Experience PlayStation One Era Graphics On Switch With Survival Horror Back In 1995

Does anyone find the graphics from that specific era appealing at all? That era is by far the least appealing one to me regarding video game graphics....

Nope, sorry but i think this is just lazy graphic rendering and 2-3 hour gameplay? If this is over £2 it is not worth it.

Just because you can, doesn´t mean you should!

@Bunkerneath I doubt it's lazy, these days it's got to be harder to make your game look this "bad".

Yeah, It IS appealing.
You had to be there by that time to understand. I'm sorry you guys are too young to appreciate it.

looks like fun, providing the price is right! 2-3 hours is pretty short

@tonyhoro
I was there at the time and still it's hard for me to understand how it was even possible to find these graphics appealing at the time. When I saw Pokemon Stadium on N64 in the 90ies, for me that already felt like HD-graphics. Now I cringe just thinking about it.

Edit: I think everything before and after aged better. I personally do not like NES, Gameboy and everything even older graphicwise, but somehow I get how the simplicity has its appeal.

@Tiefseemiez

While I definitely like and very much prefer the graphical fidelity we have today (even 2D indie games like Momadora IV, Freedom Planet, Rabi-Ribi, etc look better than 2D games from that time period did), I still very much like that 1994-1999 32-bit aesthetic. That gaming time period as a teenager was almost magical and I couldn't wait to see what was going to be shown next. Even the Virtual Boy and 32X got my imagination running towards potential and mysterious delights.

I collected bottles, mowed lawns, and worked on a farm (1995-1998) to get a Sega Saturn in early fall 1995. I got a Virtual Boy for Xmas that year. Love it all and got made fun of for my Virtual Boy!

I can still appreciate stuff like this, and its very nice to see indies stray away from the overused 2D (still love it btw) stuff for a change.

I love low poly graphics. I'm a total 90s kid though. However, I'm not a fan of boring games and I'm pretty sure this reviewed poorly. If it's a couple quid I might pick it up. Perhaps during Halloween.

This looks more like GBA Resident Evil than PS1! I played RE2 on PC and was great in my eyes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9va7ugOy5vo

I have nostalgia for many games from this era but not the graphics and wonky controls when attached to a new game. I'm assuming the 2-3 hours of gameplay is until you throw your controller at the screen in frustration at the tank controls.

Good idea that I wished more people would do (old graphics like this look cool, don't @ me). Unfortunately, this game appears to suffer in the execution based on reviews.

@tonyhoro I'm 35, I have owned and played on all consoles. I just don't understand why you would go for something that looks even worse than Resident Evil 1 on the Playstation (which i still love and played through last year again)

@Bunkerneath It's ten bucks on Steam, which means it's gonna be at least that much on Switch. Definitely not worth it for 2 hours of gameplay, but in my experience these kinds of games usually go on sale very quickly, most likely because nobody is buying them at full price.

soooooo silent hill?

😓🤢🤮

This is why i hated these graphics even back then. Everything is moving, the stone bricks, steel, lol.
not appealing at all.
the only thing i liked where the FMV cutscenes.

@PLATINUM7 Very few (if any?) of Ratalaika’s games review very well.

This looks neat but I might not pay full price for it. We’ll see...

why

I'd rather play Ice Station Z... and I don't want to play Ice Station Z lol.

I guess it's decent nostalgic throwback, but these screenshots and level environments look very dull.

If they were gonna create a game that relived PS1 graphics nostalgia, they should've been influenced by games like Klonoa or Crash Bandicoot because their color schemes and art styles helped those games age better. Or heck, use Resident Evil 1 as inspiration if they wanted the mature setting. That game has aged but the environments still show more effort and passion than what I see in this game.

I actually prefer the style of video games from this period because it was time before people acted like graphics were the be all end all of gaming. Now days, it would seem to be all that matters to most people.

That doesn't mean I want to play this particular game.

Looks similar to the other PS1-graphics Resident Evil-inspired game for Wii U and Switch called Vaccine. Is this from the same dev by any chance?

Most of these "inspired by the PS1" games look and play worse than the actual PS1 games they're taking inspiration from.

I like playing old games for nostalgia, the best games from the 80s and 90s are well worthwhile. But I have little interest in playing a new game that's selling point is merely that it looks like an old game.

