Which ps1 game has the best graphics

Simba1 Member. Dec 5, 5, Resident Evil 2 was look quite good. Green Yoshi Attempted to circumvent ban with an alt account Banned. Oct 27, 2, Cologne Germany. Rayman 2. Krusty Banned. For the time I always considered RE2 as being the best looker on the system. Whalerider84 Member. Oct 29, VIgilante 8. The Praiseworthy Member. Oct 30, 6, Jimnymebob Member. Oct 26, 13, I feel like Legend of Mana was probably the prettiest PS1 game, but that had the benefit of being 2D.

I'd go with Tekken 3 in terms of 3D, though. Livia Banned. Feb 9, Bergen. Dec 30, 1, Zaragoza, Spain. Calverz Member. Oct 28, 2, Croc legend of the gobbos. Knight Member. Oct 25, 13, San Francisco. AbandonedTrolley Member. Oct 26, Essex.

Colony Wars or F1 Alej Banned. Nov 1, Suikoden II on 2D. FFIX in 3D. Overall it is Suikoden II. Skittles Member. Oct 25, 6, Symphony of the Night. Vagrant Story has also the double quality of having incredible cutscenes that really felt like a movie in a believable way.

I still get chills over the intro to this day. I wish people would include some images in their posts. Oct 25, 9, Demblant Self-requested ban Banned. Oct 25, 7, France. So we're left with a handful of 2d games.

Of course, there's Symphony. And also the superb Legend of Mana. But for my money, even though I've barely played it, the one with the best visuals is Saga Frontier Nuclear Muffin Banned.

Oct 29, 4, Oct 28, 29, This story encompasses governments, multinational pharmaceutical companies, and conspiracies that extend to the top. Although best known at the time for its roleplaying games, Japanese developer Square was no one-trick pony. Set in the future during a war between Earth and the Moon, you pilot a spacecraft through horizontal, 2. Apart from the generally slick presentation, players of the 90s loved the tactical variety enabled by the system of picking up new weapons, as well as the way bosses have discrete parts you can target and disable.

Ace Combat 2 is an arcade-style combat flight simulator, meaning its overall design favors gameplay over simulation. It offers semi-realistic physics and the ability to carry far more missiles than the payload of an actual jet, though difficulty settings allow more hardcore players to fly with greater realism.

Gameplay divides into relatively linear, objective-based missions. You can upgrade jets using resources that unlock based on how successful you were at destroying all targets. The Caskett family of treasure hunters travels by his side as he journeys across the land and scours ruins for ancient machinery in search of the legendary Mother Lode.

It features memorable characters like your nemesis, the pirate Tron Bonne, who has a solo spin-off game released between two Legends entries. Eschewing the convention of health bars entirely, character blows either cripple particular body parts or outright kill.

This gives the game a rare degree of realism and a much more tactical and punctuated tempo. There are eight realistically simulated weapons and six characters with different stats, abilities, and proficiencies with each weapon. This allows players to run and climb between them, using the environment to their advantage. Bushido Blade has one direct sequel and another similar title on PS2, but those smooth out some of its quirks too much for our taste.

Street Fighter set the bar for the best fighting games in the early 90s, but Tekken focused on brawling in 3D instead. This arcade-native franchise set the high bar for 3D fighters and perfected the formula with its third entry, Tekken 3. Previous entries made relatively little use of 3D depending on the character. Tekken 3 , however, tones down the hyperbolic jumping and allows every character to easily sidestep around its opponent, opening up one of the most tactically complex and polished fighting systems in video games to date.

Tekken 3 instantly became a classic thanks to its large and diverse character roster and truly impressive graphics for a console port of an arcade game.

It still holds the honor of being the second-best-selling fighting game on any platform of all time, after only Super Smash Brothers Brawl. While Tekken and Bushido Blade blazed new paths for fighting games in 3D, Capcom stuck to its roots with Street Fighter , the fighting franchise that started it all.

While some felt that the 2D, sprite-based graphics dated the game, in retrospect, it looks great, and holds up magnificently well as one of the most comprehensive and refined entries in the Street Fighter franchise.

The Darkstalkers series of 2D fighters is a cult and critical darling but had middling commercial success. Relatively standard but solid mechanically, the series is mostly recognized for its anime-meets-gothic-horror aesthetic, with characters like vampires, mummies, demons, and a yeti. The look was magnificently refined by the time Darkstalkers 3 arrived, with detailed and fluidly animated sprites that are among the best of the decade.

