Beautiful 2D Shows What the PS1 Is Made Of

the PlayStation was huge revolutionary it changed gaming but it was all about 3D wasn't it games like Tekken were where Sony's first console left its Mark all thanks to its polygon based Graphics yes everything on the PlayStation is constructed out of flat shapes as we can see with a bit of emulator trickery stitched together into 3D models then filled out with textures that's surely how it all works if you want wanted real 2D the Sega Saturn was the only choice that generation the PlayStation couldn't do proper 2D Graphics at all it could only fake them in 3D somehow at least that's what you might have heard online but it's really not quite true honestly so let me tell you all about the wonderful world of gorgeous 2D games that really show what the PS1 was made of The Adventures of Low Max is a good place to start I I think a totally unjustly forgotten diamond from the depths of the '90s that's aged just as well as the finest pixel art wine often seems to it should also let you know if you didn't already that the PS1 can definitely do with 2D because this has got it all color detail animation and parallx scrolling transparency effects Sprite scaling and rotation all cooked to perfection ction a banquet of oldfashioned Graphics goodness service alaf Fran all on the table at once the work of designer Hank nberg and programmer Irwin clofer whose unmistakable style had previously given us lionart and Flink on the Amiga yes it does have that busy Euro platformer style that's probably its biggest flaw in fact there's so much detail it's hard to work out what you're supposed to interact with and what you're supposed to to avoid a design philosophy that might make Moto's eyebrow twitch but you've got to admire its balls to the wall maximalist approach such a shame that this ended up being ignored at the time it looks so good it's got six layers of Parallax but when this came out in 1996 the 2D platform probably seemed well temporarily old hat in the face of Mario 64 and Crash Bandicoot which both came out that same year but all my wittering aside how do the graphics work here how does the Apparently 3D focused PlayStation do it well more emulator debug feature stuff we'll show this is all polygons square or rectangular polygons this time mostly and not stitched together into 3D models but all arranged in layers you might even call them Sprites but they do work quite a bit differently from the Sprites of systems from from earlier generations and yes Square Sprite blocks is one of the reasons that the Sega sat is said to be better at 2D games but Sony's Playstation has a very similar facility built into specially designed for 2D Graphics like this to be drawn quickly and easily but it does have some limitations if you want to do any sort of scaling or rotation or indeed any sort of 3d effect you need to go back to the Triangular polygon and you can see some elements of the game doing that as needed and it works well because there really is something special about this game's style especially how it seamlessly Blends 2D and 3D elements without it being jarring what a gorgeous game this is despite sticking much more with tradition than the new 3D Platformers of the same ERA this is definitely a 32bit game and does so much that the previous generation of home conso Souls could never hope to achieve the sheer number of independently moving objects on the screen the wonderful scaling effects that let you move into and out of the scene things that up till that point had been The Preserve of exotic arcade machine Hardware this was a spin-off of the leming series you might be able to tell from The Voice samples if nothing else perhaps is supposed to be the start of a new expanded franchise such a shame that this didn't seem to be successful enough for it to go any further you might say that this game's 3D elements mean that it doesn't quite count as a true 2D game if you're being really pedantic the game play here is very much 2D platform with a hint of 3D depth to some of the levels and whilst the graphics are clearly quite 2D pixel art inspired there are some more obvious 3D effects too but I don't think this should exclude it really personally I'd definitely put this in the absolute absolutely totally 2D pile but there are some PS1 games you might rightly complain about me including in a video like this I think Strider 2 might be going too far apart from the sprice it is all totally obviously polygonal 3D despite the gameplay not engaging with the extra Dimension at all and Ray storm looks amazing too and it is again totally 2D in game play but I really do think that would be going too far if I've tried to call it a 2d game but let's not get bugged down in tedious definitions let's well before I go any further a quick word from today's sponsor which is me yes a quick plug for my patreon here in the middle of the video rather than at the end if you'd like to help me out with a modest donation I would be very happy there is a link in the description or you can hit that super thanks button and well if you haven't already you can hit that subscribe button for free if you'd like to see more from me but moving on from that let's gently switch through to something that is totally unambiguously completely old school 2D in its Graphics Doon Pachi a conversion of the arcade game from cave a bullet hell shooter a manic shooter or whatever you want to call it a very intense scrolling shoot them up game with a lot happening on the screen and almost perfect conversion hardcore fans of the game will notice the difference but it is pretty close particularly in tarte mode where the original aspect ratio is preserved but you will have to turn your TV on its side to make it work fairly common in arcade conversions like this in the standard definition era and it does make it a more or less Pixel