This is what happens when someone takes a steaming #2 on your nostalgia trying to cash in on it.
ps1 and N64 was close to experimental 3D. Some games were astonishingly good considering the hardware, but an ugly 3D era inspired game is THE worse idea ever.

RETRO!

But games like this from that era actually tended to look a bit better than this game in many ways:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wy34ChMlvow

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYmeNHhwQd4

I'd say this new Back in 1995 game is actually slightly less than PS1-era visually.

@Tiefseemiez Not for the large part, but some games do hold up well enough visually to still be able to appreciate them now. It's not like 16-bit 2D sprite/pixel art though, which generally holds up brilliantly even now.

@AcridSkull Also, it takes a LOT more skill and effort to make even the most basic games than I think most people will ever understand. I'm making an fps game for VR that looks pretty much like half way between Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, at it's nowhere near as easy as some people might imagine. Making a properly good game is still a lot of work, be it 3D or 2D or retro or mobile or whatever, no matter how you approach it.

@TurboTEF
I love the 90’s

@Moon 90’s!

@SKTTR
Vaccine was awful

To me, this stylistic choice is a bold move and gives the game a very distinct identity. Unless this becomes another craze like cel shading and yarn/papercraft (which need the game to have an identity to begin with), I say go for it.

To be honest it looks pretty good reminds me of the first silent hill game. My first systems as a kid was N64 and Psone I still enjoy games from back then with those kind of graphics and it will be no different with this game I like the old school graphics that's the main selling point for me.

@Tiefseemiez

same here. ps1/saturn/n64/3do. all awful. early 3d was so bad it's a joke.

this doesn't even look as good as res evil on the ps1 but maybe i'm just not remembering how bad those games looked.

@tonyhoro I agree. There's a warmth (which I suppose is triggered by nostalgia to this of us of a certain age) to graphics like this.

@AcridSkull No, no... it can't be that hard to make games look this bad. Asset Flippers seem to do it pretty much daily on Steam.

My real question is why has the Switch changed from "only the best will get into the eShop" to "everything goes"?

@tonyhoro and to add to that, there IS something about the bad outdated graphics that just looks scarier to me, IMO.

I love the graphic style, personally. Shame it's such a short game but interested to find out more.

I definitely have a soft spot which is triggered by this graphical style. I came to the ps1 after getting the n64 first so to me the wobbly 3D engine, the unfiltered textures, and the black void of the skybox all scream "dark, hardcore, pushing the limit" which as a 90s kid was everything I wanted to be.

@Tiefseemiez Thank you!!!! Finally someone on here has the same opinion as me.

I posted last week that this generation of games has not aged well but I seemed to be in the minority.

Oh god... I guess some are done flooding the market with the "retro" pixel-art nonsense - now time to mimic another defunct era.

My nostalgia is for individual of games and definitely not for the PS64 style. The polygonal style of the early PS64 era has not aged well.

@tonyhoro I was there at the time. NES has a charm due to simply how advanced it was for the time for the price compared to what else was available. SNES remains a thing of beauty to this day, as does Genesis/Mega Drive. PS1 was the weakest console of its own generation, easily bested in graphics by both N64 and Sega Saturn, and still looked rougher than sprite based SNES games from the prior gen as it tried too hard to catch up to a 3D trend it wasn't really made for. PS 1 is great because of its games, but most of it's great games were not the 3D games, but rather the pre-rendered type games like the Final Fantasy titles, but I can't for the life of me imagine the charm of emulating the worst graphics of a given generation, and in particular a generation that already was visually questionable after the prior gen that looked visually better, but it allowed for interesting new gameplay via 3D environments.

I think Dreamcast is probably the oldest of the "early" 3D consoles that really ages well. And even that does better with a coat of paint. Now those generations had some excellent 2D games still, and those games actually age quite well.

@Agramonte Wanna get rich? Start a GoFundMe for a startup to make only Mode7 games!

Put this way Old is New now....if your just for AAA graphics you missed out a lot of just gaming for gaming fun.

@NEStalgia And in traditional Crowdfunding fashion, I can take 4 years and never actually finish it 🙃

If I knew how to do any of that stuff - I would so do a super HD re-master of Panzer Dragoon Saga for the Switch.

"PS1 was the weakest console of its own generation, easily bested in graphics by both N64 and Sega Saturn"

I fired up Breath of Fire 4 on my phone not to long ago and it still hold up a bit (the sprite stuff)... but yeah, 100% with you on Saturn/N64

I like N64 graphics but not PS1, not even back when it was current gen. The stretched textures that warp just feel gross.