First released in arcades, the game endured several character additions and balance changes by the time it arrived on the PS1 — all of which made it one of the fastest, fun, and charming fighters to play at home. As the eponymous Crash, you are a mutant bandicoot an Australian marsupial on a quest to stop Dr. Neo Cortex from taking over the world using an army of other mutant animals. In its prime, the game was most highly praised for its visuals, which felt more like a playable cartoon than any game to date.

The original PlayStation was a fascinating, transitional period in game design, with a big uptick in processing power and storage opening up a whole new field of possible aesthetics to explore. The Oddworld games are a prime example. You play as Abe, an enslaved member of the Mudokon race, leading a rebellion against corporate overlords plotting to make them a cheap food source. The story is light, fantastical nonsense, as the eponymous Rayman fights and jumps his way through various themed worlds to defeat bosses and save the day.

The Rayman franchise subsequently took a detour into 3D platforming. In the immediate wake of the Sonic vs. Mario console wars in the early-to-mid 90s, marketers still held onto the idea that a console needed a family-friendly platforming mascot to succeed.

En route to vacation, Spyro is pulled through a magical portal into a fantastical world under assault by a warlock who gleefully discovered there were no dragons to bother him. Spyro collects a series of MacGuffins to progress through nonlinear levels and unlock new traversal and combat abilities.

The whole first trilogy, developed by Insomniac Games, is well remembered for its colorful characters and solid platforming. For our money, however, the second one hits the sweet spot of refined mechanics and freshness. This Namco-developed platformer is set in Phantomile, a fantastical realm manifested from the dreams that people forget soon upon waking.

You play as Klonoa, an anthropomorphic resident of Phantomile with a power-granting wind spirit that inhabits a ring. Gameplay is standard for the genre, with enemies, puzzles, and bosses spread out across themed levels. Praised by critics at its release, Klonoa can be hard to find now, particularly outside of Japan, but is fondly remembered as a solid and enjoyable platformer.

Released in , one year before Super Mario 64 , Jumping Flash! In this third-person platformer you play Spike, a boy tasked with traveling through time and using a variety of gadgets to capture hyper-intelligent apes that meddle with history.

Acclaimed at the time and fondly remembered since its debut, Ape Escape a seminal moment in platforming video games for both its cutting edge presentation and mechanics.

The game is a challenging brain-tickler, giving more replayability with the ability to create new levels, a feature that unlocks after completing the game once. Although released in the West, it was most successful in its native Japanese market, garnering several sequels.

In it, Chibi versions of Street Fighter and Darksiders characters perform a silly battle that reflects what is happening in the puzzles. Hyper-realistic driving sims are flourishing , but Gran Turismo was the cream of the crop for virtual gearheads in the PS1 era. The gameplay, graphics, and physics are largely unchanged from the first game. In its prime, Gran Turismo 2 was a bestseller among both car fans and regular gamers, establishing Gran Turismo as a key racing franchise that has endured through the present.

Players pilot extremely fast, anti-gravity ships through dramatic, high-tech courses. Gameplay revolves around extremely high speeds, power-ups, and utilizing air brakes for drifting turns around tight corners. Expanding and improving upon the first game in nearly every way, Wipeout XL was praised in its day for its intense gameplay and slick presentation, including a techno music soundtrack and detailed background world-building that made it feel like the immersive, futuristic entertainment video games promised to become since the s.

Crash Team Racing is handily the best kart-style game available on the PlayStation. Developed by Naughty Dog, this game supports up to four players and features characters from the Crash Bandicoot trilogy.

Like its obvious inspiration, it tosses in aggressive and speed-boosting power-ups, drift turning, and whimsical, elaborate courses. Unlike Mario Kart games, Crash Team Racing progressively unlocks additional characters and modes as players complete the story.

It offers the standard, time trial, and battle modes as well. It filled a definite niche for PlayStation owners during its prime. Not every great game needs to reinvent the wheel, after all. Converting from the original arcade versions is always a challenge, but with the third installment, not only was the source game more refined, but the PlayStation port was almost arcade-perfect.

The animation speed is impressive and the textures are carefully crafted to make the limited polygon models look as solid as possible. The main compromises from the arcade are a slightly reduced polygon count and the backgrounds are 2D graphics instead of the the sharper 3D backgrounds found in the arcade. Tekken 3 and Tobal No. Both games run 60 fps at i — the best frame rate and video output you can get on the PlayStation. One could argue that the textured polygons in Tekken 3 are more taxing than the shaded polygons in Tobal but the shading may have actually aged better.