Perfect Recreation very nice the big thing thing about this game though is just how intense it is how many moving objects there are a lot more than was ever possible with the previous generation of consoles how many Sprites like this can the PlayStation handle well that's not really an easy question to answer the older generation of 16bit machines had fixed numbers of Sprites that they could draw for the most part the Super NES could handle at most 128 on screen at once with some size restrictions too the arcade machine that this was based on really a souped up 16bit system could handle at most 12,24 Sprites at once obviously enough for this game of course these older machines had a certain number of slots in their Graphics chip for Sprites and that's all you could have but the PlayStation Works in a different way though it constructs Graphics in a frame buffer and you can have as many Sprites as you can paste in there in the amount of time available to draw your frame the final number depends on lots of things including the frame rate you target how big the Sprites are the color depth but we are really talking thousands per frame most likely in Doon Pache all of the graphics are constructed out of the square Sprite polygons and in tarte mode which has the largest screen area it seems to be averaging about a thousand of them per frame the PlayStation doesn't have a separate background layer like the satin does so everything on screen has to be drawn with these Sprite polygons but that doesn't seem to cause too much of a problem in fact one of the issues that serious players of this game might have is that the PS1 version is missing some of the Slowdown of the arcade game it doesn't get bugged down so easily throwing you off if that's what you're used to there is a satin version of this and well which is best is a matter of debate but one thing the Saturn does have is the abilties for each player to have a different ship and to change your ship when you continue in the PS1 version you pick at the start and both players have to have the same but this might well be due to a ram restriction which is a topic that I will come back to in a while is this the most intense shooter on the PS1 well I don't know but it's got to be up there though there are a lot of really great examples of this type of game one that I really should mention one that is so interesting I just can't avoid it the name alone makes this essential it's 70s robot anime gapy X yes that is the actual title of this Japanese exclusive a loving parody stroke tribute to the actual 70s robot anime of the majinga Zed variety these days that might spark enough interest for this to see a translated Western release still Niche but maybe but back in 1999 well probably not you'll need to speak Japanese and be a big fan of robot anime to get the best out of this of course but even without that the spectacle is still pretty astonishing the graphics at a very casual glance might not seem that far in advance of previous generation shooter mops but playing this game for a little while longer will reveal so much more one thing older systems had trouble with was not just the number of Sprites but the size showing great big objects on screen whilst still having other stuff go on was always a problem for 16bit machines but the PlayStation can easily manage giant bosses and busy scenes without breaking much of a sweat another important tell that this is next level and next generation is the sheer amount of unique detail in high resolution and the color depth the Super NES for example could display a a static image like the backdrop in this boss fight but it would take up so much of the systems 64 kilobyte video memory there really wouldn't be much room for anything else the PlayStation can easily do this though and have plenty left over for a large animated bosses too with their own unique detail older consoles were of course limited by cartridge size 2 the biggest Super NES games were 6 megabytes even the biggest 64 games are only 64 megabytes gapy X though coming on four discs tops out at over 2 gabes that's bigger than the entire Super NES Library put together but not totally unprecedentedly large for a PS1 game either quite a few came on multiple discs much of the space here though is taken up by this game's enormous amount of cutcenes all of which look superb not just great authentic anime animation all made for the game but the technical quality too the PlayStation had a Hardware video decoder built in so good quality video at 30 frames per second was no problem not the case for lots of other CD based systems even the Saturn had a bit of trouble with this and needed a hardware add-on for a decently good quality video each level here is done in the style of an anime episode with opening titles credits and even fake commercials so that video quality really does help to make it special a truly bizarre game that really makes the animation and the Nostalgia the main event but now let's switch things around once again and look at a game that is notable for its minimalism and its small data footprint it's Vib ribbon a rhythm action game with a unique look a cult hit that was released in Japan and in European Pearl territories but never saw an official USA release sadly whilst it does have a whole load of ready too songs on the disc the exciting thing is that you can insert whatever CD you like and turn any music into a level automatically to avoid content matching well I'm going to have to use YouTube audio library to demonstrate the points but if you want to play the rhythm action version of mb's classic noise album venerology well now you can I can probably get away with a quick blast of that and yeah that certainly is an interesting gaming experience but any more than that and I'll anger the content Gods so back to the slightly easier on the ear stuff it does show though