A Story Of Graphics In Videogames

[flojocabron]

http://www.cartoonbrew.com/videogames/an-excellent-history-of-graphics-in-videogames-106342.html

I found this on an animation website, but the topic fits ours as well.

A five video run of the history of graphics from the 70's till now.

Brings up lots of classic and modern games and their achievements in gaming.

Have a look and get informed...But most of us may have already known this stuff.

[Sheado]

Great find =]
Just watched three of those episodes.. They're quite good - even if you've lived through all those older games. Here's the playlist for all 5 videos: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... LnjP865X1f

[Erik_Twice]

I thought it was a great topic and was excited to watch the videos but I found them shallow and dull. It's not an analysis, it's a list of games plastered with the same dull clichés about how ugly games were considered impressive back in the day.

It's also a pretty terrible list. I'll never understand how people can find Super Mario Kart to be notable and not mention Hang-On, Space Harrier or Virtua Racing. I just don't get it.

[J T]

It's also a pretty terrible list. I'll never understand how people can find Super Mario Kart to be notable and not mention Hang-On, Space Harrier or Virtua Racing. I just don't get it.

This series did mention Hang-On and Space Harrier (they might have mentioned Virtua Racing too, I can't recall out of all the early 3D racing games they noted), and as explained in the video, games like Super Mario Kart and F-Zero are notable for using the Mode 7 effect on the SNES, which was an early trick for achieving pseudo 3D graphics.

[Erik_Twice]

The thing is, I don't think the Mode 7 is important at all. Super Mario Kart was released in 1992, by that year we already had Daytona USA in arcades.

[J T]

As a kid playing games in those days, Mode 7 was amazing. In retrospect, it wasn't a huge breakthrough, but it was the primary way you saw anything approximating 3D on the SNES before the FX chip. Admittedly, more important milestones in graphics were happening in the arcade and PC scenes at the time.

[Sheado]

Interesting perspectives Erik_Twice and J T..
I wonder if our different perspectives have to do with our relatives ages and what was available to us at the time.

I'm 35 and in the 80s I was only exposed to a handful of Atari games. So pretty much everything they mention from that era was educational to me. In the 90s, I spent more time with my consoles than at the arcades - and so at the time Mario Kart was mind blowing.

I imagine it's difficult to put together a documentary like this since they're bound to have to leave stuff out.

[BossKnight]

I'm going to agree with Sheado. The list isn't bad, but it really is only effective if you lived during the time the game was released. Also, some people couldn't go to arcades or didn't have access to one so home consoles were their only option and vice versa.

Watching this was kind of like watching a WatchMojo top ten list, there are going to be mistakes due to personal preference and things are going to get left out due to personal preference.

Nevertheless, thank you for sharing this article.

[MrPopo]

The thing is, I don't think the Mode 7 is important at all. Super Mario Kart was released in 1992, by that year we already had Daytona USA in arcades.

Which is all the more impressive considering just how underpowered the SNES was compared to what you could do on an arcade cabinet. Remember how it used to be a bragging point about how close to the arcade your port was? Now it comes from the other direction; arcade perfect ports have to restrict themselves. There was a big kerfuffle when the US port of Deathsmiles removed a lot of the slowdown.

[marurun]

The thing is, I don't think the Mode 7 is important at all. Super Mario Kart was released in 1992, by that year we already had Daytona USA in arcades.

Which is all the more impressive considering just how underpowered the SNES was compared to what you could do on an arcade cabinet. Remember how it used to be a bragging point about how close to the arcade your port was? Now it comes from the other direction; arcade perfect ports have to restrict themselves. There was a big kerfuffle when the US port of Deathsmiles removed a lot of the slowdown.

I think Mode 7 was impressive, but it required dedicated silicon, and that money and design work would have been better spent giving the SNES a faster CPU and stronger sprite handling capabilities. Especially considering how the Mode 7 abilities were constrained to a single background layer, much like the system's transparency features.

Heck, look at the Neo Geo. The graphics handling system was actually relatively simple, comparatively. No background tiles at all. Everything's a sprite, and the widths are fixed. Only height is variable. A little too much custom silicon dedicated to audio, but in the end it still sounded good. Like, a billion sound channels, but they all do different sound formats with different features and limitations, and I think it would have been better to have been a little more uniform.