However, Tobal No. Release Date: December 11, While the original Gran Turismo was groundbreaking at its release, the sequel had subtle improvements such as lighting effects and car rendering that made it one of the most convincing PlayStation games on the market. I realize that the car shining is just a visual trick intended to add to the realism, but you may notice that when cars go through a tunnel, the sunlight still bounces off their hoods. While they ended up becoming an annoyance to gamers over time, the instant replays were a technical showpiece at the time capturing a cinematic point of view to the race, dynamically showing off the top-notch car models and environments.

Release Date: December 3, However, in order to compete with the high standard set by the Gran Turismo series, Namco had really bumped up the graphic quality of the Ridge Racer series in Type 4 while staying true to its arcade roots. Ridge Racer Type 4 features a smooth framerate locked solidly on 30 frames per second and lots of detailed textures throughout the game. Also, it hits that target much more reliably that Gran Turismo 2.

The environment design and use of color is especially praiseworthy. When you are cruising around the tracks, the moody skyscapes either share the warmth of summer or put you under the trance of night. The lighting effects on the cars and roads for night time driving give the game a stylish edge that retro gamers appreciate in Japanese-made titles.

The whole environment of the game is a work of art and was otherwise unseen on the Playstation. This approach minimizes warping compared to other Playstation games, including the original Ridge Racer. Ridge Racer Type 4 has a great use of light sourcing and things like brake lights give off tracers in tunnels. There are still some imperfections in this fourth Ridge Racer increment, however, such as seeing the opposing cars through walls.

Release Date: September 8, While Ridge Racer was the main technical showpiece during the Japanese launch of the Playstation, WipEout was one of the biggest draws during the Western launch. On top of pure speed, WipEout pulled off the impressive floating element of these futuristic vehicles. On the console programming side, we had to scramble a little.

We had a few PC developers with experience and we brought them in-house and asked them to help train others. The problem is that the resolution of the polygon XY positions and the necessity to have T-joints led to cracks in the track. We never did eliminate all the cracks. Even though the game was an early success, the team often focused on the less enthusiastic reviews of the game.

It really focused our attention on what we needed to achieve for a sequel. From a gameplay perspective, the primary changes were the weapons making it less about slowing down opponents, but bringing more of a grown-up Mario Kart combat strategy and the way the ships reacted to walls. From a graphical standpoint, the new Quake Disruptor bomb sends an impressive track-altering ripple down the track.

The game also improves some of the light sourcing and visual effects to increase the polish. This leads us to WipEout 3, which is an easy selection of the most technically impressive installment on the PlayStation. Overall, this third installment is faster, deeper, and more refined than its predecessors. Graphically, WipEout 3 really shines: the race craft model have more detail and the environments feel more immersive. The effect is dramatic, especially when you have ships with a number of different colored contrails in a tunnel.

Pop-up is nonexistent in single-player and not too rough in the multiplayer. Release Date: November 13, This innovative and influential series was set out to mimic the feel of s and s car chase films and put you in partially faithful recreations of actual city layouts such as Miami, LA, and New York that you could explore in an open world environment. Of course, the Driver series was running well on the PS1 and squeezing what performance it could out of the hardware to make it all happen.

Just as Crash Bandicoot and Spyro gradually redefined what was possible in the platformer genre with 3D capabilities, Driver broke through the expectations for driving games. Up until then, 3D games were very limited in where you could go although Midtown Madness was released just a couple months earlier on the PC.

We had to pull all sorts of tricks to make the game work let alone look good. They are exciting and great but tend to be a bit rough around the edges. In addition to managing the large worlds and all the graphical and data implications that accommodate them, Driver also focused on effects to the vehicles such as crash deformations, flying hubcaps during sharp turns, and smoke from the exhaust pipe and burned rubber. However, when you learn that some of the team members also worked on Destruction Derby, this seems like a natural progression.

On top of the already impressive game, Driver also featured a Director Mode that let the player shoot and cut their own mini car chase movie with a simple, freeform camera system.

However, touches like this showed that the team at Reflections had a real passion for creativity, maxing out the hardware, and making people take notice. Unfortunately, the frame rate does take a hit a bit more and there are some pop-up issues. You can tell the team was really trying to squeeze every last bit that the Playstation could muster.

Release Date: April 22, In between their work on Gran Turismo and Gran Turismo 2, the team at Polyphony Digital dove into a completely different genre, but still managed to re-define what one could expect out of the Playstation hardware. The game features mecha designs by Shoji Kawamori of Macross fame and the graphics age quite well.

Omega Boost is interesting evolution of the shmup genre that wanted to bridge the gap of 2D sprite-based artwork and 3D capabilities that the bit era afforded.. The graphical presentation is impressive, especially during some of the faster interactions. Amazing trail and particle effects are used for many things, reflective surfaces cover the mechs and enemies, and enormous and beautiful explosions erupt every time you take out a boss.

