I vividly recall this being one of the best looking Gamecube games and even now it still stands pretty strong. I don't know how they did it. It's just so good looking
If an artist is good enough, he can create photo realism with only a paper and one pencil. These artists understood light and colour very well. It was not simply a case of pump up the engine with more power so it can process more. A great artist with cheap tools will do a better job than a bad one with expensive tools.
The water's nice, but dude, there's this thing where you stand around on one of those staff powerup pads and their bright light and hard shadows (from the ornate grating) bounce off of Fox's model. The fur mesh gets this gorgeous diffuse glow around its strands, and the shadows move and bend around every bit of surface! I remember being _so_ blown away by that effect and later, as tech advanced, what really shocked me was that for the longest time, it just didn't seem to age. Like, Fox himself began looking more and more dated under most other circumstances, but put him in said light and suddenly it looked like I was playing an Xbox 360 game. Bonkers. Surely it must be clever visual trickery, rather than any sort of real-time simulation of light from a source diffusing through fur: those shadows getting cast all the way to the top of your head (while most pads are only uplights) does make that pretty obvious in hindsight. There's only so much you can accomplish on Gamecube hardware. But man, it just looks _good._
Oh yeah, it's not just the water, but so many other things too in this game that stand out. The way they did reflections and lighting in this game combined with the rich diverse colour pallette really does make it feel leaps ahead of the time. I've been very surprised coming back to it. It's such a cool experience because on the one hand like you say it's crossing into 7th gen levels of detail and fidelity, whilst on the other, with the colours, the maps, and other details it feels more like an N64 game. It's really eye opening to how much of a difference small things can make. Thanks for your comment, I enjoy knowing others care about small details like that as much as I do. They all add up. Many modern games today don't come close to this.
@gamingeffectslibrary Yeah, 6th gen in general is odd in that sense. Some of the more well-crafted models can look surprisingly high definition and those machines could do some sweet hardware T&L stuff, so in a vacuum like those staff caverns, things can look pretty amazing, and elements that are dependent on transparency and transformation (like believable bodies of water) took a *massive* step up over the early 3D consoles. But at the same time, the still pretty woeful texture RAM and lack of enough CPU horsepower to use techniques like displacement mapping usually makes the _environments_ quickly fall apart under scrutiny. The geometry and texturing is worlds behind what 7th gen could do.
Anyhow, SFA is still a lovely looking game, like you said, the great use of color and lighting make it stand out among its contemporaries and even later games. Plus the sheer amount of polys it pushed was pretty spectacular for 2002. Rare just knew what they were doing! Especially amazing when you consider that much of it is just N64 assets redone in record time. 😮
@@markkoetsier6475 The aesthetics of a game are more than the sum of it's parts and games like this prove it. It's true in terms of drawing larger spaces it was limited but also it gave the oppurtunity for other creative techniques to be used. I have been playing Okami recently and the pre-rendered mountains look so good. It feels like these days developers only think about power whilst in the early 3D era there were so many cool tricks people used to make things seem more than what it was. It imbued a sense of charm that you don't see as much these days. Things are streamlined, people pick the usual path now as the "correct one" but going back to old games you realise there was a huge variance of interpretation to how graphics could be processed. Much like with gameplay, controls, and lots more that also feels like its become repetitive.
@gamingeffectslibrary It's certainly true that limits breed creativity, and it's cool to see the varied ways in which developers crafted a semblance of a world out of the digital equivalent of paper and popsicle sticks. Charm's the word. Still, I also appreciate that modern hardware has knocked down lots of hard barriers to what can be done and can be shown, creating all sorts of opportunities for new experiences and allowing artists to go wild, since they basically have total freedom to bring their vision to life. I expect to see an example of this in the newly announced Okami sequel, speaking of which! The way of getting there is definitely streamlined which can feel pretty boring, and it's not untrue that Unreal Engine games tend to have a similar look to them and that many big budget games go for some bland form of pseudo realism, BUT there are also lots of artistic masterpieces that just couldn't exist on early 3D tech, or would be severely hampered in their presentation. Or even their gameplay. What I'm trying to say is: be careful not to lose yourself in nostalgia. It's easy to forget that there was lots of low-effort crap back then as well, we just remember the high points.
I vividly recall this being one of the best looking Gamecube games and even now it still stands pretty strong. I don't know how they did it. It's just so good looking
If an artist is good enough, he can create photo realism with only a paper and one pencil. These artists understood light and colour very well. It was not simply a case of pump up the engine with more power so it can process more. A great artist with cheap tools will do a better job than a bad one with expensive tools.