that the levels are algorithmically generated from the music whatever you put in there which means something quite impressive for this to work the whole game needs to fit into to the PlayStation's 2 megabytes of ram so it can run from there whilst reading audio data from the CD at the same time and that's not really a huge amount of space to be fair many older games were 2 megabytes or well maybe much much less but it's still impressive for a number of reasons firstly there's quite a lot of high quality sound effects in the game and they all need to be stored in the memory and they could take up quite a bit also the game needs to read ahead the audio so it can generate the level as the player moves along it the audio from the CD must be buffered somewhere so it can be analyzed which will take up even more space how this game looks helps keep storage requirements down too textures Sprites or whatever of course take up space to which this game saves on by generating its Graphics in an unusual way in fact if I show you it in wireframe mode you might get clued in yes it looks looks absolutely identical usually the outlines of the polygons square or triangle are invisible with only the textures being seen But the PlayStation can just draw plain visible lines too another feature of the PS1 GPU not used all that much by other games but essentially a vector graphics mode which makes sense here for the same reason it made sense for those classic arcade games that used it two a series of points showing the start and end of lines takes up a lot less memory than any other sort of graphics and so this is probably one of the most inventive and quirky games on the PS1 absolutely but one of a league of 2D games on this system an amazing amount really some of them quite well known like Abes Odyssey which goes hard on pre-rendered Sprites and has a uniquely dystopian grimy look a game that I probably have to at least give a mention to in this video but there are many more many that don't get much attention in the west at least if we do include Japanese exclusive games and why wouldn't we well there are literally hundreds maybe more 2D games than anything else some forgotten Treasures like this launch title netu oako which is maybe not the most graphically impressive but has some quirky charm and something that is all Quirk and charm sexy parodius both these two will probably have some appeal to Modern Western retro Gamers but there's also a lot like a real lot of dating Sims visual novels horse racing simulators fishing games the sort of stuff that even without the language barrier maybe doesn't have so much appeal stuff like this the utterly baffling Neco no Kata which doesn't seem to be a game but a sort of cat encyclopedia part of the simple 1500 practical series of informational interactive discs but maybe not the topic I want to get sidetracked into in this video Let's instead steer into something safer and talk fighting games with Street Fighter Alpha 3 one of many fighters from the 9s is one of many that got ported to the PS1 but it is impressive to see running so well here though not perfectly this was a Capcom cps2 arcade board though a 16bit based old school 2D machine shouldn't the PlayStation be able to easily recreate this it's more powerful in nearly every way than the hardware this was designed for isn't it well nearly is the key word here and the devil is in the detail and it's about storage and bandwidth yes the ps1's CD ROM allows for masses of storage by the standards of the time 600 megabytes but it is pretty slow slow in that it takes a while for things to stream off the disc transfer rates but also slow for things to be located in the first place latency for you to do anything with the data on a disc you first need to load it into the PlayStation's men memory it's 2 megab of general purpose work RAM and it's 1 mgab video RAM this is where the problem lies because Street Fighter Alpha 3 in the arcade takes up around 45 megabytes and that's all stored on ROM chips with basically instant loading like a cartridge on a home system that means it can easily handle all the frames of animation for all the characters all the backgrounds without hitches it's all there instantly that's not the case for the PS1 though the CD ROM is too slow to read Graphics from directly they need to be loaded into the main memory first to meet made to fit in what's available you can load new graphics in as you need to but there'll always be a restriction on how much Graphics data you can have access to at any one time that was always one area that arcade machines led UN well into the 32-bit era and Beyond they could go with expensive but fast R store storage so it's impressive that this works so well because a lot had to be crammed into a small space and it's amazing how little this is compromised given that restriction it's really not a bad port at all a very possible home version of a game that older systems would have choked on but well but yes the Sega satin version is better in some important ways because well because it's got more memory to play with maybe quite a bit more the SAT has 1. 