Uh…bad street brawler was amazing
Holy crap that’s Bad Street Brawler. I have this game still. It’s straight up the worst game I’ve ever played.
To think all you had to do was wait 2 more years for River City Ransom to come out. If only precognition was real.
I decided to play Crystal Warriors recently because of the awesome cover art. DUDE I WAS NOT DISAPPOINTED. That game rules!
I’m reading this game’s wikipedia page and it sounds very fun. What a shame it’s stuck on the game gear and the now nonexistant 3ds eshop. I hope Sega does another re-release. Not that it matters to me 🏴☠️.
The “actual game” looks like a Altered Beast that takes place in a US park.
My games were all pirated. Covers had a handwritten list of all games on the cassette (and later CD). The first legit game I’ve ever seen was Mortal Kombat Trilogy and I remember being taken aback by the waste of using a full CD for a single game (iirc the game used just 30 MB of space on that CD).
ahem…
That’s the masterpiece that helped kick off the new age of gaming!
As someone who lived through that era, let me tell you, the gameplay graphics were never a disappointment. In your mind they looked as good as graphics today. The only thing I can remember being disappointed about was the Nintendo Powerglove. Man, what a collosal, non-working, over hyped advertising lies, piece of shit that thing was!
Mario 3 was the most mind blowing leap in graphics I think I’ve ever experienced.
The game in the example is Bad Street Brawler which is every bit as terrible as portrayed. I have it somewhere still. Could never get past like thr second level.
Nah there were definitely games that had disappointing graphics relative to what I was expecting lol
Although it’s true, we generally were more forgiving about graphics back then than we are these days.
The Wizard lied to me for 2 hours about that useless piece of plastic.
Dude, the guy who introduced it in the movie straight up said “it’s so bad!”
But if you would have saved it until today you could resell it foe a whole $25 more (of course accounting for inflation it’s actually $105 less)
…
Wait is that true? Did a rare Nintendo product depreciate in value???
It was a mattel product
I’m gonna press X to doubt on that one.
No, he’s right. The power glove was garbage from the get-go. Really cool cyberpunk thing on paper but … hell, we still aren’t there today!
We absolutely could be “there” today but the lingering aura of the Powerglove is still so powerful that nobody has tried to make a better one. It got clowned on so hard the first time that the echoes of that are still rippling through our global subconscious 35 years later.
Also, Nintendo would probably try to sue you if you sold a glove-based controller, even 35 years later.
Even if it worked well, the idea was bad from the start. No one wants to control a game with motion controls.
I dunno, Wii seemed to manage it just fine.
No X button on the controller. Just A and B.
I 💯 went through this disappointment. I used to also love looking at a game’s concept art because they always looked so much cooler and atmospheric than the game. I remember the inflection point clearly. I was playing Mass Effect 3 and walking around the citadel wards/docks, with it’s beautifully detailed textures, evocative colours, and painterly lightshafts, feeling absolutely enthralled, and thinking “Holy shit, they’ve finally done it, the gameplay looks better than the box/concept art.”
I’m so glad I finally got around to playing the ME series. Such a memorable trilogy of games
I remember renting Phalanx just because of the box. like “why’s this old man playing the banjo?” then you look at the back and it’s a friggin space shooter. I had to rent it.
The agency that created the box art created it for the exact reason you picked it up.
yeah after posting this I read the story on Destructoid about it. It worked. it was a meh game but the only reason I wanted to play it was because of that box.
You miss half the fun then, the imagination in your head of transforming the graphics into whatever you want. And then gameplay is the most important
The one game I remember getting based on the cover alone was Solstice.
That game was hard as fuck. I don’t think I ever saw the end.
Bangin’ music tho. I still sometimes get ear worms from it.
Honestly graphics aren’t really that important compared to the gameplay. Games such as those in the UFO 50 collection are a really good example of that. Also if you actually want a quality god vs satan game with old school graphics then I highly recommend Grimstone.
UFO 50 is so damn good
It’s the same with lots of indie games now. Oh, and mobile ones too
Back when XBLA got going there were so many games with anime character art that ended up being meh side-scrolling platformers with 8-bit pixel graphics. Looking at the Nintendo eShop… not much has changed. 😄
Back in the day, deep down you knew what you were really getting. I’m a little annoyed these days when indie games use marketing visuals that look like they could be in-game for a modern title and then it’s all pixel art style. I get that you don’t make a pixel art poster, but in that case, go all-in on an art cover don’t let it be mistaken for game graphics.
Bro, that stupid game with the guys that shoot barrels to get more fighters/better weapons looked fun. The actual game is a shitty base builder with timed progression, of course you can pay to get past the time locks. Fuck that company and every “influencer” that takes their dirty money.
I was always so disappointed in the 90s to see ‘realistic’ looking graphics and then you play the game and realize it was just a point and click game
There was a bunch of games that had really detailed graphics in the screenshots. Then you’d play them and realize they’re prerendered. A bunch of Saturn games were guilty of that.
Everyone always praised Myst for its great graphics. I always thought it was cheating because it was pre-rendered.
It was, though the difference was how early that game came out and the volume of images it had. It was pretty huge!
The novelty died out quick though, as everyone else started prerendering stuff.
Lots of the best games were prerendered! Donkey Kong Country, Fallout, Jagged Alliance 2, Duke 3D, the Pro Pinball games, just to name a few.
I do have a soft spot for prerendered graphics.
Technically the monsters in Doom, too.
BioForge was particularly impressive for the time, with mixed pre-rendered graphics.
I am not sure prerendered describes ja2 and fallout (some of the best games tbh). Aren’t those just sprites?
The rest I have not played.
The characters and environments in Fallout and JA2 are basically still frames (sprites) of 3D models at specific angles. They were rendered once on a powerful development machine, and converted to sprites for our lowly Pentiums and Voodoos.
Prerendered sprites by taking screenshots of the models on their single expensive silicon graphics.
Sure it was pre-rendered, but it was still impressive to see PCs do that at the time because of the sheer amount of storage it took. Myst basically required a CD-ROM drive because the game is basically made of pictures, PCM audio and video. There’s an astonishing amount of video in that game from the early 90’s. It was another symptom of CDs having an astonishing amount of capacity for their era. Myst couldn’t exist on floppy disk.
It is pretty cool to see what they’ve recently done to Riven. They really brought it to life in Unreal Engine.
What’s even more impressive is Myst was made on a Mac using slides.
Myst was published in what? 1993? Digital cameras were not common at the time. It was kind of cool just to see video of a person on a computer screen.
Even being prerendered, it was an intensely impressive game for 1993.
And it’s not like they didn’t have plenty of problems to solve.
Here’s an interesting interview with founder Rand Miller about developing Myst and how they were barely able to make it work due to the limitations of CD drives.
Crash Bandicoot had similar issues. The PS1 was designed to load about a megabyte at a time, in (charitably) several seconds, while displaying a static screen. It had no support for streaming data. So what Naughty Dog did instead was tell the BIOS to load the minimum page size, in the background… three or four times per second. This was about a thousand times more disc operations per hour than the PS1 was designed for. But the game looked so damn good that Sony went, okay, guess we support this now.
there were engineering competitions in the late nineties for realtime rendered games. they tended to look like vetrex games.
Speaking for myself but in 1995 or whatever I didn’t even know what the term rendered was. Game looked cool but I liked Tex Murphy Under a Killing Moon for state of the art graphics lol
but all the fun is taking the game graphics and transforming it in your head to resemble the cover art
