Enjoyably Hideous Graphics

[Mister Six]

A few possibilities; Harvester, Darkseed and Darkseed II.

No, but thanks anyway - it's definitely not the Darkseeds; newer than that by a few years, with pre-rendered backgrounds.

[St_Eddie]

No, but thanks anyway - it's definitely not the Darkseeds; newer than that by a few years, with pre-rendered backgrounds.

Phantasmagoria?

If not, it would help if you could recall the tone/sub-genre.  For example, all of my previous suggestions have been horror based.

[Phil_A]

No, but I wish I had! It looks entirely like something I'd design!

I will say in it's a favour it had some terrifically weird and imaginative design and a great soundtrack. The problem was working out what to do was basically impossible. The game features about five or six different worlds which are spread across five CDs(so there is a lot of disc swapping) and there's no direction for where you're supposed to go or where you should be using the myriad of crap you carry around with you. It's also full of bugs(at least one game breaking) and is very, very hard to get running on any system above Windows 95.

I've often thought if it ever turns up on GOG or Steam I would probably give it another go, but it seems unlikely given how few people have heard of it.

[Bhazor]

Probably the newest game in this thread.

Haydee a third person hardcore Metroidvania. Made by sex offenders. It really shows how impressive modern game engines can be. Amazing lighting effects, built in post processing, beautifully rendered generic assets. Then you see the one thing the team made from scratch, the main character.


https://www.kotaku.com.au/2016/09/steam-top-seller-with-sexy-protagonisthas-terrible-breast-physics/

The "sexy" protagonist seems to be the game's main feature. At least according to the reviews and store page

"Haydee" is a hardcore old-style metroidvania mixed with modern-day third person shooter and platformer mechanics. As well as a sexy character.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/530890/Haydee/

[garbed_attic]

The fact that so many people seem to find the main character sexy makes me simultaneously feel really depressed and better about finding Jynx sexy as a 14-year-old.

[Al Tha Funkee Homosapien]

Mid-90s point-and-click semi-3D puzzler Normality is a contender for this category. The first person bit is actually not too terrible and I found it quite funny at the time, but the cut scenes, character models and voice acting is very of its time.






https://youtu.be/nY81Mv_BITM

[garbed_attic]

As with AI in the "real ugly films" thread over in the film sub-forum, I'm generally willing to give dystopias a pass on this!

[asids]

A woman?

Tim is what?

[St_Eddie]

Haydee a third person hardcore Metroidvania. Made by sex offenders.... beautifully rendered generic assets...

Fixed that for you.

[Mister Six]

Phantasmagoria?

If not, it would help if you could recall the tone/sub-genre.  For example, all of my previous suggestions have been horror based.

Don't worry, mate. It'll come to me or it won't. Probably the latter because the memories are barely there.

[Replies From View]

"A majestic view, that."

[Replies From View]

The brilliant (its a hidden gem) Blue Stinger on the Dreamcast:

Water Tank Fart Simulator 2000?

[Bhazor]

Haydee a third person hardcore Metroidvania. Made by sex offenders. It really shows how impressive modern game engines can be. Amazing lighting effects, built in post processing, beautifully rendered generic assets. Then you see the one thing the team made from scratch, the main character.

Just had a speedrun of the game pop up in my recommends. What an absolute piece of dog shit game. As a bonus its one of the most cringiest comment sections I've ever seen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2EXfsEzol0

[The Boston Crab]

Really sexy game

[Consignia]

Really sexy game

B+ / S / A

??

[the]

something about Thighs Of The Robots

[St_Eddie]

Really sexy game

Take out the 'y', replace it with an 'ist' and you're halfway there.

[Hecate]

Realist Recognise Really sexy game.

[Clownbaby]

I decided to bust out Aladdin In Nasira's Revenge last night for a bit of nostalgia. It's even more ropey than I remember. Particularly in the Palace levels, the environment feels paper thin cause there's big dark empty areas that only fill out when you run closer to them. I remember it being a bit eerie when I was little, all those dark bits. I wonder why an official Disney game would have such shonky quality control? Surely the big dark bits count as a glitch, because sometimes it's nearly impossible to see a vine or a platform in time to jump on it. Also the characters (on my one anyway) are either completely silent when they should be speaking, or the recorded voice is all scrambled. Hot creaky mess of a game but strangely a e s t h e t i c.

Palace

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HrE_LtZ0iT4

Irritatingly shadowy magic carpet level

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OxFC64C9RCg

One thing I always really liked though is the music.

[Ferris]

Those games with the huge "blank" panels that only pop in when you get close feel very familiar to me, to the point where they don't even look odd. Which in itself, is odd.

Was it quite a common thing on mid-tier PS1 games? Must have been, I guess.

[gmoney]

Why were they making an Aladdin game in 2000? I have no memory of that at all.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

If I hadn't been told otherwise, I might have thought this was a screenshot from Bloodborne.

[buzby]

Those games with the huge "blank" panels that only pop in when you get close feel very familiar to me, to the point where they don't even look odd. Which in itself, is odd.

Was it quite a common thing on mid-tier PS1 games? Must have been, I guess.

