20th April 2010, 12:57 PM
Unreadphilosophy Wrote:When I look at the commerical for Perfect Dark, I can't help but laugh and think: "People used to go crazy for those graphics?"
Yes they did because those graphics were the most advanced to date. Lots of great ideas were used such as texture wrapping and stretching and the RAM pak was used for more than just higher resolution. The draw distance in PD is nearly infinite and unlike other shooter of the time, including Goldeneye, you routinely had dozens of on screen enemies to deal with. You could slow down time, manipulate objects with really nice physics, there was even rag doll effects that worked really well. The real time flinching meant that when you shoot someone in the head, it moved accordingly (unlike the rest of the body, however) which takes a lot of skill to program. Every area in PD had real time lighting and Rare used their tricks to color the polygons around non-dynamic lighting to make it interactive by applying gradient filters.
The 'stretchyness' of certain gun models, the movement of cloth (flags, Jo's dress) were all previously unseen. Turok 2 broke lots of ground as well, the first time a game could be viewed in higher resolutions in a home console and lots of previously never-done-before tricks such as flinching for the bodies of enemies (hit them in the shoulder and their torso moves accordingly) and full rag doll physics and beautiful lighting. The flamethrower actually illuminated areas like you'd expect a flamethrower to, very Dallas in the airshaft. The enemy AI was also way ahead of its time. It's easy to see why Nintendo snatched them up to form Retro Studios.
But yeah, of course it looks dated. Everything out today will look dated 10 years from now. But you can always notice the quality and the perfectionism of what was done with the tools at the time. cough rogue squadron cough.