Reach for particle effects. ODST for mood (tho most of it is in music so it doesn’t really count) Halo 1 for doing communicating visual themes with broad simple strokes.
2 was just… Guh… You can rely on normals all you want, but when your texture budget is that low you may wanna lay off. Lighting effects were great for the time though. Real time shadows (of any kind) on the original xbox is a big deal.
I nominate ICO. I can’t believe no one’s mentioned it.
If it hasn’t been said already, Dear Esther’s remake is absolutely stunning in terms of art direction AND graphics. It wins hands down for art direction and comes pretty close for graphics. Holy shit does it look good.
As for Halo Reach, textures and geometry look like shit from distance greater than 3 feet, especially when playing splitscreen.
That’s why I said particle effects.
I stand by Ico.
Assassin’s Creed two is pretty spectacular as well. The shear massiveness and intricacy of the towns is just stunning. Fallout New Vegas looks very nice as well. The art direction for Deadspace is amazing, and so are the graphics. Tomb Raider Underworld may have shit gameplay but it looks beautiful. And as others have said Metro 2033 is unique and beautiful, but the blur effects, especially on the surface, are a little overdone.
I vote for Borderlands for getting cel-shading right. I mean, ultimately cel-shading can only ever be cel-shading; it can’t ever get to the level of realism of some other games (because it is, by definition, cartoon-like), but Borderlands gets it as close to perfect as any game I’ve ever seen. The only other cel-shading game I’ve played was XIII, but Borderlands just seems…better, from what I remember.
No More Heroes looks better than Borderlands.
I had terrible frame-rate issues playing NMH.
Riven had some of the best renderings and most realistic, surreal settings I’ve ever seen in any pre-rendered game.
I mean look at this. These renderings are from 1997 and they haven’t been outgunned by any pre-rendered games in the succeeding years. Riven also kept this high quality throughout the entire game (unlike it’s following games). This plus the amazing lighting and a bad-ass apocalyptic finale made it one of the best looking games of that time - and it still looks great!
That’s probably more to do with the different setting. No More Heroes was in a sprawling metropolis, whereas Borderlands is in a bland post-apocalyptic desert. No More Heroes had lightsabers, No More Heroes has bullets. I think Borderlands look better, but its not really comparable to NMH. Further, my PC > the Wii’s graphics.
Its now my first priority for my Wii emulator.
Worryingly I’ve seen realtime games that look somewhat better.
Mad world looks better than NMH.
No love for FFXIII? Game’s graphics are incredible. Of course there’s barely any interactivity in the game world itself, but FF games are typically known for pushing the graphics envelope.
Fix’d
I don’t play them, but I know that their cinematics were always very nice… but I don’t really count that as the game’s graphics considering they were usually a pre-rendered videos.
Cell shading. Auto Modellista pulls it off with aplomb.
Assassin’s Creed 2 again, even though it’s already been mentioned, for pulling off both beautiful scenery AND long view distances without affecting performance.
For an oddball suggestion, Toy Story 3, for making the graphics look so good and similar to the quality of the movie - on my gaming laptop some of the gameplay looks better than the pre-rendered cutscenes!
Cinematics wise, the “UR Example” would probably be the Metal Gear Solid games. 3 in particular was amazing. Quite advanced for it’s time. 4 still looks almost photo-realistic in places. I really wish I had a PS3, because I would buy MGS4 in a heartbeat. (played some of the first act on a friend’s PS3, been wanting to get it ever since)
Also, most of the cutscenes in FFXIII were real time rendered, or rendered in-engine and run through DivX. There are a few pre-rendered CGI cinemas here and there, but when I first played it, the difference was very difficult to tell. Now of course you can easily tell which were pre-rendered and which werent.
Jet Set Radio Future for XBOX also looked absolutely brilliant.
Metro 2033, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Mirrors Edge, Crysis , Aliens vs. Predator, Prey, Zeno Clash, CoD, Mass Effect, Psychonauts, Half Life 2, Mafia 2…and others. All of them have something to offer, wheter stunning atmosphere, unique art style or awesome graphics effects.
But my favourites are Metro 2033 - for the overall visual style of the game providing incredible atmosphere(from level design, guns, characters, to watches, bullet lighter and so on) and generally CryEngine - for the graphic technology. I am looking forward for Crysis 2 of course, but i am even more curious about their Sandbox level editor. I really hope they release the developer kit for free as well as UDK for non comercial purposes.
Eg did you know that everything in CryE3 is rendered in real time? It means you can see in editor exactly how it looks like ingame, only click and you’re playing, no more compiling. Do you need to texture the peaks of the mountains differently than other parts of the map (some snow texture)… you can easily apply the texture only for certain altitude of terrain or for certain pitch. Just imagine how much time it would take in Hammer.
Agreed. JSRF is still pretty damn awesome cell shading. A pity it didn’t sell.
Founded in 2004, Leakfree.org became one of the first online communities dedicated to Valve’s Source engine development. It is more famously known for the formation of Black Mesa: Source under the 'Leakfree Modification Team' handle in September 2004.