What was the most technically advanced game?

[dsheinem]

Technically...

[Anapan]

I've watched a bunch of that guy's stuff. I think he might've been involved in the demoscene early on, which is primarily focused around exploiting weak hardware to achieve impressive visuals. There was a large community in Europe that competed to make the old microcomputers achieve seemingly impossible effects. Many of the people who were heavily involved in the hobby went on to found or join European game development companies and used the same or modified demoscene effects in their game engines. I can often tell Euro developed 2D games from the art style that seems to have stemmed from the same community - poppy colors and heavy use of dithering, hilight and shadows to get more detail out of the limited palette.

[Haoie]

Games released at the tail end of a cycle can be extremely impressive. It takes a while to learn to program for a system after all.

Example: God of War II - amazing!

[RCBH928]

I've watched a bunch of that guy's stuff. I think he might've been involved in the demoscene early on, which is primarily focused around exploiting weak hardware to achieve impressive visuals. There was a large community in Europe that competed to make the old microcomputers achieve seemingly impossible effects. Many of the people who were heavily involved in the hobby went on to found or join European game development companies and used the same or modified demoscene effects in their game engines. I can often tell Euro developed 2D games from the art style that seems to have stemmed from the same community - poppy colors and heavy use of dithering, hilight and shadows to get more detail out of the limited palette.

Yes that makes a lot of sense, the way he talks it is as if he specialised in that kind of thing. I have seen some demoscene stuff but I never heard of anyone taking advantage of it to create a game, as usually the demoscene happens a lot later in the life of the computer/console there is no market for it. I wonder what a demoscene for the Dreamcast can bring out.

On a side note, that guy sounds like a young "tech-nerd" say like MKBHD or Austin Evans, if he worked on the Sonic for the MD he must be in his 50's AKA grandpa age.

[benderx]

Donkey Kong Snes is a good franchise, but there some limitations. I recall Rare wanted the characters to have more frames of animation to make it look fluid. Soul Reaver/MetalGearSolid Silent Hill were my favorites. Resident evil on N64 was ported by another team, I believe so. Tony Hawk series went onto using motion capture. The Game developers were most impressed by Rodney Mullen Skate tricks.

I think most game developers wanted more data space, colors, increase gpu. Look at companies who took forever to release that game from CyberPunk to FF7 remake. Looking at Virtua Fighter/Tekken for the first time was breathtaking. Now Future of Virtua Fighter 6?

[Anapan]

Not gonna say anything about new games. Those are purchased effects & models piled on purchased graphics engines with large budgets and many months of boardroom meeting decisions on what those game assets could do. Yeah, skilled people made them, and should be commended, but I think for this topic we should limit the discussion to the original coder and their graphics team that did the best exploitation of the hardware back in the early years. <- Lol I was drunk. That's exactly what OP asked for. Yes, which game exploited any system the best?

Since we're talking about how devs got some crazy good looking effects in games we know, and we've already mentioned Jon Burton and his company's ability to stretch the hardware I recommend you watch the youtube video on Sonic R'd 3D environmental mapping texture rendering.
https://youtu.be/WDJgeuoaSvQ
There's some other coders that have decided to explain in terms we can understand, how some of those incredible effects were done with so little processing power, and without a coprocessor no less.

Bisquit explains some advanced 3D engine creation from scratch (not provided by SDK or addon chips).
Bisqwit

lftkryo
I'm always amazed at his chipophone and his ability to recreate the soundtracks of iconic games through it. Also some impressive early graphical coding explained.