Reminds me of playing through Silent Hill for the first time. That game scared the hell out of me, and I loved every second of it. I may have to check this out, if only for the nostalgia hit.

@Tiefseemiez

I'm with you on this one. I was raised with the C64 and find many of those games far more appealing graphics-wise than this.

@DanteSolablood those asset flip games are a different kind of bad.

There's more work gone into this to get the texture warping to work, and those low res assets have been specifically designed to look like that.
There's nothing "lazy" about the way this game looks, it might be a bit bland, the enemy design is bad and from what I've read/seen the enemy AI is terrible, but style wise they've done a decent job.

Sorry I know the passion for creating it but I can't stand these old pixelated 32-Bit 3D garble graphics. It's one of the reason why I didn't buy the Shenmue 1 & 2 collection (and the GameCube ports of Resident Evil 2 & 3) as those games still had these kind of terrible 3D graphics.

I lived through all the era's of graphic's, but these style of PS era graphics have aged the worst, I can't even find it in me to go back and play FFVII because the graphics are just so terrible now lol.

@DanteSolablood

they want to have what sony and ms and steam and apple and google have. all the things no matter how awful.

well, not ms in the windows store. that thing is deader than dead.

@AcridSkull I take your point, I must admit that I'm probably spoiled having lived through 90s gaming & only the lazy games looked that bad... but now on newer hardware simulating the aesthetic probably is quite a nuanced task.

However, I do take into question the appeal of this look - I have nostalgia for the gameplay of this era, but not the look. For example, I never had a problem with how the live action Transformers look, I only hated the way they were much more simple & childish than the 80s cartoons.

@Bunkerneath Are those games your only reference in the genre?
There were MIB, Deep Fear, Vampire Hunter D and many other games that hadn't the same budget as Resident Evil. And they were pretty solid (well, at least most of them).

The problem here is that people project their own crude feelings and impressions about this without considering the real impact it had and how many people grew up with those.

Those games are in no way perfect graphic-wise, but if that was the focus, they wouldn't take the extra effort to make the game look like and old PS1 game. And yes, it takes extra development time to emulate this look, specially on current game engines.

@TurboTEF Wow. You bought both failure consoles from that gen! Did you ever get a 64 or PS1?

Looks like the "lens of nostalgia" is beginning to shift a little!

Looks interesting, would love a demo.

Lost me at 2-3 hours of gameplay. I'm not saying every game has to be massive 100 hour affair but I enjoy a long well developed story. Fair play I like it's style though.

@DanteSolablood I agree about the look, it's worse than Resident Evil, and although it's using more polygons than Alone in the Dark (1992) it actually looks worse because everything is so dark and muddy. The way the character faces are stretched is particularly ugly.
I'd say the appeal of this game is nothing more than curiosity and nostalgia, the 2-3 hour runtime is definitely a good thing, I couldn't imagine playing it for 8 hours.

@Trajan
I got the VB as an Xmas gift and enjoyed it still. The Saturn was pretty solid for its first year and a half too. I got the PSX in early 1996 and the N64 in early 1997.

PSX was still the best console of that generation and if I knew what I did now, I would have skipped the Saturn and only rented the N64 for Mario until Zelda came out in late 1998.

Yet another "retro" game that emulates the bad parts of older games. Take a note from shovel knight and make improvements

@TurboTEF From the me at that time I strongly disagree. However the me of today would agree even though I never played any of the games from that system that interest me. I'm more into RPGs now. Back then RPGs were for the hardcore gamers. I was hardcore, but not that hardcore.

Now a days I could care less about 3d platformers too.

I'm a little curious about the 2-3 hour gameplay point, but other than that, I love it, horror is great and low res art style is even better.

I'm disappointed to see this uptick in comments making anti-90's graphics remarks as of late. It's very unbecoming, because some of the greatest games of all time are from this era, and many of the same people making these criticisms are quick to praise the graphics of 2D titles of the NES years as "timeless" (don't get me wrong, I love these games too, but let's be realistic in how we review games with "muddy" low-res low polygon graphics that can actually enhance the atmosphere versus games with a plain two-tone color background and a player sprite just barely discernible as a person. The takeaway is that great games come in many shapes and sizes, and what you see in layman's terms as flaws can actually add to the experience. There is beauty to working within the limitations).