Nowadays, the most impressive and boundary-pushing titles of our generation barely look any different from the previous generation, but that wasn’t always the case.
Older hardware had definite limits, and while pushing towards games looking more detailed, with stronger aesthetics and more things going on, it all came at a cost.
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That’s why it was so impressive, for the time, and even now, looking back, seeing games that look years ahead of the competition, some indistinguishable from titles released today.
I want to take a little look back at some titles that pushed the hardware they were on to their limits and even past that, with a combination of great technique and quite a few frame drops.
10Dinosaur Planet
Sealed Away
Though it never got to release on the console it was intended for, only seeing a second life as aStar Fox-branded GameCube game, it’d be a damn shame not to mention Dinosaur Planet.
Although it never got put on store shelves, we have tons of beta content and full playable builds of the game to show what we lost, as Rare had been cooking an immaculate meal.
The usually grainy textures look smooth, the rigid geometry the N64 is known for is worked around to great success, and the lighting looks better in some places than a ton of early Source Engine games.
I especially love the rays of light casting down from windows; it adds a ton and makes it look like it could easily pass as a GameCube game. I suppose it did, in the end, but it’s still unfortunate it never got into the hands of many.
9Kirby’s Adventure
Kirby’s Adventure
While I’d give an honorable mention to the laterMega ManandCastlevaniatitles on the NES, I thinkKirby’s Adventureis the NES winner in my eyes, with some of the best gameplay on the system.
If I were to pick a single NES game for a younger person who has never been exposed to what that old thing could put out, I’d pick this one, as it feels like more of a “real” video game, rather than something for history textbooks.
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Sure, Mario can be fun and Zelda did some cool groundwork, but Kirby had a big handful of different abilities, a bunch of levels, minigames, and a charming aesthetic with things like pseudo-moving buildings.
This is partially because it’s one of the later games on the system, released in 1992. But if you clear out all the framerate dips, this would work as a modern-day Kirby title and be just as fun as it was when it came out.
8Metal Gear Solid
Metal Gear Solid
I probably don’t need to tell you whyMetal Gear Solidis here, but regardless, it’s one of the most revolutionary games in history that carried something a ton of games never tried at that point.
It had a proper, cohesive story, the gameplay served the narrative, and the visuals conveyed the story and gameplay equally and excellently while not sacrificing a lick of quality.
The lighting covers up most of the PS1’s inadequacies, and the very wide camera angles tend to show off so much that it can look like a PS2 or early PC game at some points.
Youcan see Metal Gear Solid’s bloodin just about any game that takes itself seriously nowadays, while still being a great game to behold. Plus, it has given the rise of indies that look just like it, fitting into the modern gaming sphere like a glove.
7Thunder Force IV
Pixel Perfect
Thunder Force IV
In my opinion, the artwork on display in Thunder Force IV occasionally looks even better thanSymphony of the Night, and that’s on a 16-bit system compared to the 32-bit system the PS1 could afford.
Due to some incredibly smart use of parallax, intense and vibrant color choices, and a refusal to ever tone down to action on screen for even a moment, it looks absolutely incredible.
It’s also one of the most condensed and active-feeling shoot-em-ups that I’ve played; there are constantly things to look around for, bullets flying everywhere, and the console can barely keep up with it all.
It pushes the hardware to hell and back and comes out looking better than ever, despite the semi-frequent lag that comes from going this hard with a console from 1989.
6Gran Turismo 4
Shiny Secrets
Gran Turismo 4
If you put a newerForzaorGran Turismoon the lowest possible settings, then downscale them to the same resolution, it genuinely wouldn’t look all too different from Gran Turismo 4 on the PS2 in 2004.
The PS2 consistently surprises me with how much power it can output in the hands of smart developers, and GT4 squeezes every single drop of graphical ability out of the thing, nailing the car commercial-esque aesthetic.
The cars can look a bit flat at times, but that’s about the only indicator that this wasn’t a PS3 game. Everything else is so damn impressive, from the super smooth models to the realistic texture work.
