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[RetroGamingUK]

For 1998 hardware theres some unbelievably good looking games.

My top 10 based purely on graphics

1. Dead or Alive 2
2. Ferrari F355 Challenge
3. Sonic Adventure 2
4. Virtua Striker 2
5. Shenmue
6. Resident Evil: Code Veronica
7. Soul Calibur
8. Ecco the Dolphin
9. Metropolis Street Racer
10. Jet Set Radio

 

[PaintTinJr]

PS2 2001 holliday lineup alone is that infamous image that people keep trotting back to prove how much better it was than every consecutive console to date, so yea - you'd have to be pretending most of the library didn't exist to claim there was only 'a few' exceptions in that time-frame.
And. to add to above - we also got BG: DA, SSX/SSX:T, Splashdown, Jak1, Bouncer, ICO, AC4 and many more during the same period (and this is just listing software that was technically interesting in some way).

It's also the period where we finally started moving from 'clearly early PS2 title' (like FFX) to 'ok PS2 can do interesting things not seen before' (like BG: DA or Jak). Though even in the former bracket - I still think Bouncer was doing more with the hw than FFX did despite launching a year early - but I digress.

Bomberman Kart was also a 2001/2002 game with 4 player splitscreen lots of fill-rate heavy fx IIRC, I have my doubts such generalised camera work with that gameplay was possible on Dreamcast without methods to fake the generalized camera work into partial pre-calculated workloads for 4 player split..

 

[simpatico]

Losing baked lighting hurts. Real GI lighting can never look as good because it has no mind for aesthetics. Devs just think they don’t have to work on lighting because GI will handle it.

Proper baked lighting will take GI into account, but can override where it is needed to make a scene look a certain way