What advances in gaming blew your mind the most?

Quandary

The original Diablo blew me away, but mainly for it being such a complete gaming experience as opposed to it being an incredible technical advancement. That and all that glorious colour coded loot!

As far as technical leaps, then I would have to go for

- Doom was a real trailblazer.

- Descent - being able to fly through those 3d hallways was mind bending at the time

- Quake - the real blueprint for run and gun fps. Quake 2 multiplayer was incredible.

Kirby

Games that blew me away.......and that's the criteria here. Not just games you loved, but games that just blew your socks off.

A link to the Past. It was the first time I realised games could be something more than just.... games. They could be an adventure, a story.

The Final Fantasy VII cutscenes stunned me. They look archaic now, but at the time they were superior to anything else out there for the mainstream.

Crysis blew me away by how pretty it looked. And not just in tech demo's, when you actually played it on your own machine.

Bioshock. You watch the intro and think "What the hell have I gotten myself into...." And then of course the "Would you kindly" twist made me do the citizen kane applause meme in my seat.

The Last of Us intro let me know I was in for something special. Riveting, adrenaline pumping and yet emotional. Those Naughty Dog guys are f*cking talented.

Caovyn Lineah

Final Fantasy VII - At the time we had never see anything like it, those cutscenes were incredible. I still remember being blown away the first time I saw the Knights of the Round summon.

Gran Turismo - This game, this bloody game!!! I read every preview i could get my hands on which involved lots of copies of Edge and CVG (RIP) for months before this release, I totally bought into the hype and it delivered 100%. The graphics in this game and the general game play completely changed the genre in my opinion.

Then you have the likes of Ocarina Of Time which was the most expansive game I had ever played. The first time you get to take the horse out in Hyrule was mind blowing at the time when that camera panned out and showed you the size of the map.

Zero-Cool

Total NBA 96. 1st game I played on PS1. Couldn't believe the amazing 3d effects. I looked it up recently and it looks cack :pac:

Resident Evil 1 is a big one. I remember watching a staff member in Game play it while a crowd of us watched in awe. He wouldn't let anyone play it but the fact he had the bejaysus scared out of him by that dog made it worth it.

Batesy

Shadow of the Colossus

Mr E

A lot of my favourites have been mentioned already - Doom, and the first talkie games (either Day of the Tentacle or Prince of Persia 2 for me, I think)

I think the Wii and DS also deserves a mention here. When Nintendo got it right, they really got it right.

Mr E

Mr E wrote: »

A lot of my favourites have been mentioned already - Doom, and the first talkie games (either Day of the Tentacle or Prince of Persia 2 for me, I think)

I think the Wii and DS also deserves a mention here. When Nintendo got it right, they really got it right.

The LucasArts point 'n' click adventure games were pretty much my childhood.

QuinDixie

playing halo 2002 . It actually blew my mind that a game could look so good.

Damien360

Heavy rain. The balloon scene. I have never been drawn into a game so emotionally before or since.

http://youtu.be/J8mWBKFWWzw

Mr E

Jaaaaason! Jasooooooooon! Jaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaasoooooooooooon!

Pedro Monscooch

mark26ireland wrote: »

Rainbow Six Vegas was my first real encounter of online gaming and was just totally immersed by it, my missus bought me a 360 for xmas one year and I would easily go for 6-8 hours at a time playing the Calypso Casino map. Was brilliant. Like some1 mentioned on this thread , i would love to have them feelings again!

I loved the face scanning feature in that game. Can't believe how rarely its been used in the nine years since (especially the promises made when kinect was announced scanning your skateboard/ dress into a game). Sure, it was hard to get good results unless you really spent time on it. I remember someone scanned their baby. Maybe they stopped using the feature because this couldnt be bettered:

Eggonyerface

Tiger Woods had a feature of uploading your face. Worked really well

cherryghost

F-zero into Final Fantasy VII into Gran Turismo 3 into Half Life 2 into COD into Oculus

Damien360

For those of you a bit older like myself. On the C64, turrican.

Before I saw this game, everything was just vertical scroller, horizontal scroller or platform game. Turrican combined them all and the map was for it's time absolutely huge. It was fast and highly addictive.

