Games that push the limit, push it real good

"Contra: The Alien Wars" was impressive for the SNES. Mortal Kombat 3 and Ultimate were both impressive for SNES.

Good list, I agree that all the games deserve to be on there.

BUT, I think Sonic 3 + Knuckles should appear, as it had Lock-On. I also think Pokemon Crystal should appear on there (internal clock + 251 Pokemon + 16 badges + animated Pokemon sprites, Mystery Gift, etc) as well as Shantae (Large, layered sprites, detailed backgrounds, good animations), though both are GBC.

Ive never played Phantasty Star before

"he'll look at the 32-bit era into today where we'll undoubtedly see notables like Resident Evil 4 and Halo."

Funny, I don't remember playing Halo on my PSX or Saturn... Guess I missed it.

I dont recall the Xbox being anything more than 32bit...

for misconceptions regarding bits:

"Bit ratings for consoles largely fell by the wayside after the 32-bit era. The number of "bits" cited in console names referred to the CPU word size, but there was little to be gained from increasing the word size much beyond 32-bits; performance depended on other factors, such as processor speed, graphics processor speed, bandwidth and memory size.

The Sega Dreamcast, the first of the "128-bit" consoles, has a dual-issue 32-bit CPU core, 64-bit GPU, and 64-bit data bus although the geometry sub-processor GPU can perform internal math on 128-bit words. One of the PlayStation 2's many processors is known as the "128-bit Emotion Engine" but has a dual-issue 64-bit core; the graphics synthesizer has a 2560-bit DRAM bus. But the Nintendo GameCube is considered more powerful than the PS2, with only a single 64-bit CPU core. The Microsoft Xbox, the most powerful of the sixth-generation era consoles, uses a 32-bit CPU and 256-bit GPU, a configuration that is becoming standard in many desktop computers. The importance of "bitness" in the modern console gaming market has thus decreased due to the use of components that process data in varying word sizes. It is also important to note that most game companies sell on "n-bit talk" to over emphasize the hardware capabilities of their system. The Sega Dreamcast and the PlayStation 2 were the last systems to use the term "128-bit" in their marketing to describe their capability."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/128-bit_era

One milestone for the VCS is Missile Command. On a bet the programmer, Rob Fulop, figured out how to implement a game on the VCS that wouldn't fit within the 4K that was then the limit for ROM on the system. He 'cheated' by implementing a bank switching circuit to allow an 8K game to run. This completely changed the rules for what could be done on the VCS.

Another VCS biggie is Communist Mutants From Space. This was the flagship game for the Starpath Supercharger, a device that added RAM and a cassette deck interface to the VCS so much larger games could be loaded from tape. This was also at the center of an amusing lawsuit over the right to the game Frogger between Parker Bros. and Sierra On-line. One company had ROM rights while the other had the magnetic media rights. Parker Bros. assumed this gave them a lock on the VCS market but Sierra created a supperior Frogger for the Supercharger and litigation hilarity ensued.

NES: I always thought 3D World Runner was ahead of its time for managing to create Space Harrier-like 3D effects on the very limited NES hardware and using the precursor to the dance mat for control. Throw in some light gun target shooting and a remake would be great.
Genesis: There was an Al Michaels endorsed basketball game that did a remarkable job of implementing the SNES Mode 7 effect in software.

Sega CD: The Core Design titles deserve recognition for being the few third party games that really used the Sega CD's video effects.

Marc is right. Once you hit a minimum 32-bits for most or all of your major functions anything greater has to be qualifed for specific needs, such as addressing massive amounts of RAM. The Pentium has a 64-bit wide data bus to grab two 32-bit values from memory in one operation and keep the processor busy but nobody would say the original Pentium was a 64-bit processor.

The jumps from 8-bits to 16-bits and 32-bits were all important milestones for game consoles but the use of greater than 64-bit elements is just details along with all the other engineering items of interest. Sometimes it can be better to go narrow if it means greater speed. This seen in the trend towards replacing parallel bus structures with serial busses that are narrow but many time faster. Rambus was ahead of the curve on this.

Bitness doesn't matter any more. By and large engineers are now free to use whatever bus and register widths they think will best accomplish the task. For many function there is simply no advantage for working with numbers larger than 32-bit. For instance, the PowerPC that IBM used as the basis of the GameCube's Gekko CPU had 64-bit registers that offered no performance advantage for the GameCube's objectives. So they altered those registers to instead hold two 32-bit values and set things up so that the same operation could be performed on both values with a single command. Big performance win by processing two appropriately sized values rather than one big one.

oh My god Halo! If a game had to be give the billion dollar award for greatest strenuous use of the provided hardware.. pushing it to it's absolute limit then halo hands down gets that award!