5 megab of video RAM by default as opposed to the PlayStation's 1 megab the way this memory is split up adds some complexity to that for 3D games the PlayStation's memory might actually be better because of how it's organized but for most 2D stuff the Saturn is better placed to handle larger amounts of Graphics data it's also a bit faster too but that's not the end of it because the Saturn's Ram can be expanded up to 4 megabytes be added and Street Fighter 03 is one of those games that benefit if you have that Ram expansion the extra memory means more space to store more Graphics more everything in a readily accessible form making it closer to the arcade maybe not super obvious just looking at this footage but there is a difference better animation better quality sound effects not arcade perfect but closer the PS1 version is still good though and it probably pleased many PS1 owning Street Fighter fans at the time if maybe not quite as much as the Saturn owning ones but there are many other impressive Fighters I could talk about as well including the incredible Guilty Gear a system exclusive this time until recently anyway no certain port to compare this to but it looks Fab and I know it had a good following then and the series still does today I love the Neo Geo style zooming that this has but it also features effects you won't see on the neoo like transparency and rotation so yeah that's 2D on the PS1 great nice loads of games too many to mention etc etc but let's not beat around the bush anymore because yes there is one game that can't be left out one game that you knew that I was going to talk about and you've probably guessed by this point that it was going to come at the end it is of course the amazing the leg legendary the unforgettable Castlevania Symphony of the Night a masterpiece that's just grown and grown over the years in influence importance and acclaim you won't hear much besides well-deserved praise for this but it's game design World building and the brilliant way that it all unfolds that gets the most attention literally the Vania part of the meteroid Vania portmanto that names this genre it was directed by taru hagihara and koi igarashi and they wanted to avoid the mistakes that Castlevania 2 made when adding Adventure elements but still makes something that was more than just a linear action game that they absolutely nailed it's got the tight platforming and fraud combat that the best in the series always had but it makes it Greater not lesser with an interconnected world to explore you're no doubt familiar with the this game even if you haven't played it you should but even if you haven't played it I'm sure you've heard many Rave about it or site its influence so many modern gangs were inspired by yes 2D meteroid viners like Hollow Knight of course but it's also not hard to draw parallels to the souls games as well and many others the graphics are definitely 2D well nearly all of them anyway in Parts looking quite a bit like it could be a 16bit game maybe not totally unintentional as this is a direct sequel to the PC engines Rondo of Blood The Unforgettable opening being a recreation of that game's ending so yes it does invoke the classic era of Castlevania in looks but you're never too far away from something that reminds you that we're not in 16bit Kansas anymore Toto yes there was a Sega satin version of this and despite having some extra content it's generally considered to be not as good as the original there's more loading more slowdown downgraded sound quality missing effects some scaling artifacts a lot of little details that lack often with 2D games the Saturn wins but not this time you might have heard that the Saturn is a true 2D machine or something which makes it better at 2D than the PlayStation but to reiterate my earlier point though both systems draw 2D Sprites in a very similar way as Square polygons composed in a frame buffer the SAT has a special hardware for drawing backgrounds that the PlayStation doesn't but we don't need to get into that now both systems are really very different from older consoles in how they handle Graphics in some fundamental ways but absolutely the PlayStation was designed from the start with the ability to handle two 2D Graphics in mind it's got special features made for that purpose the Saturn might beat it in those ways sometimes dedicated arcade machines might top its capabilities too but it does do 2D really very well far better than the previous generation absolutely even if some of its Rivals from the same era got the jump on it you might have heard that Sony either gambled or had the foresight when they leaned heavily into 3D Gra and got really lucky leaving competitors behind when that became absolutely essential to the new generation of games I think though that the reality is a bit more complex than that and Sony are perhaps even smarter than what they get credit for what they made with the PlayStation was a powerful allrounder with a straightforward design that could do everything pretty well whatever kind of game a developer might want to make in the mid to late '90s the PS1 could do it decently L without the blind spots other consoles might have had whether a tactics RPG or a Sim racer a first person shooter or a port of a laser dis arcade game you could give them all a good go and that Sony made making games as easy as they realistically could the PS1 had a good software development kit good tools for programmers good documentation plus compared to other systems its cleaner architecture made it much easier to work with easier to get the best out of I don't think it would have mattered what kind of games were popular the PlayStation would have steamed ahead with its brilliant design in Japan where the gaming landscape was pretty different the Playstation still dominated the market and it was more than just the technology that they got right it was the pricing the clever advertising the great controllers they nailed it and 2D games just helped to bring that point home Sony and the PlayStation went from being nowhere to being the biggest player in a multi-billion dollar industry in less than 5 years so now let's bring this to a close thank you very much to my Superstar patreons your help is huge thank you so much guys thank you so much once again if you'd like to join them there is a link below and so the end is here once again and I will say thank you for watching and goodbye

Channel: Sharopolis

Views: 25,512

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Id: uXf1WPOOaic

Length: 27min 48sec (1668 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 29 2023