The best looking game EVAH !

heh--I remember when I first reached the outside of the ship in Unreal and looked around. I went, "Crap." Nothing else has made me do that.

 

Probably Unreal 1 was the last game that gave a "Wow" feeling to a lot of ppl, me included.

 

Like most people it seems, I agree that great artwork and a great story are MUCH more important than the technical excellence of the graphics engine, even while rating the looks. Not a single one of the "technically excellent" recent games are even in my top-10. If the game grabs and immerses me, it will probably look much better to me than when I really start looking at the graphics.

Planescape: Torment gets my vote as well, for best game ever in all respects. Wing commander 4 was the first game that actually made me really love 3D graphics.

 

There's an editorial in June's PCGamer about playing those old games that you hold dear to your heart. It pretty much said to leave them as fond memories since if you were to see them now they would lose all their lustre since they look like complete crap in comparison to modern games

I don't completely agree though. I played through MechWarrior III a couple years ago and although the graphics sucked the gameplay was a blast.

 

MW3? Oh, you mean "Hit The Other Guy's Legs If You Want To Win?"

(yes, I'm still bitter about that, ESPECIALLY after Heavy Gear 2, the best mech game of all time)

 

Hehe, yeah.

 

Pretty much the same as all the other games in the series. . .

 

Nah. In the rest, hitting the legs was a viable option, but so was hitting the head or torso or arms or whatever. Legs were hard to hit, but they pretty much crippled the mech. Still, though, a Mech would still be able to stay upright and at least fire at you a bit.

In MW3, you get a lot of large lasers or a few PPCs, then just hit legs from 350 meters out. Hey! You won, because blowing off a leg means the Mech dies. Online play was nothing but that. Very crappy, because that even happened if you were using jump jets at the time. In mid-air? Too bad, cause you BLOW UP. So, they ruined DFA, close combat, and they also put in the stupid customization system. Very grumpy about MW3.

 

I dunno. I think there's a significant separation between gameplay and visuals, personally. I think the best judge of really good graphics in a game is the game where you've spent the most time gaping at it instead of playing it.

 

Ah. . . I see. . .

Actually I think it was only in MW2 where you stayed standing after losing a leg. I remember completing the demo mission (Firebase defense) with a Jenner IIC, in the end only having one leg left. By turning left and right I could waddle around the map even without jets. Pretty damn hillarious.

IIRC in MechWarrior 2 Mercenaries you just fell down after losing a leg. You couldn't stand up unless you used jump jets, but then you fell down after landing anyway.

I don't know about MW4, though. . .

 

I did that with Far Cry and Doom 3 and such for a bit, until I got bored and threw them away

 

Yeah, both had their moments, but I think I spent more time just blown away with Unreal and Chronicles of Riddick.

 

MW2: Mercs was the second best mech game ever. Really fun, especially the hovertank mission ("Escape the clan prison!"). Still, though, nothing can compare to HG2 in space.

 

I loved MW2, but never thought the graphics were anything to write home about.

 

My usual vote for The Gothics, for showing vast expanses of exciting landscape, and creating places you wanted to be...

 

i was thinking about this, after seeing the previous mention aswell
to forget about purely one aspect, such as featureset used (ooh! just remembered Expendable, with it's subtle bumpmapping and cool shadows for the time) and go for something because of its massive artistic world vision, i would have to go Gothic too

with regards my earlier post, Resurrection of Evil surpasses DooM3 with its environmental wow factor - graphically pretty; this is like having the whole Unreal thing again, except without the massive environments, that award goes to Gothic above

 

For graphics with: beauty, art, style, realism and performance: Half Life 2. (The only thing missing is High Dynamic Shadows and HDR - it's gonna be in Lost Coast and Aftermath.)

 

Doom 3

 

The first time I got that "wow" factor was GL Quake, when I finally got what the 3D fuss was about. I had a 3DLabs Permedia 2, which did OpenGL with a full ICD, unlike most cards at the time which used miniGL. Not the best IQ though, and real slow at Quake2.

Unreal was definately awesome: Looking up at the sky after leaving the prison ship, I didnt play it until I got a Voodoo3 though (after upgrading from a Riva 128). But still, it was amazing. UT was also pretty awesome on the Voodoo3. The colours in this game were way better than Quake.

UT with the S3 textures (Geforce DDR), and particularly the map "Face" was amazing. I had a mod "Old skool" where I could run Unreal under the UT engine, with S3 Textures - that was pretty awesome too.

The opening film clip for Quake2 was pretty wow at the time I recall (well, i thought so).

Max Payne -loved that games whole film-noir coolness.

doom3 was cool for a bit, but I'm still running an FX5900 and it runs too slow. If it runs too slow it kills a game -it means running it at low res/ low texture quality and it really bites.

Half-Life 2 is the most stand out game for me in terms of design, character animation, physics, & the speed of such a new and gorgeous game on existing hardware (when i had tweaked it to run with DirectX9 shader effects).

 

Doom 3 is pretty highly CPU-limited, so a faster CPU would probably help you more than a new vidcard. When I upgraded from an Athlon XP 2000+ with GeForce 6800 to an Athlon 64 3000+ with GeForce 6600 GT, despite the minor video card downgrade, performance in Doom 3 went from about 36 FPS to 60 FPS at the same settings.