The graphics were out there, turning into a wheel when you pressed space bar and go rampage. Sadly time has not been kind to it.

Retr0gamer

F-Zero: That super fast mode 7 scaling was like something out of the arcade. Of course it couldn't match Sega's Mode 7 hardware but it was close enough.

Mortal Kombat: It's one of the worst fighting games ever made but the digitised actors were so realistic to me at the time I thought graphics could never get better. It looks awful now and it wasn't even the first game to use that technique.

Doom: PC gaming was a total joke to me until I saw this game. At the time it was the most realistic 3D environment I had seen in a game. So bloody fast and the heavy metal inspiration hit my teenage self at the right time.

Daytona USA: Ridge Racer looked good but it just could not match Daytona USA in the arcade (pity the Saturn version was a dog). The firts ever game to use bi-linear texture filtering meaning it had no blocky textures up close. Still looks stunning in the recent 1080p re-release.

Resident Evil: Forget about FFVII, it was Resident Evil that fooled me with pre-rendered backgrounds first. I was wondering for a long time why the games backgrounds had such realistic lighting and none of the horrible 3D imperfections of other PS1 games. The game totally fooled me and it wasn't until a magazine review explained how FFVII worked that it finally clicked for me.

Mario 64: The first game to do 3D exploration right. The world design and movement were just perfect and made every other 3D game seem stiff and clunky.

3D accelerator cards: While most people had a 3Dfx I had a far superior Power VR card. Ultimate race was pants but looked spectacular while Tomb Raider at 1024x768 was absolutely stunning. It's a shame that 3Dfx became the industry standard

Unreal: I still think this game is a big old load of arse but the 3D engine at the time was so far ahead of everything else at the time. It even made Carmack and the Quake 2 engine look amateur which is some feat.

Sonic Adventure: The start of the 128-bit era, the game was awful but looked absolutely stunning, far better than anything I had seen before. The Orca whale segment blew me away. It was a long time before the PS2 caught up which brings me to....

Metal Gear Solid 2: The E3 demo of this game looked far better than anything else on any other console at the time. People thought it was all pre-rendered CGI so when the game was released, Kojima gave the player limited control of the camera to prove that they were in real time. The animation quality is still impressive. The tanker level just looked spectacular and it marked the point when the PS2 finally over took the Dreamcast visually.

Halo: For a lot of console people Halo's big open levels were amazing but for a PC player used to stuff like Operation Flashpoint etc. it was nothing new. However it was the first time I had seen pixel shaders used in a game. Turn on the flashlight and the textures are given a 3D depth that hid their low poly nature. PC games had support for this at the time but it wasn't widespread.

Gears of War: The 360 got off to a slow start but when Gears of War came out it was far and away the most visually stunning game on any platform. Even a few years after it's release it still looked stunning. The poor PS3 had a horrible time trying to match Gears of War, Resistance which looked like an upscaled PS2 game was laughable compared to GoW. It wasn't until stuff like Uncharted 2 and God of War 3 that the PS3 started getting games that outclassed Gears of War technically.

Damien360

Bought a HD TV for gears of war. Had a big ass TV for some of the game. Saved, plugged in new TV the next night and saw the flies buzzing around my characters head. Blew me away.

Den14

Deleted User wrote:

It's probably been done before in other games, but playing Fallout 3 for the first time and seeing NPCs actually interact with each other was great. It was such a simple touch, but added so much.

Deleted User wrote:

The interactive intros were amazing, where everything happened around you and you could be involved in them as opposed to being completely static. I think the first Medal of Honour did it great as well.

Damien360 wrote:

Bought a HD TV for gears of war. Had a big ass TV for some of the game. Saved, plugged in new TV the next night and saw the flies buzzing around my characters head. Blew me away.

The first Gears had the biggest visual impact on me. Graphics were generally darker and it looked very visceral with the blood effects and all that. The armour and skin had that sheen of light reflecting off it that made it look super real. The later installments were excellent gameplay wise but the graphics were alot less gloomy and were instead brightly coloured and suddenly it all just looked a bit cartoony

Fakman87

Like a few in here, leaving the dungeon and vault in Oblivion and Fallout 3 respectively. That's a feeling I haven't had before or since.