Perhaps the low resolution is doing the game quite a few favors and masking some of the rough edges, but a mask applied with tact looks far better than something that wasn’t given anywhere near the same level of thought.
5Yoshi’s Island
Cartoonish Creativity
Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island
I have no clue how to explain it, butYoshi’s Islandfeels more like a modern indie game than something like Shovel Knight, as it pushes past the SNES limitations to make something completely timeless.
Not only did it push the limits of the hardware, it had to create new ones with the SuperFX chip just to get some of the trippy visuals down pat, on top of the adorable hand-drawn style.
I think the most impressive part of it, aside from being perhaps the 16-bit game with the highest commitment to a non-standard art style, is the fact that it doesn’t particularly chug at all; it’s smooth as butter.
I have no clue what black magic was employed to make Yoshi’s Island look this good and clean while incorporating the pseudo-3D in such an excellent way, but I wish I could have a taste of it.
4Sonic Unleashed
Breaking Barriers
Sonic Unleashed
Before you say anything, yes, the Xbox 360 is retro. If it were a person, they would need to pay taxes. The system struggles with some hardware that occasionally decides to die for fun, yet, ultimately, Sonic Unleashed stilllooks better than Sonic Frontiers.
Sonic Team sought to make the game look like a Pixar film came to life and was playable, and damn, did they achieve that and more. It’s only possible with some incredible usage of the Hedgehog Engine, made specifically for this game.
The lighting in some areas looks better than the same location in this year’sSonic Racing Crossworlds. The game can mostly handle Sonic running through environments and plowing through hundreds of physics objects at Mach 10, and it’s a miracle the system doesn’t explode.
That said, it does chug quite a bit, especially in levels like Adabat with a ton of physics interactions going on, and in the nighttime levels. However, it feels monumentally impressive to make a game still look better than modern releases 16 years later.
3Soul Calibur (Dreamcast)
Cutting Edge
Little-known fact about the Dreamcast: It had extremely powerful hardware for the time, and the only two games I know you think of whenever the console is brought up are nowhere near hitting its limits.
Most games completely wasted the potential of this system, withSoul Caliburbeing the exception. It’s a multi-platform title, but the Dreamcast version in particular looks incredibly good and has a silky performance.
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Every attack animation flows into the next and makes each hit look all the more impactful. That, combined with the extra room for high-resolution textures, makes for something that could pass as a PS3 game with ease.
If you only ever saw the Dreamcast as that one washed-up SEGA console with like two or three games on it, Soul Calibur, at the very least, should show you that it was capable of way more than it ever gets credit for.
2Metroid Prime
Metroid Prime
Retro Studios never gets enough credit for one thing, and that’s how good they are at pushing the hardware of whatever they’re developing for. That was the case withMetroid Primeon the GameCube.
The vibes and effects carry things here, every environment selling such a realistic aesthetic that you get so immersed in the alien worlds they’ve intricately crafted and stuffed onto the hardware.
The dynamic lighting on Samus' armor, the intense atmosphere, and incredibly smart effects create a game that could pass for an Xbox 360 game any day, a level of hardware Nintendo wouldn’t reach for another decade.
While this one certainly isn’t retro, it’s also worth mentioning that Retro cookedeven harder on the Switch remake, a game that looks better than most PS4 games on hardware that’s weaker than some phones.
The Fight is Over
The original Xbox is even more of a sluggish brick of a computer than its younger sibling, yetHalo 2is one of those generational titles that stuck the landing so hard that it demands a shout here.
Some Xbox 360 games genuinely look far worse than Halo 2. The game uses some incredible texturing in combination with baked lights, then throws on even more impressive dynamic lighting for characters.
It’s processing all these intensive things, and still running incredibly smoothly, even with a bunch of other players all interacting in multiplayer or while you’re traversing the impressively huge world.
If Metal Gear Solid set the foundation for what modern video games could eventually strive to be, Halo 2 built that groundwork to make an example of one game that was everything we hoped games would evolve to become, and it’s a monument to the industry as a whole.