Omega Boost often runs at 60fps, but can occasionally drop to 30fps. Despite the dips in the technical frame-rate, this impressive range in frame rate coupled with the overdraw effects and particles make it seem smoother than it is. Overall, Omega Boost is a fresh take on a classic shoot-em-up. In some ways, the game reminds me a bit of a 3D take on the arcade classic, Defender — along with the inclusion of a map indicator to help you find where more enemies are.

Release Date: September 30, John Carmack had an astounding talent for coming up with new ways to push the limits of hardware primarily PCs to display 3D environments and Quake II was one of the biggest breakthroughs in an already impressive string of achievements. Of course, Quake II was developed with a modern at the time personal computer equipped with cutting-edge accelerated graphic cards and the Sony Playstation had a much more modest hardware setup especially when it came to the limited amount of RAM.

The end result was incredibly impressive considering the circumstances and became the standard for how first-person shooters on the Playstation or even the Saturn and N64 should be judged.

In an interview , Chris Stanforth, head of development at Hammerhead, shared. To compensate for the lack of a floating-point capable processor, Hammerhead tackled the challenge with coding the main computational parts of the game engine in assembler and using algorithms with an ideal balance of accuracy and efficiency.

Stanforth added,. To work around the RAM limitation, Hammerhead reformatted the original Quake II maps into chunks that could be handled by the Playstation and then reconstructed them to be as close the original as possible. To keep authenticity levels high, the team avoided using common visual tricks like fogging or strategically placing walls to keep the draw-distance from getting out of hand. Some of the larger levels had to be split over two loads on the Playstation to help compensate for the RAM deficiency, however.

There is no skybox for the levels many gamers may never notice — instead, a flat Gouraud-textured purple sky is drawn around the top of the level. Other compromises compared to the PC version include removing the ability to crouch mostly to simplify the control scheme for the Playstation controller.

Many graphical effects were able to replicated in creative ways on the Playstation. Colored lights for levels and enemies and yellow highlights for gunfire and explosions manage to make an appearance on the Playstation version with the addition of lens flare effects located around the light sources on the original lightmaps. Quake II on the PS1 manages to run in by , at a smooth 30fps regardless of the number of players.

There is a minor loss of detail for the four-player mode, but given the relatively small display area given the smaller displays of the day , it was a modest sacrifice.

Release Date: October 10, The original game was then scrapped as Argonaut Games the company behind the SuperFX Chip on the Super Nintendo was tasked with creating a first-person shooter based on the movie property instead.

Instead of pumping out a mediocre shooter, Argonaut worked on an impressive 3D engine that was ahead of its time. Everything is completely 3D with multi-levels, platforms, ladders, and vents all present. In addition to lighting and explosions, steam blasts and scripted events like a alien bursting through a doorway play out dramatically.

And while many of the levels are fairly expansive, it uses the claustrophobic nature of the Alien setting to help keep draw distance and RAM usage under control. Having been delayed a full three years after the Alien Resurrection film had been released had some benefits as Half-Life released a year earlier in seems to be a bit of an influence in visuals and the minimalistic but engaging sound design.

Great sound design with excellent environmental effects and Alien screeches right out of the Fox archive immerses you into the horror setting. The lack of background music leaves you to wander eerily quiet hallways and listen for Aliens through background hums of equipment or clinking of chains.

Distant, echoing sounds of screams and gunfire suggest battles elsewhere in the ship, and the chirps of the motion tracker raise hairs on the back of your neck just as they did in the films. Alien Resurrection was the one of the first console FPS Uprising-X is possibly the first to really use a twin-analogue stick control model that had moving and aiming assigned to different sticks on the Dualshock players also have the option of using the Playstation mouse.

The game was criticized heavily for this decision in as it was so different from people were used to. In hindsight, however Alien Resurrection looks innovative and influential as its configuration has now been embraced by nearly every modern console FPS. Release Date: May 2, Star Fox 64 was released just a few months earlier, but even Nintendo fans in the era admitted that Colony Wars looked more impressive than their new Star Fox installment.

Overall, the Colony Wars graphics engine did sometimes show some polygon dropout and texture tearing, but still managed to push the limits of the Playstation in terms of speed and detail. The series was always known for a slick frame rate for a top-notch space flight experience. The enemy ships are colorful and intricate, right down to fluctuating thrusters and cockpit design.