Another one was in heavy rain when you get out of bed and walk around your house doing trivial things. There was something very meta about it for me and I felt like it was a form of virtual reality developing.

johnny_ultimate

Less of an instant mind splat, and more a slow-dawning realisation - what digital distribution allowed games to do. I guess this can be pinpointed back to games like Geometry Wars (2) and in particular Braid earlier in the 360's lifespan in particular - the emergence of smaller, creative games, the type of game that certainly didn't exist during the previous few generations. One could argue though there was something of an equivalent during even earlier generations with 'bedroom programmers', and a less visible PC homebrew scene. But these titles opened up the floodgates. It's something that has continued since, where developers are no longer tied to big budgets, physical retail releases and strict commercial interests, and instead able to create games that are more narratively, formally, aesthetically, mechanically challenging and experimental. Where those sort of experimental titles were once rare treats (the likes of Ico) now it's near impossible to keep track of them all!

Certainly the last few years after the likes of Journey, Year Walk and Papers, Please and many more besides have made me increasingly delighted about the opportunities some of those earlier independent, digitally distributed titles opened up. Without any hyperbole they have irrevocably altered what games are are capable of, and it's a change whose magnitude is hard to measure since it's all still evolving. While there was definitely a sense of 'this is something new' when playing Braid for the first time, really the revolution has been a much more gradual thing.

Lemlin

GTA 3. It was such a jump from GTA 2 and PS1 games.

I don't think we'll ever see such a huge evolution again.

callaway92

This thread bringing back good memories.

For me (in short):

- Metal Gear Solid ---> The dialogue, the voice acting. Perfect.

- The tanker level in MGS 2

- PES 2 revolutionised sports games for me

A more recent one then would be the opening to Uncharted 2 or perhaps the opening scene of MGS4.

Retr0gamer

Hmm, never mentioned online advances:

Quake: Pretty sure this was the first game with server/client architecture and then Quakeworld came along with server browsing. It made online gaming such a breeze and the server set up facilitated the creation of friendships and communities online. The predictive netcode Carmack coded made matches over 56 kbps modem smoother than anything else and it would be the basis of how netcode would be coded from now on.

Honestly matchmaking and PVP server architecture can die in a fire, give me a dedicated server list.

Demon's Souls: After my shortlived counterstrike phase I was done with online gaming. All it offered were ways to shoot each other or help shoot aliens. Then Demon's Souls came along and showed that online elements can be used for far more interesting applications... even enhancing a single player campaign.

Nobody knew what the hell to expect of Demon's Souls or what the game expected from the player leading to community of players helping each other try to figure out the puzzle of this game. You could leave hints for other players. A new threat of players invading the your game was ever present but you could also enlist the help of other players. Then there was the ingenious Old Monk boss battle. Demon's Souls gave me a reason to play a game online again and changed my outlook on how online could be used.

In my mind Demon's Souls is the most important game of last generation (although you could maybe point to Braid as well for kickstarting the indie scene) and that opinion is only solidified by the scramble of developers trying to imitate it.

Gandalph

Going from the PS2's Medal of Honour Frontline D-Day, were there was max like 5 soldiers on the beach with you to the original CoD's D-Day were it felt like there were hundreds. It was my first real taste of FPS PC gaming which was always going to go hand in hand nicely.

I couldn't get my head around how mind blowing Morrowind was when I first played it, probably the first open world free roaming game I played. Nothing beats that first feeling in ones gaming career of completely forgetting about the main storyline in favour of exploring - "f**k it I'll become a prophet later, first I gotta go explore this cave for some catnip"

Unearthly

Going from the mega drive to the Playstation 1 was incredible for me.

Especially Fifa, having commentary for the first time, and then using the camera that was up close to the players. Also games like Destruction Derby and Crash blew me away.

SeantheMan

Gran Turismo on the PS1, I'd never seen graphics like it

mdwexford

Sega Saturn for me.

Seeing Virtua Fighter and Daytona USA on a home console was amazing.
Really felt like having an arcade at home for the first time.

