The N64 has it’s own set of graphical limitations, but hold up a bit better to the test of time, IMO. At the time I know it was the school yard debate of which looked better and many felt the sharpness of the PS1 was preferred over the softer N64 image.
The shimmer and dithering are not really noticeable on CRTs. Maaaybe if you had a really fancy Trinitron or another of the last-generation ultrasharp flat screen CRT TVs, it would be noticeable, but those weren't mainstream until pretty comfortably into the PS2+ era.
Granted, I was a kid then. If you were a professional artist or something in the 90s, I'm sure you noticed.
That said, as much as I love playing old games on a CRT, I'm in a PAL region, and in today's world of high-refresh rate screens 50Hz is nausea inducing.
There is no such thing as CD distortion. Does that make the whole opinion invalid?
However i think the combination of lack of z-buffer, affine texturing and RGB color output with dithering was kinda unique - or at least very rarely seen elsewhere. You could see several z-buffer-less and affine-only texture mapped games on software rendered PC games, but pretty much all of them were using 8bit palettized modes. Some also used dithering (e.g. Ultima Underworld) though it was very rare.
By the time there were a few games that used RGB colors and software rendering (e.g. Unreal, Heretic 2), PCs were also powerful enough to do perspective correct texturing.
Or is it that it isn't a problem of PS1 but a problem of games - which, again sure, this might be true but that'd be the splittiest of hair splitting :-P it is the lack of a hardware feature that drove the games do what they do, so it isn't entirely "blameless".
Yes, this is what I wanted to emphasize.
My intent wasn't to say that the 'lack of z-buffering' statement was incorrect (it's still true), but that there's a fundamental issue behind it, the visible/hidden surface determination, and now it depends on the developer's implementation. I believe this is overlooked on non-technical sites.
With this, I just wanted to make it more informative for the reader. I don't think the question is if the PS1 has a z-buffer or not. Sure, z-buffering is a solution, but there's the reasoning behind it that I wanted to transmit it to the reader.
Anyway, that's just my opinion.
Most games didn't aged well, however some of them are still impressive today considering the limitations:
- Chrono Cross: almost no loading times after the initial one.
- Crash Bandicoot: the graphics are still very charming, and there is almost no graphics 'jigling'.
- Valkyrie Profile: one of my favorite RPGs of all the time, and thanks to its 2D graphics and huge sprites it is still very good looking even today.
- Tekken 3: Very detailed character models and I think it runs at 60 FPS? Even if it doesn't, it is still impressive.
It does, at least on NTSC. On the PlayStation Mini or whatever they called it, they packed a 50FPS PAL version of the game - and as near as I ever figured out, it was because the MT chip inside of it couldn't emulate Tekken 3 at 60FPS.
The first system that I feel like had enough power to be a 3D system without being completely terrible was the Dreamcast. It had enough power that you could target 60fps and even if you missed it, get close enough, and have enough power to draw recognizable environments and make things that could at least hide the fact they weren't made out of huge polygons, with a bit of artistry. It wasn't near obligatory to spend multiple refreshes' worth of time on a single frame to put up a competitive-looking frame. I played quite a few games on that and it was rare to see slideshows. All the 3D I've played prior to that still feels clunky to me, but playing the Dreamcast feels primitive, but workable.
The Dreamcast was probably the first system I played where a 3D game looked just as it did in the arcade.
Here's the first track in Ridge Racer Type 4, for example, which looks so much nicer without the track and wall textures wobbling about:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDJpmP9jfeA&t=204s
Edit: the original version, for comparison:
Developers were:
1. grappling with an entirely new dimension of gameplay
2. investing enormous amounts of engineering work into making 3D world run at all on these systems
And it seems to me that the result was that gameplay the gameplay for this generation at least for action-oriented titles, generally was a big step back from the 16-bit era.
There are certainly some early 3D action titles that still shine for me though. The PSX-based entries in the Tekken series and Metal Gear Solid come to mind.
I noticed this at a friend house, while looking for something in the garage we came across his old system and games. We could not resist taking it back into the house and setting it up.
The first thing I noticed was how long the load times were. And how noisy the machine was when reading and seeking on the discs.
The next thing was the primitive texture mapping. Polygons 'jiggling' and 'sparkling' all over the place. It reminded me of my first attempts at programming 3D graphics in VGA, before realizing what floating point (or fixed point) could do.
We tried re-living some of the classics, and after not even an hour we just shook our heads and went back to what we were originally doing.