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GLBOG 3D Games That Built Worlds With Minimal Processing Power
0Article by Dave Cabrera
Early 3D games on consoles were pretty tough stuff. Extremely limited hardware whether the threadbare original Playstation or the famously over-complicated Saturn meant developers had to get really creative building the new 3D worlds that players wanted to play in. It's an unimaginable situation today, but those severe limits are exactly what brought about the unique beauty of these games.
Resident Evil 2 (Capcom, 1998)
One of the top strategies used by the biggest games was to simply lay high-detail character models over still pre-rendered images of much more detailed environments: the whole screen looked beautiful, and the 3D hardware only had to do heavy lifting on the character models.
Squaresoft is most famous for this in the Playstation Final Fantasy trilogy (7-9), but I don't think this approach gets more visually impressive than in the Resident Evil series' breakout sequel. Having legitimately mastered the technique, the designers use the fixed camera angles to shoot their game like a horror film. Early in the overrun police station, players encounter a dripping puddle of blood, displayed front and center on the screen as we approach from the exit.
Of course there's something there something that wants to kill us and to proceed we must approach it, with dread, from the point of view of that slowly dripping pool of blood. It's a brilliant scene.
The remake of Resident Evil 2 is fine and worthy, but there is a unique terror to the way the original game is framed, and even the now-archaic "tank" style walking movement. You can't always go back.
Parappa The Rapper (Sony Interactive Entertainment, 1997)
Talk about getting around fancy 3D models; how about just making every character a wobbly paper cutout? This early music game doesn't get enough credit for going all the way on a concept and a style that nobody at the time was even a little bit sure would work.
Boasting only the simplest rhythm gameplay, Parappa The Rapper is a game that gets by entirely on the charm of artist Rodney Greenblatt's weird characters, Gabin Itou's weirder story, and musician Masaya Matsuura's very silly songs. The paper-doll characters work, somehow, as you forget about 3D altogether and start to accept Parappa's nonsense cartoon reality as he quests for rap greatness and the heart of a giant flower.
The Paper Mario series would, of course, bravely carry the paper-doll aesthetic forward long past Parappa's disappearance.
Bust-A-Groove (Square Enix, 1997)
Another early concept of what the music game would look like was Enix's Bust-A-Groove, a game not too far off from Parappa but with one-on-one dance battles. Coming late in the Playstation's life, both games have really impressive graphics for their hardware.
Bust-A-Groove 1 keeps the camera tightly locked on the dancing combatants, highly detailed models that show off in motion-captured dance routines under real-time lighting. The music is extremely campy and catchy, perhaps for that reason.
The sequel, on the other hand, goes really big and places the dance battles from the original in progressively more dangerous and exciting locations like for example the player dance battling in a helicopter against a 100-foot-tall alien monster.
Traditional rhythm games pretty much took over from there, and I guess there's the little dancing guy on your screen during DDR, but I'd rather see a Bust-A-Groove revival. Hamm is forever.
Tobal 2 (Dream Factory, 1998)
The experimental fighting game Tobal No.1 is largely remembered for being packed with a demo disc for Final Fantasy 7. It's pretty good; just unconventional. It didn't really get noticed until the sequel gave it a glow-up.
Never released in the US and thus a very popular import, Tobal 2 squeezed everything out of the Playstation in an attempt to make the absolute prettiest fighting game possible on the system. Running in the system's high-resolution mode in 60 frames per second, Tobal 2 is so smooth and clean it's hard to believe it's running on a Playstation 1. Extremely clean character models all shading, no textures are super-responsive to the controls, running free around the ring. A console-only fighting game that met and perhaps exceeded the arcade games of the time.
The full RPG dungeon mode, from which you can bring any of the game's 200 monsters into the main fighting game, was icing on the cake.
Vagrant Story (Square Enix 1999)
For my money, Yasumi Matsuno's moody dungeon crawl Vagrant Story is probably the single most beautiful game of this era; I wouldn't even think of a list like this without it. The Vagrant Story team somehow pulls off a full 3D environment and crams as much detail as they can onto every object on the screen.
The catacombs below the city of Lea Monde have a certain moody atmosphere that's enabled by the extensive dim lighting throughout. The lanky character designs fit their 3D models perfectly; the faces speak to us. Cleverly designed textures fool our eyes into imagining even greater depths. The beautiful, cinematic direction of the cutscenes push Vagrant Story's narrative beyond what we could have imagined the Playstation capable of. An unmatched game.
Metal Gear Solid (Konami, 1998)
We've mentioned that full expansive 3D environments with full 3D characters were still tough at this stage, but the era-making classic Metal Gear Solid is simply not concerned with the things that ordinary people worry about.
Hideo Kojima's team brought us an action game in a truly packed 3D world, one as narratively dense as any of his previous adventure games (Snatcher, Policenauts). It wasn't just the gorgeous 3D characters or the heavy script, it was the place where everything went down. Shadow Moses felt lived-in, and Metal Gear Solid gave players the power to really investigate and experience the place in a way no other game had even considered at this point in history.
Combine that level of detail with tight stealth gameplay, some of the great action set-pieces, and Kojima's trademark twists and tricks, and you have an all-time classic.
Bulk Slash (Hudson Soft 1996)
As a Sega guy, I refuse to leave the Saturn off the list. The Saturn was really where you went for excellence in 2D games, but a few brave developers managed to squeeze some excellent 3D out of its famously difficult architecture.
In another awesome game that didn't leave Japan (the Saturn has a lot of those), players pilot an anime-style giant robot the only 2D sprite object around small 3D city maps, transforming into a jet plane to dash across the map and blowing up everything in sight as they go. Stages crescendo into a battle against an even more massive enemy machine the size of a few city blocks. The old-school tank controls are pretty tough to re-adjust to in an analog joystick world, but the gameplay is frantic, fast, and deeply satisfying.