Pedro Monscooch

There were a few games that were completely new experiences for me:

Pokemon Red -Capturing all 150, naming, trading and battling on the game boy. Hundreds of hours spent on the franchise since.
The Sims -I still remember the first person I drowned in a pool without ladders.
Eternal Darkness -Psycho Mantis in MGS was spoiled on me. These sanity effects made up for it.
Guitar Hero /Rock Band -A group of people clicking buttons in sync shouldnt feel so good.
Mario Kart DS -Fourth Mario Kart I owned and the first MK with online racing. Changed everything
1 vs 100 -I'd give anything for the return of a large scale interactive show like this
Minecraft -Made me feel like a kid playing lego. Loved discovering that game
P.T. -One of the craziest and best two hours of last year.

Then there the advancements in game trailers alone. My first time seeing these will always stick with me:
Gears Of War -Mad World
Dead Island's reveal trailer
Halo 3 Believe

CiDeRmAn

The advances that made the biggest impression on me were
Knightlore, on the ZX Spectrum, I never really liked the mechanics of the game but the graphics were so far ahead of everything else at the time, a solid 3D world.

3D Starstrike, another Spectrum game but this time really a clone of the arcade game Star Wars, and better than the later official port. It was incredible to see vector graphics so well realised on the computer, in colour and at speed. It's sequel was slower but featured solid vectors and was similarly mind blowing.

Uridium, on the C64, arcade perfection that never appeared in the arcades, smooth scrolling shmup action, glorious and easily better than many of it's arcade only peers, a tribute to programming ingenuity, even more impressive was the port to the Spectrum, a computer that really shouldn't have been capable of it.

The Need for Speed on the 3DO, utterly sublime, this is the game that turned me off arcades forever, with a deep racing experience over beautifully rendered tracks and realistic cars and traffic. The tracks are point to point, long and stuffed with character and the draw distance is phenomenal.

Return Fire, redefined the multiplayer experience with what I feel is the definitive local 2 player head to head game. Beautifully balanced vehicles, clever use of music and audio samples, as well as video clips. Couple this with a tangible world to play in, feels like a toy set just beyond the screen surface. Brilliant! Purists know the 3DO version is superior to all others.

Wipeout, I know the first sequel is the one most jump on to be the best, and it well might be, but the first one rewrote the book on what we could expect from the nascent console generation, smooth hyperfast racing action, great use of both music and corporate logos to make a racing league that felt authentic, and all on the Playstation.

Jumping Flash, on the Playstation, the only game to get 3D platforming right, by allowing you to see your feet! The sequels add much to the template, but the first one is fantastic.

Metroid Prime, on GC, it tied the aforementioned 3D platforming into an organic world and a story to match. Beautiful in a way that was perhaps emulated in Gears of War, with Metroid Prime pioneering the look of places that were once beautiful and sophisticated but are now in ruin. Weapons, abilities, suits, progress, environmental puzzles, all intertwined, its a game that has lost none of it's relevance and is still well worth playing today. It's telling that with releases over the years they have done nothing to update the visuals, bar 16:9 support, only the controls, unlike Halo it needs no HD remastering!

jumbobreakfast

Frontier Elite 2 on the Amiga (procedurally generated galaxy with thousands of star systems on one floppy disk)
3DFX cards (A huge advance in 3d graphics at the time, there has not been such a jump since)
LAN gaming (C&C Red Alert and Duke Nukem 3D)
Battlefield 2142 Titan Mode
Oculus Rift playing Elite: Dangerous

Beefy78

RopeDrink wrote: »

Definitely - got a massive bunch of the series all nicely packed up in the attic (along with about 1,000 other cassette tapes, not including Amiga discs and NES & Amiga cartridges).

Since my childhood days (where computers in general had me awed) - I've just been toiling through the generations ever since, casually nodding in approval with each step/jump it has made.

Aside from C64/ZX to Amiga, I can't really recall any moment I've been in awe. It's just 'expected' to keep on progressing, much like every technological media has/will.

I think it is a bit of a shame that you feel that way. I'd guess I'd go back as long as you do in terms of gaming (still have my Atari 2600 at home) and I love that I can still be surprised by what video games can do.

There are three times that I can pinpoint which made me completely rethink everything that I thought I understood about what a game was capable of. They are Metal Gear Solid, Grand Theft Auto III and Journey, so the most recent is about four years ago. I don't doubt for a second that something else will be out there which will give me that feeling again and I can't wait for it to happen.