So you have your Star Fox/Star Wing, your Turok, and your Superman 64. Those have feasible explanations. Bottlenecks. 4 MB of total ram, and meddling companies who kept telling the developers to keep changing things.

And then you have Pokemon Sword and Shield. Which has pop in and fog like a Nintendo 64 game. But shares a console of which Super Mario Odyssey, Breath of the Wild, and even a goshdanged port of the Witcher 3 can be found.

So, can you think of these underwhelming underperformers, these foggy failures, and these grainy graphics and list their failures out? (Especially since GOG has nothing resembling graphical embeds?)

But first, some ground rules:

Intentional stylistic choices and art styles don't count. Yes, the Binding of Issac is about as graphically well crafted as a pug, but that is an intentional stylistic suck. Loathsome as it may be, it isn't actually a mistake. One could say that Grow Home is graphically simple, but there's no obvious graphical botches.

Which brings me neatly to the next rule. If you can count the total staff on one hand, do try to show it some mercy.

Yeah,they should be banned.

Grown adults still play pokemon?

Inexcusably bad... hmm...

Any number of games by developers who buy assets off an engine marketplace, slap a crud filter on them and then let subpar coding somehow manage to make the assets look worse than their stock settings?

But of course; those who started with the franchise in 1998 are still with things. I suppose that is a rare exception to the second rule, yes.

I'm playing Shadow Warrior 2013 remake and with all graphics settings turned up it looks alright (meaning only slightly dated) but for things popping into view when you move. It is distracting. My guess is that it has to do with the game been made for the weak Xbox One and they never bothered to rework that part of the graphics for pc. Not a programmer but I guess it is a lot of work. Still, I feel that kind of popping should not exist in a big budget game from 2011 or later.

There are more games of course.

Anyone remember Jet Ion GP on the PS2? Looked like something off the 3DO and played even worse.

Go play a game by Blast!, then we'll talk :P

It's kind of amazing the Switch could run something as big and beautiful as Zelda: Breath of the Wild but then struggles with seemingly much lesser games like Link's Awakening and Pokemon. Just developers not using the hardware well I guess, but Nintendo used to always be on top of that sort of thing. Luckily I play all my Zelda stuff emulated anyway and don't care about other Nintendo stuff anymore.

Anyway...

Saint's Row 2 had horrible pop-in and ugly graphics on PC, if I recall correctly, compared to other open world games of that time. It was a notoriously bad port in general though, so not surprising.

Outer Worlds has ridiculously close pop-in sometimes, even on "ultra," which is a bummer.

I remember thinking Assassin's Creed 2 had a much more "boxy" feel in the cities compared to the first game.

Doom 3 was an amazing looking game but the "BFG Edition" brightens it up across the board and makes it look terrible. The textures and such were meant to be in darkness, and brightening it makes them look so bad. Similarly Deus Ex Human Revolution's "Director's Cut" took away a lot of the gold tint and such, which made it look weird.

The original Far Cry had amazing looking jungles and islands for the time, but I remember thinking the human models looked terrible.

A lot of early 3D games looked so bad they should have stuck with 2D longer, which is a pretty common opinion. Final Fantasy 7, Alone in the Dark, Monkey Island 4, etc.

Deus Ex 2 and Thief 3 have truly terrible textures, even for Xbox ports.

I remember thinking Halo 2 looked worse than Halo 1 somehow, but that's another crappy PC port so I dunno.

I find the TAA on some modern games to be inexcusably blurry, since other games can do TAA much better. It shouldn't be a crapshoot.

Man o war: Corsair. Tbh it’s not just the graphics, or the bugs, or the empty towns, pointless quests, or the dreadful controller mechanism, or the wonky animation...oh, yes actually it’s all that.

I know risen 3 was slated a bit for effects put on the graphics, though I played with all that modded out.

Any game with awful blurring when turning.

well...

Grown adults still shame other adults for their game choices?

I'm guessing that's the original DX9 version you're playing, right? Because I don't remember getting these issues on the DX11 version.

Yeah, I also don't recall things popping in, with the DX11 version. But speaking of things popping in, Skyrim was really bad for 2011 in some aspects, especially distant LOD.

OpenGL version, as that is what was used for the Linux version. Now I am considering trying the Windows version in Wine.