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Cool visual effects in 16bit console games.

nkarafo

nkarafo

Member
One thing i love about the 16bit generation is how, in the later part, developers pushed the graphics and visual effects to prolong it's duration during the start of the 32bit generation. Donkey Kong Country was maybe the first game that went all in with this as far as i remember. After that game, more and more 16bit games would look nothing like how they used to look.

During that time, i remember being impressed by various visual effects that i never thought possible in those consoles. Prerendered animations played a huge part in this. Anyway, i think my favorite visual effects came from Vectorman on the Mega Drive. Particularly the first scene, where you can see those beautiful flags animate super smoothly, looking like real (for the standards back then)

AtKEsLP.gif
Click to expand...
This is the only gif i could find showing those nice animations.

The game was also the first i had ever seen emulating the lens flare effect, which was pretty popular later on, during the 32bit/N64 generation.

vectorman1_11.png


VectormanShadowHighlightExample.png



So, what were some other cool visual effects that looked amazing for 16bit technology?

If possible post some pics or gifs :)

EDIT: Enhancement chips like Super FX, etc, are legitimate so feel free to post games that are supported.
 
nkarafo

nkarafo

Member
Here's another one from Yoshi's Island

YoshisIsland-Raphael.gif


This game could just as well be released on a Playstation level console and nobody would complain.
 
K

Krejlooc

Banned
nkarafo said:
One thing i love about the 16bit generation is how, in the later part, developers pushed the graphics and visual effects to prolong it's duration during the start of the 32bit generation. Donkey Kong Country was maybe the first game that went all in with this as far as i remember. After that game, more and more 16bit games would look nothing like how they used to look.

During that time, i remember being impressed by various visual effects that i never thought possible in those consoles. Prerendered animations played a huge part in this. Anyway, i think my favorite visual effects came from Vectorman on the Mega Drive. Particularly the first scene, where you can see those beautiful flags animate super smoothly, looking like real (for the standards back then)


This is the only gif i could find showing those nice animations.

The game was also the first i had ever seen emulating the lens flare effect, which was pretty popular later on, during the 32bit/N64 generation.

vectorman1_11.png


VectormanShadowHighlightExample.png



So, what were some other cool visual effects that looked amazing for 16bit technology?

If possible post some pics or gifs :)
Click to expand...

So cool thing about Vector man is that it uses a rarely used VDP mode called shadow and highlight mode. What this does is apply a bitshift to the value being drawn onto the screen, so the values automatically shade darker or lighter as they're drawn per an intensity flag. It's applied on a per-tile basis, so it's not really useful in all scenarios, but vectorman uses it well. One of the coolest things about highlight and shadow mode is that, thanks to the bitshifting math, you can arrive at color values that don't exist. Meaning you can use this mode to display colors outside of the normal 64 color master palette that the Genesis can display.

Vectorman uses shadow and highlight mode to simulate lighting effects. Look at shadows in those shots - those aren't being created by dithering. They're essentially true transparency.

You can simulate similar transparency in any planar graphics system, btw, by sacrificing a bit for an intensity value.
 
L

lazygecko

Member
nkarafo said:
Donkey Kong Country was maybe the first game that went all in with this as far as i remember. After that game, more and more 16bit games would look nothing like how they used to look.
Click to expand...

I think Aladdin was probably the first one to really make people go "Woah! Video games can look like THAT?" since it was largely divorced from the traditional pixelart look.
 
K

Krejlooc

Banned
Ninja Dom said:
Thunderforce III, the fire level.
Click to expand...

So this is done using a sine look up table. It's per-row line scroll. The Genesis is too slow to do tan/sin/cos calculations on the fly, so what they'd do is pre-calculate sin(x) and store it in a look up table, and use line count of each row of pixels as the offset to look up in the table. To save space, they'd actually only calculate 1/4 of sin(x) from 0 to 255 (so about 63 values) and use negation to flip around the circle to save space.
 
