Limit Pushing PlayStation Games (That No One Ever Talks About)
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- Опубліковано 4 лип 2024
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The PS1 has a huge library, no surprise that there's more than a few games in there that seem to be lost in the mists of time I've got a selection here to show you that are fun, forgotten, graphically impressive but also not particularly expensive to by or hard to get hold of.
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Games featured:
00:00 Intro
00:27 Damdam Stompland
04:54 Ray Tracers
09:19 Rally Cross II
14:41 Jumping Flash
19:21 Love and Destroy
24:16 Ending and Patreon Thanks - Ігри
Loving how driving games have just been consistently a generation or more ahead of every other genre when it comes to doing complex reflections.
Except Lara Croft
Lara Croft isn't a series bro, that's like calling the God of War series "Kratos".
Lmao
@@BlueEyedVibeChecker Sorry, "Tomb Raider"
The PS1 library is so big it still has stuff unaffected by the scourge of speculators driving everything up, that's kinda nuts
That method of shadow casting is pretty common in 3D fighting games, actually. This did inspire me to look up early uses of shadow maps though. I know that Conker's Bad Fur Day on N64 used a shadow map for Conker's shadow, so I was curious if anyone managed this on PS1. Looks like in Crash Bandicoot Warped they actually map a shadow to a small square of polygons below Crash. Pretty cool to see on a system that released in 94.
Tobal 2 might be the visually most impressive PlayStation game for me since it uses a high-resolution rendering resolution (512x512), runs super smooth at 60FPS, and features (relatively) high poly models with crisp animation on-top. It is a bit of a awkward one though since it stayed in Japan, the language barrier makes the dungeon crawling single player portion of the game a little trickier to enjoy properly (even with a limited English translation patch floating around the web).
that alert message being reflected in the windows in ray tracers implies that there's red flashing text physically just hovering around the car
I wonder if Jumping Flash used an affine transformation to render the floor because of the PS1's general trouble with rendering large polygons without losing performance or experiencing warping/precision issues.
That's what I was thinking when I saw that. You can see in the final game visuals that the ground textures looks very clean and straight around the player, with warping only occurring some distance away. They might be rendering that off-screen so that it can be drawn independently of the actual frames and reuse the floor image between frames if necessary. That might help with keeping the framerate steady, as I don't think that floor will be cheap to render.
Love and Destroy looks awesome, thanks for the discovery !
Aww yeah, we got a Sharopolis video!
The history of character shadows in 3D video games is weirdly fascinating. In highly abridged form, first we didn't have any, then we had spot shadows -- literally just a spot-shaped decal that sat under the character (vital for platform games so you could see where you were going to land), then we had polygonal shadows -- a flattened 3D model bent over the floor, simplified projected shadows -- shadows drawn to the screen with pixel shaders but using a heavily simplified version of the player model to actually do the calculations, then fully real-time stuff we've got now.
Even the fully realtime thing has at least two major steps. First it was the doom 3 shadow volumes that looked great but had some pretty dire limits (and creative inc suing everyone that tried to use it), where you drew some cones and used the GPU to cut the cones into very sharp shadows.
And then we got the depth shadow technique that is still the most common way, where you "turn the light source into a camera", and get a depth picture of the scene, where every pixel store how deep that part of the pic is.
And then with some crazy matrix math, you can use the depth picture to determine if the thing being drawn is visible to the light or not.
And all the talent was redirected from game design to art and programming.
I swear 90 plus percent of 3d games from the era look terrible. Some look so bad as to just be a big ugly, muddy mess like Tomb Raider. The 2d games are all very nice looking.
And this was a good thing.
The thing I find strangest about the evolution of shadow technology is how non-linear it is: we had Star Fox doing accurate polygonal shadows back in 1993, and some of Rare's N64 games doing projected shadow maps in 1997-2001... and then there were much newer games using still spot shadows!
IMO we should return to the flattened 3d models technique as the modern real-time shadows have issues such as staircasing, peterpanning, etc.
Woah, finally someone knows about L&D! This game only came into my possession because of the art. Its not hard, not long, not complicated but DAMN it looks impressive and plays great.
A few years back I made a (german) review of that game and at that time there was barely anything from it on YT, so great to see it covered by someone big enough for people to actually see the game.
So weird really, cutting edge polygon shifting at a solid frame rate becomes dated as you increase counts of both and yet the PlayStation had some classics that still look crisp and visually stunning 30 years later in 2024.
No, it doesn't. Especially not from this bunch. They were all ugly as sin.
