Every few years, clever developers think of new ways to visually wow the public into opening their wallets. In addition, console manufacturers often make it easy for devs to apply arresting visual effects with little performance penalty. Something that studios are only too happy to avail of when a new machine is released.
Most of the time these visual fineries work as intended. Games and consoles sometimes market themselves to varying degrees on these visual effects until they become normalised. However, there are occasions when developers take it a little too far. While there are many examples of subtly applied, immersion fostering visual effects; some VFX were milked dry or applied with a sledgehammer. Here are five times it ended up being one of the latter two:
Obstructive Foreground Scrolling Elements
The rich parallax scrolling of the 16-bit era is fondly remembered these days. Memories of Sonic the Hedgehog ‘s classy animated backgrounds and Shadow of the Beast‘s expansive, depth-filled backdrops come flooding back when anyone mentions the effect.
However, there was a time when the world was confused by some of Sonic 3‘s piled-on parallax. Nauseous at Jim Power: The Lost Dimension in 3D‘s inept innovation. And blindsided by Earnest Evans‘ foreground follies.
Of course, the obstructive foreground is the most infamous of those parallax problems. You don’t get a TVtropes.org page years after a fad dies without annoying a few of the wrong people. Placing objects in the foreground does indeed add a little depth and was, in its day, an eye-popping detail that elicited many a ‘wow’. But it didn’t stop developers from placing objects in front of the actual gameplay.
Classics like Streets of Rage and Ristar are guilty of this obfuscation but the most infamous examples are multiplatform Brutal: Paws of Fury and Jurassic Park II: The Chaos Continues on Super Famicom/SNES. The latter featured in an AVGN episode with the Nerd articulating the mood of players confronted with this intentional annoyance.
Modern 2D and retro-inspired games rarely make such mistakes. The Ori series and latter-day 2D Rayman games show how a little foreground can support a deep parallax effect without taking away from the gameplay.
Digitised Sprites
While Mortal Kombat wasn’t the first of its kind, it was the digitised face that launched a thousand ships. The huge sprites, teeming with detail, captured the eyes of arcade wanderers. Its excessive gore and simplified fighting mechanics helped the game swallow coins en masse in arcades around the world.
Mortal Kombat‘s home ports sold by the tonne only accelerating the efforts of imitators. A brief deluge of competing versus fighters with digitised sprites emerged, all uniformly poorer than MK and its lineage.
These games include some of the worst games ever made, like Kasumi Ninja and Shadow: War of Succssion. As well as stains on the gorgeous visual heritage of gaming royalty like Street Fighter: The Movie.
When the one v. one fighting craze died down, the style was seen more and more in other genres. First-person shooters saw human hands shooting crudely captured humans hiding behind realistic barrels. The odd game used a whole human as a hideous third-person view of our protagonist.
By the end of 1997 digitised photographic sprites had all but disappeared while their pre-rendered younger sibling remained for another few years. Their cousin, pre-rendered backgrounds, chose a career in horror and role playing but that’s a story for a another day…
Bloom
The mid-2000s was an exciting time for video games graphics. A host of neat visual effects were becoming standard on PC and console hardware with native support for these tricks was making its way to market. One of these newly established ubiquities was bloom and devs took that particular trend to its eye-injuring peak in 2006, barely a year after it truly began flooding our TV screens.
Of course, bloom had burned its way onto select retinas since 2001’s Ico . 2004’s Far Cry was an important stepping stone on the way to a level of optic abuse that peaked 2005/06 when Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 were both looking to knock the socks off last-gen consoles.
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is the absolute height of this glowing, blurry obsession. To this day it serves as one of the best examples of the worst application of visual effects. Gears of War is an honourable mention.
Bloom retreated to a ‘slightly overdone’ level in the years following TES IV. Games like Uncharted 2 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare arrived within a year with a mild, occasional overuse of bloom that still looks pretty good to this day.
Nowadays, bloom effects are just one of a game designers tools in a locker full of visual effects. They are used sparingly, often in fantasy settings to elicit an ethereal quality. Or to foster a brief sense of contrast as our hero emerges from darkness. The Vaseline-smeared cameras of yore are seemingly gone forever.
Except for two last runouts with Syndicate (2012) and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, obviously.
Lens Flare
Lens flare in gaming has been around for a long time. Like its real life counterpart, it crept into view, ruined image quality for a bit before retreating to the periphery.
Lens flare was initially aimed to imitate a the Sun’s intensity overblowing a camera’s capture capabilities as well as the visual artifacts in the form of translucent polygonal streams that would emerge as rays from the celestial body interacted with the lens of the camera.
The hot spot glare of the Sun was effective on its own at conveying the intended brightness. But some mid-to-late 90s video games have swathes of the screen partially obscured by wobbly, dithered hexagons. Distracting, ugly and wholly unnecessary, their day in the Sun was brief (not soz) but annoying.
However, facets of the effects remained for years. While the ugly, obstructive Sun-induced polygons became much less invasive, bright lights were distractingly smeared across screens until relatively recently.
The last days of Xbox 360 and PS3 and the early days of the PS4 and Xbox One saw plenty of the animorphic lens-style of contrast flare. Syndicate (2012, again) and Battlefield 4 are eye-gouging examples from that time.
Motion Blur
Until relatively recently, rock-solid 60fps in visually complex games wasn’t guaranteed. To compensate for this, developers at first, used primitive full-screen effects that were truly awful. Of course we didn’t mind due to the novelty of such an effect and the alternative being much worse.
Before the brute-force blur, full-screen pans, like turning in a first-person shooter, looked jittery. Racing at high-speed towards a horizon was similarly jumpy.
Eventually the tech started to catch up with the crisp, blur-free vision of developers and the literal, crisp blur-free vision of gamers. Yet motion blur has stuck around much longer than it probably should have, even making its way into ‘overused’ territory inside of arcade racers.
The Burnout series wasn’t the first to apply some motion blur to foster a sense of speed but it was a blur innovator. Blurring the edges of the players view at different rates and blurring objects on a per-pixel basis being just two of the neat effects that the series overdid just a little.
Others, of course, absolutely ruined it. With smeary blurring applied even at low speeds in inferior racers. Interestingly, a study performed in 2013 by MIT researchers found that motion blur did not improve the player experience in racing games. The object of that study was the Split Second: Velocity so it’s no wonder they came to that conclusion. An honourable mention goes to Blur for being honest with us.
Which visuals effects, tricks or style do you feel were overdone or otherwise abused by devs? Do modern cinematic or lens effects bother you? Stuff like chromatic aberration and depth of field effects? Which of our examples bother you the most? Or are there any that didn’t bother you at all? Let us know in the comments below…
