Graphics that almost seemed a generation beyond....

[replicashooter]

For me each time I give Forza Horizon a spin it really impresses me visually as switching from a PS4 to a 360 game there really isn't that much downgrade. It helps that the game is silky smooth all the time and plays mighty fine too but it's the visual design and how crisp everything looks that is so stunning.

Well worth buying the 360 for this:

What gave you a similar vibe in terms of games that visually straddled two generations and held it down for the old guard against the young bucks?

[Asura]

What gave you a similar vibe in terms of games that visually straddled two generations and held it down for the old guard against the young bucks?

One of my favourite titles for this is a bit obscure - Tony Hawk's American Sk8land for the DS.

This came about during pretty much the nadir of the Tony Hawk franchise, when Activision weren't so much running it into the ground as repeatedly stomping it into the dirt. The "big" consoles got "Tony Hawk's American Wasteland", but the DS (and I think GBA) got Tony Hawk's American Sk8land, which were different games.

The DS version really was spectacular. full roaming 3D games are pretty rare on the DS, because the hardware was not ideally suited to them. Nintendo had a few, for instance their port of Mario 64, which was certainly good, but that's Nintendo developing for their own hardware. You expect that to look fantastic.

I've joked in the past that someone must've made a deal with the devil to make that engine work on the platform, but that's not really fair. I'm convinced someone really loved this game; perhaps even the whole team. It was extremely well-made, highly polished, and ran like something that felt it just shouldn't be possible on the DS. It was, for all intents and purposes, a Tony Hawk game in the style of the first 3, with a cartoony visual style. You could even make your own skate park in the level editor (the game's progression was about working with Tony Hawk to revive an old skate park - you collected tiled pieces by completing challenges in-game).

But the 3D visuals... They just moved with such smoothness, and the controls were excellent. Truly this was a technical marvel.

[charlesr]

That does look lovely. How does it play?

[endo]

Really well- in the same vein of the early TH games. You could also record your own voice/sounds for when you slam and for other things, which I rediscovered a while ago having found this while having a clear-out and playing it in front of the kids. Having completely forgotten about this feature, and the fact that I'd recorded various shouted swearwords, which were faithfully reproduced at full volume.

[dataDave]

Perfect Dark and Conker's Bad Fur Day. Only the framerates and resolution held these back from almost looking like early 128-bit games.

[JazzFunk]

Micronaut One on Speccy did 3D better than 99% of SNES games, it even outshines MD in some cases.

[chipsgravy]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Donkey Kong Country. During the reveal I think everyone thought it was running on Nintendo's new hardware.

[thetrooper]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Donkey Kong Country. During the reveal I think everyone thought it was running on Nintendo's new hardware.

That's a really good shout; I remember that a lot of people jumped to that conclusion (maybe even me!).

[Dogg Thang]

Ecco the Dolphin wowed me back in the day to the point where I had to ask what system was running it, thinking it had to be some bump in quality from the Mega CD or something. Although a big part of that was the sound rather than just the graphics. It sounded incredible.

[nakamura]

Donkey Kong Country and Forza Horizon are great shouts, Perfect Dark less so though. It may have had some forward thinking ideas but it was a blurry, jerky mess visually. Great game though.

[chipsgravy]

Another SNES title that shouldn't be possible is Street Fighter Alpha 2. Apart from the loading times its an incredible achievement. Plus playing SF with a SNES pad just feels "right" to me.

[Team Andromeda]

Conker Bad Fur Day - XBox. That game looked better than most 360 games

GT 4 - PS2 . Its wasn't far off the Gfx in PGR 3 on the 360 imo.

Radiant Silvergun - Saturn. Like Lee @ Dreamware said it looked like a DC shooter

Riddick - XBox. It looked like it was running off those then new GFX PC cards needed to play DOOM 3

Yoshi Story - Snes . It looked like a Saturn 2D game

NFl 2k - DC . At the time it was almost like watching the NFL on TV

Star Wars RS II - GameCube . It looked like ILM CGI

Pulstar - Neo Geo

[Baseley09]

Black & Burnout Revenge took me aback on the OG Xbox, i imagine theres more on that system that are similar to 360 levels.

[BigDeadFreak]

The first time I saw Ridge Racer running on a PS1 it seemed like it was from about ten generations in the future. I'd played it in the arcades but just assumed the PS1 and Saturn would be a slightly better Neo Geo. I never thought it would come home virtually arcade perfect.

[EvilBoris]

Splinter Cell Blacklist and Splinter Cell Chaos Theory.

Gears of War Judgment

God of War