Everything was limited to 480p. HDTV barely existed, and even VGA-out was a luxury. Yeah, the PS2 technically supports up to 1080i, but almost nobody used it, even when annual sportsball releases dragged on into the 2010s.
Meanwhile, screenshots were the worst way to see PS2 games, since its anti-aliasing was nonexistent. Some of its obscene fillrate comes from only emitting whole pixels. The Dreamcast’s goofy tile-rendered PowerVR thingamajig only looked silly insofar as character animation tech was still mediocre. Blue Stinger has the same intersecting-blobs setup as Metal Gear Solid, minus the deliberately low-detail models that left everything to your imagination. Seriously, Snake doesn’t have eyes. To the extent the Dreamcast has A Look that’s distinct from the PS2, it’s because Sega themselves were forced to make half the library, and they were cranking 'em out left and right.
If anything - the Dreamcast is extremely of-its-era. Sega was always an arcade company that stumbled into a home-console rivalry against an 800-pound gorilla wearing a red tie. Their games are very action-heavy, even years after Mario 64 embraced contemplative playground spaces. There’s a very go-go-go atmosphere. They eventually chilled out a bit and made Shenmue, famously the inspiration for a decade of open-world games… including their awful gameplay and ballooning costs.
Also they included a modem as standard. They were really trying. It just did not work out.
Well, yeah, we’re not disagreeing here. That’s a great example, with the modem being in there in a world where a bunch of people barely had access to semi-functional Internet, let alone the willingness to surrender it to a game console for online gaming. And that’s what I mean about the VGA out and HDTV support. Today both of those seem like forward looking thing if you squint hard enough, at the time they were irrelevant tech quirks.
And on the flipside, Sega sticking to the weird approach of still filling that library with arcade ports all over the place just as arcades were becoming irrelevant. Again, we’re not disagreeing on that.
I’m going to disagree about how well the PS2 presented in screenshots, though. I remember looking at printouts of stuff like GT3, Silent Hill 2, GTA III or MGS 2. The launch lineup was one thing, but that second batch looked insane on print. I remember laughing off the screenshots of Silent Hill 2 showing their projected shadows and calling my friends gullible for thinking any of that would be realtime. Turns out, it totally was. Once that stuff hit gaming magazines the Dreamcast may as well not have existed. Shenmue may have been impressive against late day PSOne stuff, by the time Shenmue II launched it looked a generation out of date.
… what?
Everything was limited to 480p. HDTV barely existed, and even VGA-out was a luxury. Yeah, the PS2 technically supports up to 1080i, but almost nobody used it, even when annual sportsball releases dragged on into the 2010s.
Meanwhile, screenshots were the worst way to see PS2 games, since its anti-aliasing was nonexistent. Some of its obscene fillrate comes from only emitting whole pixels. The Dreamcast’s goofy tile-rendered PowerVR thingamajig only looked silly insofar as character animation tech was still mediocre. Blue Stinger has the same intersecting-blobs setup as Metal Gear Solid, minus the deliberately low-detail models that left everything to your imagination. Seriously, Snake doesn’t have eyes. To the extent the Dreamcast has A Look that’s distinct from the PS2, it’s because Sega themselves were forced to make half the library, and they were cranking 'em out left and right.
If anything - the Dreamcast is extremely of-its-era. Sega was always an arcade company that stumbled into a home-console rivalry against an 800-pound gorilla wearing a red tie. Their games are very action-heavy, even years after Mario 64 embraced contemplative playground spaces. There’s a very go-go-go atmosphere. They eventually chilled out a bit and made Shenmue, famously the inspiration for a decade of open-world games… including their awful gameplay and ballooning costs.
Also they included a modem as standard. They were really trying. It just did not work out.
Well, yeah, we’re not disagreeing here. That’s a great example, with the modem being in there in a world where a bunch of people barely had access to semi-functional Internet, let alone the willingness to surrender it to a game console for online gaming. And that’s what I mean about the VGA out and HDTV support. Today both of those seem like forward looking thing if you squint hard enough, at the time they were irrelevant tech quirks.
And on the flipside, Sega sticking to the weird approach of still filling that library with arcade ports all over the place just as arcades were becoming irrelevant. Again, we’re not disagreeing on that.
I’m going to disagree about how well the PS2 presented in screenshots, though. I remember looking at printouts of stuff like GT3, Silent Hill 2, GTA III or MGS 2. The launch lineup was one thing, but that second batch looked insane on print. I remember laughing off the screenshots of Silent Hill 2 showing their projected shadows and calling my friends gullible for thinking any of that would be realtime. Turns out, it totally was. Once that stuff hit gaming magazines the Dreamcast may as well not have existed. Shenmue may have been impressive against late day PSOne stuff, by the time Shenmue II launched it looked a generation out of date.