Alpha waves was before Jumping Flash. Both great games.
some ps1 games had a shockingly spartan UI. guess the logic was "what? all we had when i was a kid was a start menu!"
I remember being very impressed with Rally Cross II at the time, i noticed the real time reflections and it blew my mind. For a PS1 game that was unheard of.
It´s the first time i see anyone talking about it, cool!
Love and Destroy looks absolutely incredible. You are completely spot on regarding how difficult it would be for the Saturn or N64 to handle that. I've never seen that one. Brilliant!
Tobal 2 looks really good for PS1. Also a racing game, I think it was called Motorhead?
yeah, for exceptional graphics, this comes to mind. and LBA and Fear Effect.
Nintendo DS graphically impressive games next? 😳😳
Hotel Dusk may count, though maybe more artistically impressive than graphically.
Hehe. Maybe they wanted you to think, the flashing alert sign is actually floating over the car.
I really enjoy your channel. I wish you great success. I can tell you put effort into your craft.
If you ever do a follow up, Vanishing Point on the PS1 might peak your interest, there's absolutely no background pop in whatsoever and has a draw distance all the way to the horizon
V-Rally 2 has what appears to be specular mapping on PS1. Great video btw!
Specular highlight mapping and environment reflection mapping are entirely the same from the point of view of the renderer, only a question of what you put into the reflection map texture.
DamDam StompLand might be one of the first games with product placement.. notice the New balance logo 1:13
Not even close. Those games were made all the way back in the 80s. Even before the American video game crash.
I love this series of videos. I go back and play the games you mention and they're some really cool experiences.
I like to get the most out of my games, so I stick to emulation almost exclusively so I can upscale, get rid of limits, overclock Super FX games, and use save states and cheats sometimes too.
Even my collection of official Mini/Classic consoles are emulation machines too.
Awesome Mate.. love these vids
Omega Boost is a beautiful looking game I never hear mentioned. Love and Destroy looks insane as well!
I had Jumping Flash and Ray Tracer and both blew my mind as a kid.
Ray tracers was one of my favourite ps1 games. Loved it.
Excellent vid as usual!
I never owned or rented Jumping Flash but it was included on the demo disc that came with my PlayStation and I wore that damn thing out. Nobody ever knew what I was talking about when I'd bring up that game back then so it always warms my heart to see it get praised more often over the years. I'm going to have to put the 2 games on my Steam Deck and try them out
Not gonna lie, Love or Destroy looks awesome. The environments look like a real city, which is very rare for mech shooters back then. It needs a fan translation for sure.
General comment about shadows: projecting the shadow of a 3D object onto a flat plane is pretty simple and fast; it's when you start projecting it onto 3D geometry that it becomes a lot more complicated. But for something like the PSX it's very conceivable they could fake it by projecting onto a flat plane (the ground) then overwriting whatever was on screen, given the PSX doesn't have a z-buffer. As long as you don't get a good look at the shadow on surfaces of different angles, this would be convincing enough for the era.
Sharopolis' analysis is the cherry on top for me. How the developers got the most from the hardware is fascinating
Very interesting video, as always! What emulator are you using for dumping out video RAM?
I will definitely listen to all of this, love PS1, but man, Jumping Flash doesn't belong on a "no one talks about" list, it's in every PS1 launch titles lists and such. :)
It's a footnote nowadays, it is fairly well known in retro circles but nobody really talks about it.
Not too mention the floor rendering is Walmart vdp2 of the sega Saturn 😅
Great list!!
I really love Jumping Flash! But the first 3d platformer.. i think that came much earlier, with the game Alpha Waves.. which i also really like
15:38 The first 3D platformer was Alpha Waves (Infogrames, 1990).
how did LoD have such a high production value with such a cursed cover art
Rally Cross 2 is great. My friend and I used to play it a lot and use the track editor and fun cheats.
a preview video for Ray Tracer was on the pack-in disc with a copy of Ultimate Game Players magazine that I randomly happened to get from the shelf back in the day... I didn't even have a computer to put the disc in, I loaded it on a powermac 6500 in my middle school tech-ed class lol
There was some footage of Zelda 64 as well, and a handful of other games (there MIGHT have even been a small clip of Tempest 2000, but I can't recall for certain). The game had always been an enigma to me, and I always wanted to play it... I could just download an ISO, but I'd like to find it in the wild, and I am genuinely surprised that all these years later I have still not laid my hands on it anywhere. Still haven't played it proper to this day.
most underrated gaming channel.
Always good to see the "behind the curtain" look and the technical analysis you bring along with it!