Sapiens

Sapiens

Member
lazygecko said:
I think Aladdin was probably the first one to really make people go "Woah! Video games can look like THAT?" since it was largely divorced from the traditional pixelart look.
Click to expand...

Completely agree. DKC came rather late on the 16-bit effects wars, and leverage its pre-rendered visuals more than its effects (which I recall to be pretty cool as well, I guess, but not on the same level of what is happening in other games).
 
K

Krejlooc

Banned
Sapiens said:
and leverage its pre-rendered visuals more than its effects (which I recall to be pretty cool as well, I guess, but not on the same level of what is happening in other games).
Click to expand...

This is absolutely false, and a pet peeve of mine. Whenever people talk about DKC, they always dismiss the graphics because of pre-rendered sprites, when that's a terribly superficial way of looking at the game. Donkey Kong Country in fact does use tons of hardware-pushing tricks, far more so than most contemporaries on the SNES. Look beyond the sprites and you'll see DKC is do way, way more than the average SNES title.
 
Sapiens

Sapiens

Member
Krejlooc said:
This is absolutely false, and a pet peeve of mine. Whenever people talk about DKC, they always dismiss the graphics because of pre-rendered sprites, when that's a terribly superficial way of looking at the game. Donkey Kong Country in fact does use tons of hardware-pushing tricks, far more so than most contemporaries on the SNES. Look beyond the sprites and you'll see DKC is do way, way more than the average SNES title.
Click to expand...

I'll give it a second look. It's been 20 years.
 
nkarafo

nkarafo

Member
Sapiens said:
Completely agree. DKC came rather late on the 16-bit effects wars, and leverage its pre-rendered visuals more than its effects (which I recall to be pretty cool as well, I guess, but not on the same level of what is happening in other games).
Click to expand...
I'm pretty sure both Aladdin and DKC were released in the same year.

Fast edit: I was remembering wrong.
 
S

supermarioworldE

Banned
The weather effects in the first stage of Ghouls N Ghosts (Genesis/SuperGrafx)

GhoulsNGhosts.gif


Reflection effects in Castlevania Bloodlines (cant help but chuckle at the candles)

Castlevania-Bloodlines-Castlevania-&



As well as the wobbling/rotating Leaning Tower of Pisa

Bloodlines.gif


Castlevania+-+Bloodlines+%2528USA%2529020.jpg
 
K

kinggroin

Banned
Krejlooc said:
So this is done using a sine look up table. It's per-row line scroll. The Genesis is too slow to do tan/sin/cos calculations on the fly, so what they'd do is pre-calculate sin(x) and store it in a look up table, and use line count of each row of pixels as the offset to look up in the table. To save space, they'd actually only calculate 1/4 of sin(x) from 0 to 255 (so about 63 values) and use negation to flip around the circle to save space.
Click to expand...

Probably not the way I'd have done it, but that works too.

Wut
 
D

dlauv

Member
Phediuk said:
Mad Hatter boss fight in The Adventures of Batman and Robin for the Genesis.

https://youtu.be/CR0MWpOK1RU?t=2819
Click to expand...

Adventures of Batman and Robin on the Genesis always astounds me.

It's like they got hold the license and went "Let's fuck 'em up." The gameplay, music and visuals at times are so intense and seemingly inappropriate, but they totally work.

Does anyone know any other good, edgy uses of licensing? Aside from Batman Forever on Saturn I mean, lol.
 
T

thechristoph

Sir!
Krejlooc said:
This is absolutely false, and a pet peeve of mine. Whenever people talk about DKC, they always dismiss the graphics because of pre-rendered sprites, when that's a terribly superficial way of looking at the game. Donkey Kong Country in fact does use tons of hardware-pushing tricks, far more so than most contemporaries on the SNES. Look beyond the sprites and you'll see DKC is do way, way more than the average SNES title.
Click to expand...

I'd appreciate a deeper explanation. I get a lot out of your recaps of old tech.
 
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