[nness]

Every time I stumble upon this I end up losing an hour.

The Rare era Nintendo 64 games are particularly interesting from a graphical stand-point, as Rare really got the most out of the N64's limited texture cache by blending textures with vertex colours.

In Banjo-Kazooie its mostly for used as a primitive baked-lighting (Mad Monster Mansion being a great example of this.) But by the time you get to DK64, they're really working overtime to leverage vertex colours to add variety to the textures and help blend texture edges.

People refer to N64's blurry textures as its signature look, but I think what Rare did with vertex colours is really what most people think when they remember back to the N64.

(Would love to see GoldenEye or Perfect Dark maps added to this site.)

[ctippett]

I'm glad I came back to this on desktop, I initially tried visiting the site on mobile and of course nothing loaded, so I dismissed it and moved on. Seeing now what the site is actually about, holy shit it's impressive.

FYI I saw some references to Goldeneye in the GitHub repo, so we might see it up on the site (hopefully) soon.

[ToucanLoucan]

I also enjoy how WELL most Nintendo games' levels render in browser, because unlike the other two (Sony and Microsoft), their render pipelines are incredibly simple. This of course isn't a complete win, you obviously miss a lot of features of bigger/beefier GPU's like advanced shaders, but at the same time it really draws attention to how the artists developing for those platforms, at least first party, are continuing those traditions of covering a lack of technical ability to, for example, render real caustics in real time, and instead simply make water textures that are so evocative of water that they appear as good as, if not better, then technically superior water effects.

I say this as a slight graphics nerd who loves this shit and plays some games solely to see the visuals they can pull off: I mad respect artists who go the complete other direction, who barely use any "real" graphics tech, to make absolutely beautiful things.