All the refinements and enhancements that Red Sun saw over the original installment were easy to overlook compared to what gamers were seeing out of the new consoles. Release Date: October 14, In the late 90s it was easy to get mesmerized by the stunning cutscenes and the pre-rendered graphics that were executed so well, but with Threads of Fate also known as Dewprism in Japan the RPG powerhouse fully embraced real-time 3D and managed to make it shine in a timeless fashion.

Instead of the rough 3D models we typically experienced in the bit era, characters in Threads of Fate are cleaned up and smoothed out with minimal pixelated edges. The faces feel more anime-inspired and expressive. The full character models show minimal collision detection errors despite all the animations with limbs, faces, weapons, and clothing. Instead of relying on Gouraud-shaded polygons like more of the cartoon-like games and much of the N64 library , Threads of Fate upgraded to texture maps on many of its polygons, which added a solid level of detail to characters.

Backgrounds are also rendered in real-time, but feel like they belong in a cut-scene from one of its peers. Combining the cinematic ability with the simplistic and child-like art-direction, Threads of Fate feels timeless, evokes an emotional response at times, and provided something unique in an era that could be likened to an awkward adolescence of 3D gaming. Release Date: December 23, When the Saturn started to die off especially outside of Japan , Capcom finally focused on pushing the Playstation to its 2D limit, it found that it could finesse their code into pumping out 30 frames per second of one of their latest arcade hits with relatively acceptable list of compromises.

The Playstation actually received the first home port of Street Fighter Alpha 3, which makes the port all the more impressive. Sound was heavily compressed, which caused the voices and sound effects to be more muffled than later home ports.

Some fake transparent sprites were also swapped in for actual transparencies. One of the more noticeable compromises was there was more loading time with static character artwork between battles. On the bright side, the Playstation port did add extras such as six more characters and some new game modes. Overall, the Playstation port of Street Fighter Alpha 3 is a solid gameplay experience with some of the tightest controls amongst console ports and is right up there with Castlevania Symphony of the Night for top 2D honors on the platform.

Release Date: April 18, This fighting game developer rivalry-turned-collaboration is best known for ports to the likes of the Dreamcast and the sequel also saw ports to the PS2, Xbox, and Gamecube. Capcom used the NAOMI hardware a stronger arcade version of Dreamcast hardware for Capcom vs SNK instead of the aging CPS II, so they were able to do a lot of cool graphical techniques and presentation eye candy to breath fresh life into sprite-based 2D fighters as the genre was starting to lose mainstream appeal.

The compromises is the Playstation port are strategically subtle and are more than acceptable considering what the developers had to head with. Capcom vs SNK on the arcade had a slick graphical presentation that give chills to hardcore 2D fighting fans in Capcom managed to maintain most of that feel on the PS1. The characters are missing their dynamic shadows against the backgrounds, but its just feels more like a classic 2D fighter with them removed.

Character sprites are somewhat reduced, but they look pretty darn close to the originals. The HUD where the power bars are shown have lower-resolution artwork, but no big deal. What is impressive is that many of the stages that had animated elements like floors on the construction zone are still dynamic and give the impression of being like the arcade version.

Of course, like on Street Fighter Alpha 3, there are increased load times and downgraded sound as well, but nothing too bad. Marvel vs Capcom was also a hot title around this era and featured the tag team feature in the arcade and on the Dreamcast port. The Playstation port was severely crippled, cutting the ability to switch characters within a round, among other things.

Capcom vs SNK, however has a different approach to the multi-character team matches. The Resident Evil franchises was kicking into a high gear in the late 90s, but those that wanted something different in the survival horror genre were welcoming to fresh take that the team at Kronos Digital Entertainment delivered with Fear Effect.

The original Fear Effect ended up being one of the very first cel shaded games to hit the market but Jet Set Radio for the Dreamcast was shown off earlier and came out only a few months after Fear Effect.

For both Fear Effect games, Kronos also opted to work full motion video footage that streamed or looped in the background to give a fluid and realistic environment. This gave much of the impression of dynamic 3D-generated backgrounds without rendering resources used. Of course, this took up much more space on the CD-ROM, which explains why the adventure takes up four discs. There are also some syncing issues with the video backgrounds that pop up occasionally. Kronos did, however, design the character models to smoothly transition between realtime and pre-rendered sequences.

This execution gives Fear Effect a technical edge over some examples in the Final Fantasy games that utilized pre-rendered elements. The Playstation strength was not in its 2D graphics. Instead, it was primarily built to show off its 3D capabilities.

However, much like the Capcom fighters mentioned above, Castlevania Symphony of the Night made use of the Playstation hardware creatively to give the 2D powerhouse in the Saturn a run for its money.