Accomplishing a FPS clone on hardware that's almost identical to the PC using the provided developers environment that your company developed! Holy moo cow that takes skill... Definitely pushing the hardware to the limit their.

It's amazing how much they can accomplish on an Xbox, making ports from PC games that use the same DirextX environment. imagine, just how much time it takes to port Direct X calls to xbox Direct X.

Those massive Multiplayer levels in halo! you could barely see the whole way across them! and don't even compare to those "huge" levels you saw on the PS2 who's hardware was just more then half as powerful. just because it took a few minutes to move across the map doesn't mean that it's better then halo oh no!

AND did you see those guns?!?! OMG they were like so original like did you see that one gun that used like energy plasma?!?! you've never seen that before on a typical mainstream CPU backed up by a typical mainstream GPU. I'm telling you, you haven't, so don't say you have.

You know what I'd like to see: articles about gaming history that don't forget about 8-bit and 16-bit home computers. It seems that every American writer completely forgets about the Spectrum, Commodore 64, Atari ST and Commodore Amiga that completely dominated European gaming from 84 till 92.

My games that pushed their hosts machines?

BBC: Elite
Amiga: Shadow of the Beast

you know, i forgot to add - one game that totally blew the doors off for me was Last ninja 3 on the commodore 64 (on cartridge no less)

Killer art design, music was spot on, and the graphics where outstanding for sprite design.

2 cents.

A bit unfair tough, every Nintendo game in the list had an extra chip on the cartidge to push the sounds and graphics. On the Nes it was castlevaniaIII, maria3 and kirby on the SNES side it was strafox and yoshi's adventure. All but one game: Donkey Kong witch really was brilliant at the time being.

Totally agree ymmv, I remember when KnightLore came out on the Spectrum... it was totally unbelievable!

epobirs:

You almost brought a tear to my eye when you said "Rambus"... 800MHz of dual channel goodness. WHY DID THE COMPUTER GODS TAKE THIS AWAY FROM ME?!

Sean:

Do you need a towel? You seem to be dripping with sarcasm... Anyhoo, Halo practically reinvented console multiplayer (I never had a lan party for Mario Kart) and as a launch title, looked better than most PS2 3rd gen+ titles, so give it some credit. Halo 2 is probably one of the best looking games on current gen consoles to date, so it too should get a little respect. If draw distance is the only thing you care about, you can spend a few minutes with Far Cry Instincts which was also an Xbox exclusive. I'm sure there are plenty of other great games that will make the list, some of which we all will agree on, many which may be in dispute, but IF Halo makes the cut, there's probably roughly 6 million people or more who would agree it should be there. If you think it's a crappy game, that's fine, but numbers speak for themselves. Have a look at these: http://www.joystiq.com/2004/11/11/halo-2-sales-dont-reach-expectations/
Game on.

well, the idea of lanning an fps at less than a hundred a head is pretty sweet, maybe even revolutionary, or at least evolutionary, agreed, but didn't like millions of wan connectings get made in mario kart? and don't people lan mariokart now? and hasn't it ALWAYS been a big multiplayer draw?
the technology being apt enough to bring the experience isn't the same as the game being so amazing that it needs to be mentioned at every conversation of games of extrordinary mention. but i do laud the game's affordable multiplayer shooter fun. the only thing cheaper would be actual guns, i think...

I think the GTA series continues to push the envelope when it comes to the PS2.

How much more content can they pack into one game?

Lineage 2 Fan Art: Yeah, except they're so ugly!

Solaris for Atari 2600 was truly the best game for that system for that time, I still remember playing it for hours!

OMG, Out of this World was soooo damned amazing...

Yu Yu Hakusho Makyo Toitsusen is a fighting game by treasure for the Sega Genises that I recently stumbled upon Via Emulation. I found it to be quite enjoyable and has awsome grafix considering it is a Genesis game. It uses a simular tecnique that was used in another later Great Treasure game for Sega Saturn called Gaurdian Heroes as it uses the zooming in and out feature (Granted it is on a smaller scale than Gaurdian Heroes only using 2 plains insted of 3, and only up to 4 players insted of 6 in GH. But I found it amazing that they could pull off anything even remotely simular to GH on the Geneies. Just thought I'd run that one by you just incase you hadn't known about it :). Great Page BTW, I too am interested when "inferior hardware" get's put into overdrive to compete with more modern machines.