me. I remember being flabbergasted the first time i saw Tekken in a TV show.

 

[DavidGraham]

I grew up around the start of 3D games, nothing stood apart for me, until Hitman 2 and Max Payne 2 got released. Then it was Far Cry 1, Half Life 2 and Doom 3 in the amazing year of 2004. Then Crysis of course, then Quantum Break, then Quake 2 RTX and all the path tracing goodness that spawned from it culminating in Alan Wake 2.

 

[Seanspeed]

Mario 64 was, hands down, the biggest “Holy shit! What am I looking at?” moment I’ve ever had. I wish I could experience that feeling again.

This would easily be in my top 5 'mind blown' moments in games. Probably even moreso cuz I was able to play it at a Toys R Us demo stand upon first seeing it as well, so I also got to experience the insane new controls. It just felt like a whole new world and I still cant get over how Miyamoto basically nailed 3d platformers on the first go.

Doom would be another one for me. I'd played Wolfenstein sure, but Doom still felt like this quantum leap. Verticality, incredible lighting and atmosphere, phenomenal gunplay, scary enemies, genuinely interesting level design. Wolfenstein felt like an early concept stage for the first person shooter until Doom came along and properly established it. At my age, it doubled as basically my first horror game as well. I only ever had the shareware version for quite a few years as I didn't dare ask my parents to buy me the full game, but boy I played the heck out of it.

Final Fantasy VII. It wasn't my first JRPG, much less my first Final Fantasy and I was already blown away by FFVI in particular, but VII just ramped up the cinematic levels to something I genuinely would have never imagined possible. Not just the CGI cutscenes, but also the camera work during battles and all the prerendered background scenes that were all so carefully utilized to portray all manner of detail and crazy locations no game could have ever possibly achieved at the time with real geometry/pixel art, all with clearly some of the best art direction and framing we've ever seen.

Half Life should be an obvious one. Anybody around then knows how incredible that opening tram ride was alone in terms of immersive presentation. First person shooters up til then were all about action, so this was just something completely new. It invented the 'cinematic FPS' that would largely take over the industry in the next couple decades, but unlike something like FFVII or later shooters, it would do it without the grand spectacle cutscenes and whatnot, preferring to keep the player in the shoes of the character.

GTA San Andreas would probably be my last pick. I'd played and loved Vice City, so I wasn't unfamiliar with the impressiveness of Rockstar's open world detail and freedom and all that, but the sheer scope of San Andreas didn't seem real for the time. It was such a leap over Vice City in size(back when this really mattered) and ambition and really felt like a 'too good to be true' sort of game. That game in many ways has probably been responsible for so much of the issues we have today in terms of game budgets and whatnot simply because it raised the bar to such a ludicrous level...

Boring, common picks, but well.....they'll be common picks for very good reasons.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance : lighting and shadowing, particle effects, clean rendering, 60 fps, materials, and of course that water.

GT3 A-Spec replays : Felt very like TV footage, especially with the post filters.

 

[see colon]

the amazing year of 2004

We aren't ever going to have a year like 2004 again.

 

[Cyan]

I grew up around the start of 3D games, nothing stood apart for me, until Hitman 2 and Max Payne 2 got released. Then it was Far Cry 1, Half Life 2 and Doom 3 in the amazing year of 2004. Then Crysis of course, then Quantum Break, then Quake 2 RTX and all the path tracing goodness that spawned from it culminating in Alan Wake 2.

yup, forgot to mention Quake 2 RTX. I commented about it in the forum, but the Path Tracing in that game does wonders. Wish the original Quake, my favourite Quake game, received the Path Tracing treatment.

Doom would be another one for me. I'd played Wolfenstein sure, but Doom still felt like this quantum leap. Verticality, incredible lighting and atmosphere, phenomenal gunplay, scary enemies, genuinely interesting level design. Wolfenstein felt like an early concept stage for the first person shooter until Doom came along and properly established it. At my age, it doubled as basically my first horror game as well. I only ever had the shareware version for quite a few years as I didn't dare ask my parents to buy me the full game, but boy I played the heck out of it.

another one I missed. The game made you feel tense, with all the sounds in the background and the scary enemies. I discovered the shareware version in very late 1995 and early 1996 when I had my first PC, and played the shareware version for countless hours. I still remember most of the secrets of the first episode of the campaign in the shareware version, if not all.

