edit: This is actually an edited image I found years ago. I find the low poly bunnies slightly more funny than the original, which had skeletons.
edit: This is actually an edited image I found years ago. I find the low poly bunnies slightly more funny than the original, which had skeletons.
Many forget (or don’t realize) it wasn’t the graphics alone, it was the smooth 3D motion.
Before the 3D console era (and the equivalent arcade machines) most “3D” motion was scaled and stacked sprites. The rest of the time we had 2D scrolling.
Two examples of the best of 16 bit 3D effects:
Galaxy Force II
Power Drift
Which used 3x CPUs like the Genesis clocked at 12.5 Ghz
Compare to the first gen 3D console 3D effects:
Soul Edge - PS1
Panzer Dragoon Zwei - Saturn
It was very much like the difference between seeing a video of VR gameplay and experiencing VR yourself.
I remember seeing the screenshots in magazines (we used to update ourselves on the state of the industry with monthly or biweekly physical print media) and thinking “oh neat, but whatever…” and then I saw Battle Arena Toshinden being played at Toys’R’Us and that “oh neat” turned into “okay satan, you can have my soul for this”
We weren’t blind, we knew the polygons were ugly as hell standing still, but seeing them move at 30 fps on a 25-inch CRT was downright sorcerous
Just an FYI, that Soul Edge video is it being played on a PS2 which upscaled the resolution and smoothed the textures. There was also a pretty big time gap between the Sega Y Board which came out in 1988 and the PSX which came out in 1995. While the PSX was a big jump in graphics over the previous console generation, the arcades had graphics that were similar several years earlier with the Sega Model 1 and 2.
The first PS game that really blew me away in terms of graphics was Gran Turismo. There were some other games that looked pretty good but Gran Turismo (specifically the replay feature) was head and shoulders above everything else.