It was called pop-up (or pop-in) and was related to the draw distance (the furthest visible object that would be drawn by the 3d rendering engine they were using)  the programmers had chosen, which was determined by how much processing time was available between each vertical blanking interrupt (the 50/60Hz signal sent to the TV to turn off the electron guns to allow the beam to return to the top of the screen, ready to draw the next frame). One tactic to disguise this was to add a 'fog' to the renderer so you didn't see the limits of the draw distance. This worked well on a game like Silent Hill (it was also very common on N64 games - Turok was infamous for it's fogging due to a very short draw distance)

Sony supplied a standard 3D rendering library with it's PS dev kits, but many of the bigger software houses either modified the Sony one, cross-compiled their PC-based 3D engines to work with the PS's graphics chip and limited RAM, or developed their own from scratch, optimised to suit their game code (an example being Polyphony Digital's renderer developed specifically for the Gran Turismo games).

One of the problems you got with a lot of middling games is that was well as using tthe standard rendering library the developers also used a tactic that was carried over from the 16-bit home computer days - the ST and Amiga had very similar processing hardware ,but the Amiga had massively better graphics and sound capabilities due to all it's custom chips. However, to reduce development costs many software houses used the same codebase for both versions of their games, developed on an ST-based platform (as it had better development tools available, such as the DevPac 68k assembler) and then cross compiled them for each platform which meant the Amiga version never fully exploited it's hardware advantages. The same thing happened with the PS1 and Saturn (except by that time the development systems were PC-based) so the games were never fully optimised for the hardware of either system.

[Sebastian Cobb]

^ still goes on today with cross-platform titles doesn't it? I'm sure I think that was one of the problems with the ps3, that the chip was a bit esoteric so its abilities didn't often get realised due to how many titles were cross platform.

IIRC a big difference between the N64 and the PSX, along with fog was that the 64 had the ability to blur when you got close to walls and stuff, where as on the playstation it just pixellated. In the day it seemed good but these days it just feels like trying to play games while wearing your nan's bifocals.

[Phil_A]

One of the problems you got with a lot of middling games is that was well as using tthe standard rendering library the developers also used a tactic that was carried over from the 16-bit home computer days - the ST and Amiga had very similar processing hardware ,but the Amiga had massively better graphics and sound capabilities due to all it's custom chips. However, to reduce development costs many software houses used the same codebase for both versions of their games, developed on an ST-based platform (as it had better development tools available, such as the DevPac 68k assembler) and then cross compiled them for each platform which meant the Amiga version never fully exploited it's hardware advantages.

That was only the case early on, wasn't it? Publishers like Psygnosis didn't take long to nail their colours to the mast, and fairly soon you had titles like Shadow Of The Beast being specifically designed to take advantage of the Amiga's special features, while the ST port was a complete pile of shit.

[Clownbaby]

Why were they making an Aladdin game in 2000? I have no memory of that at all.

There was a crap Aladdin animated sequel that was straight to video around that time sk that's why they made a game in 2000

[alan nagsworth]

Love this thread. I'd like to contribute Alone in the Dark, which, whilst admittedly an impressive looking game at the time of its 1992 release, is a monstrously clunky looking thing now. Look at this fucking guy at 27 minutes in here: https://youtu.be/9lWaQe8LPW0?t=1622

Here's a picture of it if you're a lazy fucker:



I'll also concede that part of what makes it so unsettling, especially playing it a few years later when the N64 had already come about and I would have been around 10 years old, is the look, feel and sound of it. The stiff controls that are akin to the difficulty moving one might experience in a dream, the awful music, all of it.

Good lord:



This faceless winged bastard in particular used to scare the absolute life out of me:



Well! That's me off to bed then!

[Bhazor]

I've always had a soft spot for the Leisure Suit Larry games. That is except for Box Office Bust which has the most hideous character models I've seen. Bearing in mind the game is supposed to be a sex comedy. The downgrade from Magna Cum Laude (2004) to Box Office Bust (2009) is baffling.


Magna Cum Laude (2004)


Box Office Bust (2009)

Then you see the game in action.

https://youtu.be/-4XFW4nnuEQ?t=4m30s

The pop in, the complete lack of lip synch, the glitchy shadows, the one colour textures, the chucky cheese level animation, the choppy frame rate, the hideous hideous character models. You can't take your eyes off it. I come back occasionally just so I can appreciate how much better other games that came out around that time looked. Like cleansing your pallete between meals with a piece of dog shit.

[garbed_attic]

I've always had a soft spot for the Leisure Suit Larry games. That is except for Box Office Bust which has the most hideous character models I've seen.

Definitely not enjoyably hideous... quite upsettingly hideous really!

You reckon any of the Larry games are good then? I think Larry 1 might have been the first game I ever played. To memory, Larry 2 was overly ambitious and not really playable without a walkthrough; Larry 3 had some genuinely funny moments, with Larry look especially gone-to-seed, possibly the best of the series; 4 was a masterpiece; 5 was a slog and generally a bit tedious; 6 was porny; 7 was the only one which was arguably actually sexy, to memory, but don't actually think I played it!

[Bhazor]

Well Magna Cum Laude is great. Some deceptively sharp writing in there and the kind of dumb broad boner comedy you'd expect from a 90s gross out and enough softcore wank material to keep 14 year old me locked in his room.

I'd say Consolevania pretty much summed it up for me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUJtEdP5FLc

As for the pointy clicky games. I haven't played all of them but as someone who prefers Sierra style to Lucas style I've enjoyed the ones I have tried.