@exodus fair nuff but the player characters in all of these look to me to be doing the same trick as the horse one which was kindly snooped by sch above. My thinking (aside from my gut feel looking at the motion) is if they’re prerendered, why bother with the low poly look on the models? So many frames would be equally well spent making things look higher fidelity ahead of time - so many prerendered sprites in gba have that plasticine glossy lighting as a result.
@MDS-02 Yeah, I think I can maybe see it on sound of thunder! army men I‘m less convinced. but I’ve been wrong in this thread before, ha ha.
@exodus yeah army men its just so tiny I can’t tell, was just thinking by lineage I wouldn’t be shocked if they were fiddling with similar methods there.
@exodus !!! Woah look at that tank at 19 minutes in army men.
@MDS-02 Yeah, I guess you‘re on to something there! This is so odd to me because like… it’s so small on the real screen that you almost can't tell? lots of effort for that.
@Garrett.exe I think this kid may have been Bob Odenkirk?
@mtvcribs “I have triples of the ultimate jump kick maneuver. If that's not true, then none of it is. Tell him.”
It is possible these isometric games are pre-rendered and that they are making use of custom sprite loading code, since the total number of animation frames would be larger than what could fit into a tileset. I think the larger point is that it goes against the spirit of the thread, which is using every trick in the book to make a full 3d engine for something that lacks dedicated hardware. GBA demoscene provenance.
Ran through this thread one more time - I agree that full 3D is the true money, but I like polygonal models too!
Realized we hadn’t brought up Ozzy and Drix yet. A unique look but boy is it a drag to try and play.
https://youtu.be/2eh-lyAa3WI?si=w6dypmjDF6NVtQbo
Ultimately another use case of the Blue Roses engine, so not too unique, but I think its the only 3D sidescroller.
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@MDS-02 oh yeah, this hadn't made the thread yet! it sure looks bad - seems like in particular they had trouble with collision between 3D and 2D objects. And also just the game in general (whoops).
And I’m not sure this video has been shared (maybe I did already) but minnime did a pretty good roundup a few years ago. We’ve got some things he doesn’t but he generally paints a good historical arc.
We had Nightfire posted above but we didn’t really discuss it. For me, this has the best looking texture work and environmental detail with not just vertical walls. Minnime pointed out the muzzle flashes lighting up the environment.
I think what‘s wild about these 3D games to me is almost none of them are popular. By and large they’re all weird licensed games or budget obscurities. Is Sonic Battle the most popular (by sales and recognition) 3D game on the GBA!?
@exodus possibly, it seemed like the most prominent to me as a kid at the time. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 is another one of the ones I commonly saw.
@MDS-02 It was indeed shared already (post #39) but no big deal.
@exodus You can be pretty safe in assuming the Astérix game sold well enough in Europe. The early V-Rally games probably did OK too. Both cases on virtue of (Infogrames era) Atari having a pretty strong distribution channel all over Europe back then.
This video is a bit youtubey but they point out some good 3D segments in games that otherwise are not 3D, most of which we hadn’t seen yet and were new to me. (Finding Nemo has a voxel section, Polar Express has some 3D course parts, spiderman has some city swinging, Tron has a full FPS mode in addition to the main loop)
Hell yeah
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EU only release - Trick Star. I think this is the same rendering as Monster Truck Madness. I like the base silliness of the premise.
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No music during the race sure gives that euro tech demo vibe!
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this stuff is wild
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