I also played the original Wolfenstein but I played Doom first and the flat level design made it boring in comparison.

Doom 1 and 2 and its expansions or add-ons had the best most maps of any Doom game to date, imho. Wish modern Doom games had that level design.

 

[Riddlewire]

For me, it wasn't actually anything graphical.
In 1998, a demo for the game Forsaken was released on a magazine demo disc. I took it to the Computer Store where my brother worked and we installed it on one of the floor models there. They had high refresh rate CRTs. Whatever the highest rate was for gaming monitors back then. Maybe 120hz.
Forsaken was a very simple game without a framerate cap and most PCs could run it very fast. It was the first time I had ever seen a game running at such an extreme framerate, with a refresh rate to match. It was otherworldly. Didn't look real.
I've been impressed with graphics a few times since then, but nothing like that experience.

 

[Seanspeed]

Doom 1 and 2 and its expansions or add-ons had the best most maps of any Doom game to date, imho. Wish modern Doom games had that level design.

It'd be great if id Software took a smaller team and simply made a new Doom game in a 'retro' style. So an original game, new art style and everything, but based on simpler tech and older design principles like the mazey maps and whatnot. Something they could maybe finish in two years or so on a smaller budget.

 

[Flappy Pannus]

whoops, wrong thread

 

[davis.anthony]

Silent Hill 2

Being blown away by the pre-rendered CGI intro, and then waiting for the gameplay to kick in when James is looking in the mirror, only to slowly realise you are looking at the gameplay graphics.

Gran Turismo 3

Say no more.

Crysis

Still looks amazing in 2024.

Perfect Dark Zero and Kameo

The first time you saw the parallax occlusion mapped textures was mind blowing.

 

[Cyan]

The first time you saw the parallax occlusion mapped textures was mind blowing.

Parallax occlusion mapped textures weren't like bump mapping? 'Cos I had the Matrox G400 in the early 2000s and it was, afaik, the first GPU ever to natively support bump mapping and the software of the video card had a demo game featuring it. It looked pretty good at the time.

 

[davis.anthony]

Parallax occlusion mapped textures weren't like bump mapping?

No, they're very different.

 

[Globalisateur]

I think Soul Calibur is that game. Nothing compared to my first impressions of seeing and playing that game. Soul Calibur was perfect in all aspects from graphics to music to gameplay, playing with a buddy, replay value, etc.

 

[leglevy]

Sonic The Hedgehog running on a Sega Mega Drive (imported from Japan) in 1991. So colorful and stupid fast. It gave us a glimpse of what 16-bit games could offer. My main console was the Master System and seeing Sonic convinced me to upgrade.

Saw F-ZERO (SNES) at a friend's house and it blew my mind. That was as real as 3D got for me during the 16-bit era. Only to be surpassed by Virtua Racing on the Genesis!

(but that required a special SVP chip inside the cart)

The Need for Speed on the 3DO. You had to see it to believe it back then. The FMV alone was incredible, and it didn't even require a MPEG-1 decoder. Outstanding sound effects and 3D modelling. I even supported Dolby Pro Logic!

Gran Turismo 3 on PlayStation 2 convinced me that arcades were dead ... "Arcade quality" was now possible at home. Seeing the demo mode was unreal.

Ghosthunter, a late PS2 title, impresses me to this day. It looks so clean and detailed in Progressive Scan.

 

[leglevy]

yup, forgot to mention Quake 2 RTX. I commented about it in the forum, but the Path Tracing in that game does wonders. Wish the original Quake, my favourite Quake game, received the Path Tracing treatment.

another one I missed. The game made you feel tense, with all the sounds in the background and the scary enemies. I discovered the shareware version in very late 1995 and early 1996 when I had my first PC, and played the shareware version for countless hours. I still remember most of the secrets of the first episode of the campaign in the shareware version, if not all.

I also played the original Wolfenstein but I played Doom first and the flat level design made it boring in comparison.

Doom 1 and 2 and its expansions or add-ons had the best most maps of any Doom game to date, imho. Wish modern Doom games had that level design.

I played Wolf 3D soon after launch (shareware version). It was truly revolutionary at the time. I remember being able to run it on a monochrome 286 at my shrink's office, even!

It flied on a 386 with a "multimedia" kit.