Regarding Jumping Flash (which is the one misstep, as far as deep cuts go), it actually targets 60fps, and frequently stays above 30 when there's not too much stuff on screen.
Because this game's performance bounces all over the place, triple buffering keeps the framerate as high as possible at all times, rather than locking to a factor of 60. With double buffering, it would just be stuck at exactly 30 (or 20!) most of the time, as those in-between rates like 40, 50, or 55fps wouldn't be "allowed".
Whilst your correct, I don't think Jumping Flash targets 60, more that it's an unlocked frame rate and can hit 60 in certain moments. I'd say the 30fps target is more accurate.
@@volkte37 I've always heard and used the term "target" to mean the maximum, as that's what the game is trying to hit, but yeah, it would at least be accurate to say that the devs were intending to keep it around 30fps.
(Similar situation with Goldeneye, where it hits its 60fps cap even less than Jumping Flash does, so it's safe to say the devs were aiming for around 20-30.)
@@3dmarth yeah I think target and engine capability are different. Jumping Flash and Goldeneye as you put out, rarely hit 60fps. Normally this happens when looking at the sky! So the true targets are lower. 🙂
Thank you so much for the call back to jumping flash! I felt ripped off when I bought crash bandicoot and then played Mario 64 at Walmart and saw the fully 3-D rendering background. Then I played jumping flash and felt vindicated for my purchase. for youngsters out there. 3-D was the big deal back then. true 3-D that is. We’d even sacrifice gameplay for an immersive experience.
But jumping flash was great. it gave me vertigo the 3d was so good! Outside of jet Moto I couldn’t think of a better 3-D experience for the platform.
I loved jumping flash
man, I've never played Rally Cross 2 but if it's by 989, I can absolutely see Twisted Metal 3 all over the place lol
The first PS1 game I got to play was "Fighting Force" at the time I loved it. It was so fun to play. I miss how gaming was throughout the 90's-00's so much
Ray trace looks fun! if you enjoyed Love and Destroy, Global Defence Force on PS2 is a blast! Greatings from Uruguay 😊
These are some deep cuts, very interesting.
Ray Tracers looks great fun! Might check it out. I'd take that any day of the week over the stodge of Gran Turismo
Ooh a sequel to games that pushed psx to limit! Spicy!
The N64 can do pretty large textures with some tricks and using the right texture formats. Sauraen made a video where he shows off a 512x512 texture being rendered as part of a Fast64 demo.
Actually the N64 can do up to 1024x1024 textures as seen in James Lambert's megatexture demo.
Love and Destroy looks phenomenal
Best narrating voice in the game!
I LOVED jumping flash
The way I feel called out by your Ray Tracers description.
still remember how the physics of OG Rally Cross blew me away back then...nothing else felt that way before
Right, I've got one for you that's left me baffled- lawnmower man on snes - How in Earth does it do those 3d bits?? And the megadrive scaling effect on the boss at the end too?? [I've just seen game sacks' hard limits pushing episode 9, but he never said how it's done, and I'm stumped. The 3d, while simple, looks like an actual 3d environment, all at 30fps and no accelerator chips. Any thoughts mate?
Jumping flash I remember !
reflection mapping on rally game is interesting
Ray Tracers looks really fun and looks like it runs really well.
16:03 Actually AlphaWaves/Continuum was even earlier (very early 90s, on Atari ST, DOS and perhaps some other machines. Definitely before even Playstation, the SNES addon, was a thing, let alone Super Mario 64.
List is really not bad, I didn't know about 2 games before. Suggestions for pt2: Racing Lagoon & Omega Boost
Racing Lagoon soundtrack is excellent.
Hey Sharopolis, you forgot to actually link the video in the description that you mentioned at 4:41
Thanks, its done now!
Correction: the fist 3D platformer is Alpha Waves
Hey mate check out Sheep Dog n Wolf, or Sheep Raider. It's a 2001 PSX release, but it looks amazing - very fun game too.
It’s not really mentioned much from a graphical standpoint but quite a few of the Spyro games for the PS1 really broke some huge technical ground across the board. ❤
8:11 So it's done similarly to the screen space reflections in modern engines.
Jumping Flash is very good. Spyro is slicker, but for it's time it was outstanding
Hey Taito's Ray Tracers was actually previewed in 1995 American gamer magazines and also iirc in Next Generation aka Edge magazine UK... the game was clearly released in 1996 and I don't believe it was released outside Japan... unless it did errmm and got forgotten.
