Games that look awful by the standards of their systems

[WelcomeToTheNextLevel]

By this, I mean games that look like they should be on a system a generation or two older than the systems that they're on.

Data Design Interactive games, such as Ninjabread Man, Myth Makers: Super Kart GP, etc (Wii)

These look like PS1/N64 era titles - they came out around 2007-2008 but look straight out of the late '90s, and play far worse. They're on Wii, so that's 2 generations newer, but it's really more like 1.5 generations since the Wii was underpowered compared to the Xbox 360 and PS3. Still, that's pretty bad. DDI just didn't give a shit.

Bubsy 3D (PS1)

This could have been done on SNES with a Super FX chip. On the PS1, it's a big fat pile of FAIL.

Time Killers (Genesis)

This is a game that looks like an early NES or Master System title, but it came out on Sega Genesis in 1996.

[SpaceHarrier]

Rise 2 Resurrection (PS1)

To my eyes, actually quite a bit uglier than it's SNES forebearer, Rise of the Robots.

[gbpxl]

IIRC the story with Time Killers is that its release was delayed a number of years or something.

games that come to mind for me... yeah Bubsy 3D comes to mind.. other games that look like dogshit... Aidyn Chronicles is a hideous mess of a game... cant think of many others as I dont normally go out of my way to play shit games

[WelcomeToTheNextLevel]

Time Killers was intended for release in early 1994 on Genesis and SNES. Even for that time it looked... awful. Nintendo wouldn't allow Time Killers to be published on SNES, so it was scrapped. The Genesis port was complete around this time, but it was shelved. Two years later, in July 1996, it was finally released.

It looked even worse. At least, in 1994, the NES was still alive (barely) and the main market was still on the 16-bit consoles. By 1996, 8-bit was dead and being sold at fire-sale prices at Funcoland and 16-bit games that were still being published had to try their best to show that the jump to 32-bit wasn't quite worth it yet. Stuff like Toy Story, Vectorman, Red Zone, and Sonic 3D Blast pushed the limits of what the Genesis could do, with talented programmers still providing up-to-date experiences on aging hardware. Time Killers was released among all this as the same exact game finished in 1994 that looked like it should have been from 1988. It would have been a D-grade game if it were a launch game for the Genesis. It also boggles the mind why they didn't bother to improve it at all in the 2 years between its planned release in 1994 and its final release in 1996.

[goldenband]

Santa Claus Saves the Earth on PS1 is a pretty well-known example. It looks like something for the Amiga CD32, or maybe Philips CD-i.

[Gameguy]

I guess Punky Skunk on PS1 would count. I like the look of the game but it was supposed to be a SNES game originally so it does look outdated. But does outdated mean awful? Is that what the thread is going for?

[WelcomeToTheNextLevel]

Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Battle 22 on PS1 would be another one. In 1995, when it was first released in Japan, it looked like a Super Famicom game with cutscenes added. In 2003, it made it to the USA, and it looked like an SNES game through and through. It looked like a 10 year old game back when 10 years was A LOT of progress.

[Greg2600]

Anything produced for the Jaguar.

[gbpxl]

Anything produced for the Jaguar.
I'm too young to really remember much of it but yeah seeing all the advertisements now about how they kept saying the hardware was so much superior but the games looked like SNES games or worse in most cases was pretty hilarious

[kupomogli]

Falcom games on the Vita, PS3, PS4, and Switch. Graphically they look like a From Software PS2 game just in HD.

Brigandine Legend of Runersia. I do like how the world map and all of the menus look, but the 3D models in and out of combat just look awful.

Langrisser 1 and 2 Remakes. Unlike Brigandine Legend of Runersia which has terrible looking 3D graphics, this game is all in 2D and the graphics don't look bad, except for the character sprites. Now the game allows you to change the character sprites to the original versions, but not the battle map sprites and this is by far the worst part of the game. I just couldn't get past how cheap looking these graphics looked and that alone turned me off to purchasing the game which from what I've played was otherwise quite solid.

Now, with past consoles I'm going to go with games that were the ugliest on the console.
XCOM UFO Defense definitely didn't look like it should have been a PS1 game for instance and was pretty ugly. It probably could have been done on the Sega CD or PC Engine. It's okay, you can tell what everything is, but it's pretty ugly in doing so imo. Good game though.

Die Hard 3 within Trilogy. In this case, Die Hard 1 looks good enough and 2 looks better, but Die Hard 3 looks awful. It was never its own game, but it is its own game within a game.

Dragon Ball Z Ultimate Battle 22. The jank in this game and is quite ridiculous for a 2D game. Everything is well animated, but for a fighting game all of that detailed animation and how slow everything performs, should this even be considered good or bad? It's all just so akward.

Dragon Ball GT Final Bout. Even worse than Ultimate Battle 22, you now have the same ridiculous jank but now in 3D. Now, I do think the character models look kind of good, but the problem is that the combat is as janky as it was. The thing I don't get is this is where they should have put more effort to have even more animations instead of less, because now you see three frames of animation to do attacks and it just looks so bad.

Tecmo's Deception.

From Software PS1 and PS2 games.

There are so many games that don't really look up to par on systems that it'd take weeks to go over all of them so here's just some. Most I don't really know off the top of my head so I'd just have to go visually recollect what the games look like. I don't play games for the graphics.

[Nz17]

Dragon Quest 7 for PS1 looked like an SNES game and it was released late in the life of the PlayStation 1.

[Pr3tty F1y]

DQ7 has a fully 3D world.... Yes, it's populated by 2D sprites, but it's definitely well beyond what the SNES could pull off.

[goldenband]

Anything produced for the Jaguar.

Well, not quite anything. I'd say a few games had graphics that actually lived up to the system's promise (though not all of Atari's promises!), especially Skyhammer which is approaching Saturn or early PS1 territory. Doom also makes the cut, I'd think, and you could make a case for a few others like Battlesphere Gold and Super Burnout.

Same deal with the 32X, really: most games looked disappointing or were just 2D games with a higher color count, but Virtua Fighter and Doom probably make the grade. Maybe Star Wars Arcade and Shadow Squadron as well. You could throw in Metal Head and Darxide if you're feeling generous, since the texture-mapping on those games put them at the doorstep of the 3DO and maybe Saturn.

[AceAerosmith]

Alekhine's Gun for the PlayStation 4 always looked like a shitty PS2 era game. And some of the game features were absolute shit. No checkpoints, no auto-saves, flat textures. Pure garbage.

[Ryudo]

BMX XXX looks like an N64 game on 6th gen hardware.
Madden 64. Even for N64 this looks bad.
Shining Wisdom Saturn. Was intended to be a Genesis game and the pre-rendered sprites look cheap.