I think this
tech demo playing "find my own way" is one I haven't seen before. But it exemplifies the differences/shift in 3D graphics that generation had. When Sony claimed the PS2 could do 30+ million polygons per second, or 75 million, or the gaming press and the majority of online gamers accepted "
10X more powerful than any console out there" ad hoc, it made me look. I was used to focusing on gameplay mechanics, specifically unique gameplay. But I shifted to framerate which, on a standard definition TV, meant silky smooth when the screen panned quickly was 60FPS, blurry was 30FPS, and stutter meant below 30PS. I'd note this, then I'd wonder why it mattered if the gameplay wasn't broken by either/or.
When I focused on character models I looked for hard edges, deformed claws instead of fingers on hands, moving mouths and eyeballs, ears that actually had insides and outsides. For other detail, I looked at textures and expected sharp real life detail of rocks, or grass, or sand, or grains of cloth. What I got was something else entirely. I got motion blur instead of fine detail on walls and characters. I got sub 30FPS more often than not, but there were sparklers and splashes, and streaks of light on the screen that simply did not impress me.
Over the decades, gamers moved on and stopped talking about model complexity and texture detail in PS2 games, instead focusing on the particles and "post processing" effects as the true proof of its "polygon monster" status. But that is not what I was looking for when I bought my PS2 for Soul Reaver 2 in 2001. This was not what I was looking for when I bought Kendo Master of Bushido, or Silpheed, or Gun Griffon Blaze, and failed to see even double the detail on screen of "anything else out there." Later on, Tenchu, Shinobi, Virtua Fighter 4, Blood Will Tell and even the popular mainstream games continued to perplex me.
More sparks in Burnout didn't take away the obviously lower resolution, better modeled cars in Gran Turismo 3 A-Spec didn't distract me from the obviously low color/resolution, maybe palatalized, textures especially when compared with F355 Challenge. When I played ports of Dreamcast games I didn't get twice the framerate, or twice the character model detail. I didn't even get more effects, in most cases I got less. So, for the entire generation and beyond I thought it was pretty obvious that whatever was "10X more powerful than anything else out there" was somehow hidden in the background, didn't really affect the graphics. Maybe it was physics, maybe it was lighting or blur effects I didn't care about, but it definitely wasn't the polygons per second/frame promised clearly in the hype and accepted by the mainstream.
I think that, and the
near religious belief that the PS2 was the most powerful game hardware of its time, caused a thread like this to go on so long. I don't think anybody believes the 1998 hardware in the Dreamcast could be more powerful all around than the PS2, the problem is the majority opinion for decades is the PS2 was all around more powerful when the games, especially prior to 2004, didn't clearly demonstrate this "fact."
To the point of this topic, based on what I've played on the Neon 250, the Dreamcast could handle any of the games up to and including 2003 titles. There would have been adaptations, concessions, maybe a RAM upgrade would have come along, but the hardware was more than capable of these games. That's a five year life span from the Japanese launch, not too bad for a company that had its mainstay Arcade business swept out from under it while it was designing the hardware.
www.vogons.org