Gran Turismo 1 however actually shipped in Japan in very late 1997... so there was no competition there... when Gran Turismo officially released in North America and European regions, it was 1998... by that time Ray Tracers was a long time... and it is in a different category... The real problem with Ray Tracers is that Taito decided to think this up during the fairly early life cycle of the PS1 and it shows and as such is a fair release for back then but it also probably failed to sell as much copies as Namco's Ridge Racer Revolution and Rage Racer which iirc were the more dominant PS1 graphical racing games of the time and might have been grating to go from Rage Racer's smooth and fast graphics and sharp 3d models to this extremely angular car designs...
Taito's Ray Tracers should have been revived for the Sony PS2 however and actually used on the PS2 arcade hardware System 243 but sadly that never happened because by then they might have reasoned that the PS1 game did not sell enough and did not warrant a sequel.
Love and Destroy is pretty awesome and a victim of the types of games we were being prevented from getting localized for some bizarre reason... especially when the PS1 early adopters were working young adults, not little toddlers waiting for xmas gifts and no offense to those but the working adult gamer had a lot of buying power and it is possible that some of these games might have had some sequels if they were released closer to the Japanese releases.
i talk about jumping flash all the time its like one of my most favorite games ever -_-
Man, I think I've read about Love and Destroy in the past but it was only ever in terms of like, wiki-skimming Inti Creates amd seeing what else they've done, I've never actually seen footage of it. And from what I see I see both merits and demerits that would make it an impossibility to localize- it seems to have the regular polish of a Inti Creates game, but also be as slight as they usually are. They really have been doing small little nuggets of gold as long as they've existed, haven't they...
If you ever revisit the topic you should try Terracon. One of the best looking PS1 games imo
Love & Destroy looks bizarre!
3 out of 5 games you presented I well know. At least thats what my take on this topic. Jumping Flash is talked all the time on social media
Surprised you didn't mention Alpha Waves for DOS and Amiga as a pioneering 3D platformer. I'm pretty sure it predates everything you mentioned, unless I'm missing something.
wow Love and Destroy reminds me of Zone of the Enders
To be fair I think Jumping Flash has been well remembered by the community, it gets mentioned now and then. The rest I've never heard of though.
is that shadow stomping game a japanese thing? Ive seen the characters of the movie "perfect days" playing that
subberb video! I love it! thanks!
Is Ray Tracers running at 60fps? It looks really smooth and fast
There is something oddly smooth about it at times. It's definitely not 60, but there's something weird going on.
It looks like it might be running at 35-40fps at times, and there's also some iffy frame pacing throughout.
The PlayStation could make 30fps look really smooth as though it were 60.
WipeOut is a good example, it runs at 30fps but looks so smooth it may as well be 60. Most people thought it was 60fps for a long time because it was so smooth.
It seems like a holiday. PS1 is certainly now elderly. It's about time the Sony breakthrough got it's due.
1:22 this is just 3D smash bros
Jumping flash's floor rendering is Walmart vdp2 Saturn 😅
epilepsy warning at 7:26
Jumping flash looks kinda like minecraft
Re-released, remastered or even remembered
And they all still struggle with texture warping. le-sigh
Are you seriously complaining about texture warping on ps1 games?? 😂
@@johnnywoodstock
Yes. A PS1 game that pushes the hardware would be one that could fix these issues.
@@Mechaghostman2 we have modern games coming out purposefully adding in texture warping as a graphical feature.
@@johnnywoodstock
Some indy games, yeah, and I hate it.
Colony Wars thumbnail?
I’d like to remind everyone that there’s a decade longer between this & now than this & Pong.
Horrific and reported for violence.
Not much changed in videogames over the last decade, so it doesn't count.
Please do the impossible Tekken rom Tekken advanced for the gba the only rule is that it has big changes
Uh, Rally Cross 2 is actually pretty good
I think Ray Tracers was a play on words with Rage Racer
Technically impressive? Maybe, but certainly not graphically
It’s just using a different criteria for graphically impressive than closer to photorealism = better 🤷♂️
It's time for humanity to git past the turbine and the polygon.....
Fk boiling water 💧 2 make steam 2 turn a turbine.
Lol sorry. I thought I was commenting on Plainly Difficult's channel.
A console that always felt pedestrian to me, as I had a pc with a Voodoo card. Not elitist: I needed a pc for college, a laptop was out of the question because they were like 4x the price of a desktop for half the power with zero expandability, and spending money on a console was ridiculous if you could spend that money on a good gpu.
