But again, regarding DC, DC was limited by its own medium. dvd allowed ps2 and xbox to do things dc never could. There's nothing on dc bar Shenmue that looks as good FF10 or MGS2 and I doubt DC would ever reach the highs of FF12 or Okami either.
Well, let's be fair here- clearly the PS2 was the more powerful system (and doubly so for the Xbox), but it's not like it lasted long enough for us to see what could have really have been done with it, especially when Square never touched the console and MGS never saw release on it either.
Also, like I said. You're biased in this. It's pretty clear that you paid attention to fighting games, but other genres didn't improve THAT much considerably on DC.
I only started talking about fighting games for all these examples because
you did. Fighting games were the showcase genre for a while there, so they make for good examples. I played/owned just about everything back then. I worked at the only used/import game store in the entire city. I saw and played literally everything that came out and heard the opinions and saw the perspectives of countless other people who came through there.
On the RPG thing, the company pumping out the visually-impressive titles was Square. No question about it...and they went with Sony.
A lot of DC games looked like marginally better N64 games.
Resident Evil Code Veronica was the first full 3d RE.
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It doesn't look considerably better than a ps1 RE at all.
Better character models, a higher resolution, AA (something the PS2 lacked), real-time lighting, and fully-3D backgrounds doesn't look "considerably better" to you? If anything, compare Code Veronica to Dino Crisis 1, not to the REs that used pre-rendered backgrounds.
Compared to DMC it's not really that impressive.
I can certainly agree with you on this. Or rather, that DMC1 was a much more visually impressive game at the time.
Dreamcast wasn't THAT much of a leap for most games. DC is a system with a whole lot of fighters, so those look great. But a lot of other games? PS2 knocked those out before it even got warmed up. It's not even close. I think a lot of people put Dreamcast on a pedestal, as great a system it was. With few exceptions, it wasn't particularly mind blowing. What DC is great at is fidelity in that it had HD capabilities other systems didn't have. So DC has aged better than those in that you can hook one up today with vga and it'd look great, but if you hook up a ps2 with component cables to an lcd you're going to have a bad time.
Once again, you keep going back to graphics and nothing but. People weren't into Phantasy Star Online for the visuals-- it was being able to play it online with three other people that was the draw. Sony didn't even have online capabilities in their console at the time. They even improved it further with voice chat in games like Alien Front Online. There were definitely a lot of fighters -it was a a big 'arcade' machine- but you also had amazing ports of games like Crazy Taxi, Outtrigger, Daytona, Virtua Tennis, and The House Of The Dead 2 among others-- and by "amazing," I mean the port quality...consistently-high framerates and resolutions. And let's not forget about original mind-blowing titles like Jet Set Radio with that crazy cel-shading. It's just too bad that the majority of consumers just didn't give a shit about any of this stuff.