Reminder this was on a console that only had 40mbs of ram
And this is how it ran day one with zero patches straight out the box as well.
this game would have been so much better if it had been its own IP and rare didnt feel the need to shoehorn in the starfox theme
For most of it it doesn't feel like it's got anything to do with StarFox except for him being in it.
The water's nice, but dude, there's this thing where you stand around on one of those staff powerup pads and their bright light and hard shadows (from the ornate grating) bounce off of Fox's model. The fur mesh gets this gorgeous diffuse glow around its strands, and the shadows move and bend around every bit of surface!
I remember being _so_ blown away by that effect and later, as tech advanced, what really shocked me was that for the longest time, it just didn't seem to age. Like, Fox himself began looking more and more dated under most other circumstances, but put him in said light and suddenly it looked like I was playing an Xbox 360 game. Bonkers.
Surely it must be clever visual trickery, rather than any sort of real-time simulation of light from a source diffusing through fur: those shadows getting cast all the way to the top of your head (while most pads are only uplights) does make that pretty obvious in hindsight. There's only so much you can accomplish on Gamecube hardware. But man, it just looks _good._
Oh yeah, it's not just the water, but so many other things too in this game that stand out. The way they did reflections and lighting in this game combined with the rich diverse colour pallette really does make it feel leaps ahead of the time. I've been very surprised coming back to it. It's such a cool experience because on the one hand like you say it's crossing into 7th gen levels of detail and fidelity, whilst on the other, with the colours, the maps, and other details it feels more like an N64 game.
It's really eye opening to how much of a difference small things can make. Thanks for your comment, I enjoy knowing others care about small details like that as much as I do. They all add up. Many modern games today don't come close to this.
@gamingeffectslibrary Yeah, 6th gen in general is odd in that sense. Some of the more well-crafted models can look surprisingly high definition and those machines could do some sweet hardware T&L stuff, so in a vacuum like those staff caverns, things can look pretty amazing, and elements that are dependent on transparency and transformation (like believable bodies of water) took a *massive* step up over the early 3D consoles.
But at the same time, the still pretty woeful texture RAM and lack of enough CPU horsepower to use techniques like displacement mapping usually makes the _environments_ quickly fall apart under scrutiny. The geometry and texturing is worlds behind what 7th gen could do.
Anyhow, SFA is still a lovely looking game, like you said, the great use of color and lighting make it stand out among its contemporaries and even later games. Plus the sheer amount of polys it pushed was pretty spectacular for 2002. Rare just knew what they were doing!
Especially amazing when you consider that much of it is just N64 assets redone in record time. 😮
@@markkoetsier6475 The aesthetics of a game are more than the sum of it's parts and games like this prove it. It's true in terms of drawing larger spaces it was limited but also it gave the oppurtunity for other creative techniques to be used. I have been playing Okami recently and the pre-rendered mountains look so good. It feels like these days developers only think about power whilst in the early 3D era there were so many cool tricks people used to make things seem more than what it was.
It imbued a sense of charm that you don't see as much these days. Things are streamlined, people pick the usual path now as the "correct one" but going back to old games you realise there was a huge variance of interpretation to how graphics could be processed. Much like with gameplay, controls, and lots more that also feels like its become repetitive.
@gamingeffectslibrary It's certainly true that limits breed creativity, and it's cool to see the varied ways in which developers crafted a semblance of a world out of the digital equivalent of paper and popsicle sticks. Charm's the word.
Still, I also appreciate that modern hardware has knocked down lots of hard barriers to what can be done and can be shown, creating all sorts of opportunities for new experiences and allowing artists to go wild, since they basically have total freedom to bring their vision to life. I expect to see an example of this in the newly announced Okami sequel, speaking of which!
The way of getting there is definitely streamlined which can feel pretty boring, and it's not untrue that Unreal Engine games tend to have a similar look to them and that many big budget games go for some bland form of pseudo realism, BUT there are also lots of artistic masterpieces that just couldn't exist on early 3D tech, or would be severely hampered in their presentation. Or even their gameplay.
What I'm trying to say is: be careful not to lose yourself in nostalgia. It's easy to forget that there was lots of low-effort crap back then as well, we just remember the high points.
Pikmin 2, enough said.
Guess which game is going into my rotation soon?
Why is there a triceratops
What, you mean your sewer doesn't have one?
His name is Tricky he is a ruling monarch of dinosaur planet
@loreparanormal
And he's hungry
@@cymtastique And he wants to know where you're going.
He won't leave me alone.