This was an era where PC and console gaming had a massive schism, though. It was exceedingly rare to get any, let alone good, ports of games from either side to the other. You didn't buy a PS1 solely because of its power; you bought a PS1 because you wanted to play Spyro the Dragon.
There's no PC game in '94 that had better graphics than what PS1 is capable of.
@@Vulpas Good point, although the PS launched in '95 (December '94 in Japan is basically '95). Quake was released in '96 and the first Voodoo card hit the market in October '96. I would say it wasn't until later in '97 that 3D accelerators really started becoming a thing.
@@trzy True, it was a late '94, and PC definitely had the edge over consoles by '97. I wonder about Dreamcast though, I suppose it was pretty even for a bit there. Now of course PC laughs at consoles.
wtf
every game in this line up - with the exception of jumping flash - is underwhelming. There are tons of forgotten PS1 titles with much more impressive graphics. You could list five forgotten games from SquareSoft alone that were incredible graphically.
Also ridge racer r4 which is the best racing game on the ps1.
There's nothing forgotten from Square on PS1, especially anything that meets that criteria, at least released in the west.
@@Vulpas a bunch of JP only square games were largely unknown in the west, during the PS1's hay day
@@maroon9273 R4 isn't forgotten ofc. Racing Lagoon from Square was unknown to western gamers till a recent fan translation, and the graphics are mind blowing for the time
I don't see this as a list of definitely the most technically impressive games that are off mainstream discussion; merely games that did do something impressive or interesting of note that is forgotten or isn't noticed. This video series is continued so there will be more games to discover and talk about for sure. I'm sure Shar will not mind the audience taking up some work of discovering them for him :D
The hell are you complaining about every game being too short and too easy. I personally don't have enough time to play through all these great games I'm fine with that I don't think that's a bad thing when you're really looking to just grab a game from the past actually it's even better who wants to spend 50 hours on a padded game with a huge backlog of other things to play.
There are no 3d PSX games that look good. It's the defining feature of the 32b generation. 3d that looks terrible. A big muddy mess in most cases. The 2d games, that's another story. They look great.
Sheep Dog N' Wolf looks fantastic, because it leans heavily into the cartoon aesthetic, but includes varied seasons, times of day and weather as well.
At the time these games looked pretty magical honestly. They still have a lot of charm now too, in this era of overly busy and detailed everything.
@@C.I... The thing with cartoons is there is sometimes not a lot of colors or detail in them, because realism isn't the goal. Even the early (1940s) WB cartoons are nothing like the Sinbad the Sailor Popeye episode or Snowwhite and the Sevendwarfs (sic). Nothing in the world is 1 color. If you paint a wall from a single can of paint, that wall will be many, many different colors in the real world. But quite often, items and landscapes in cartoons are depicted with 1 or 2 colors. So it just much easier to not deal with all that color and all that texture. So some cartoon graphics could probably get away with it. But trying to do real world things like a road or a cave system using the PSX technology just ends up with a big old ugly mess.
@@DuckAlertBeats I cannot tell you how magical pong was. One day you watched TV. If you wanted to play a game, you better grab a friend and break out some cards or your chutes and ladders game. Then, the next day, you can control what is on the TV!!! I was about maybe 8 or 9 when my family first got a pong game around maybe 77 or 78. And the arcade machine, like Space Invaders, that was even more magical.
SO I get what you are saying. I even thought SI on the 2600 was magical. Though funny enough, I was never amazed at the technology as such. Even as a small kid, I just assumed there was some computer stuff inside. How do they do that, didn't really cross my mind. It was how did they think of all this stuff. But today and really even then, I recognized the graphics weren't all they were cracked up to be. But I still enjoyed it and do to this day. But I'm not so overwhelmed then or today by nostalgia to say those graphics were great!!!
Plus, it wasn't a step backwards. It was a step forward. The step from nothing to something is a huge leap forward. But the step from beautiful hand drawn 256 color graphics on the SNES to the ugly mess of Tomb Raider was just a huge step backwards in my mind.
@@tarstarkusz Well of course realistic looking games won't age well on PS1, but to say there's no good looking 3D games just isn't true, they're just more anime or cartoony. Mega Man Legends 2 looks good. The N64's Pokemon Snap looked pretty good too.
The first game is far from graphically impression for the PS1
The lighting is great.
It'd be more accurate to say it is technically impressive.
It's covered in the video pretty clearly
If you look at it from the perspective of a casual user I’d agree but on a technical level it was definitely ahead of its time
Interactive tech demo really.
I fast forwarded until Jumping Flash and then stopped watching. Title is misleading. Not your best work.