Look At These PS1 Games and Try Not To Bleed From Your Eyes

There is probably not a single Playstation game more infamous than Bubsy 3D. The Eidetic game is considered to not only have the worst video game visuals of all time but the entire game itself is often referred as the all around worst game in history.

Final Fantasy XV is one of the most jaw-droppingly gorgeous games of all time so it’s only right that we take a look at the franchise’s more humble beginnings. Before the Final Fantasy series gave us food so realistic that we were all tempted to lick our TV screens, it was first a heavily pixelated world where muscles looked sharp and strange. Oh how times have changed.

Final Fantasy VIII was a huge visual improvement to its predecessor but that doesn’t change the fact that those graphics are pretty offensive to the eyes. Almost everything in the game felt flat and underwhelming and movement in the game never felt fluid or natural. That’s not to say that FFVIII wasn’t one of the best games of its time. It’s just a not so pretty reminder of how far we’ve come.

So let’s be honest. When Tony Hawks Pro Skater was released in 1999, gamers were thoroughly impressed by the graphics it offered. Details as small as rust on pipes or being able to clearly see different logos and graphics on t-shirts just felt special. Nearly 18 years later, Pro Skater is yet another eye sore that makes us grateful for technological advancements.

Perhaps the worst thing about X-Men: Mutant Academy 2’s graphics is that they actually didn’t significantly improve from the first X-Men: Mutant Academy. To make matters worse, Juggernaut looked way more like Clayface than the iconic X-Men villain.

Dragon Quest VII (known by North American gamers as Dragon Warrior VII) actually wasn’t a bad gaming experience. The lengthy RPG is rather enjoyable and has a story line that made the tremendous of hours of gameplay pretty worth it. The graphics, however, were pretty disappointing. Even for PlayStation 1 standards, Dragon Quest VII was visually underwhelming.

Any game with backdrops this barren and undeveloped should at least put some pretty solid sprites in the game to try to distract our eyes from the environments—or lack thereof. Even though Xenogears was released back in 1998, it doesn’t excuse the type of visual wasteland that, quite frankly, just felt like the result of a lack of effort.

Laura Croft is sexy. She’s strong and clever. She is a butt-kicking heroine for young girls and she was one of the first fictional crushes that young boys had. In Tomb Raider Chronicles, however, she looked downright weird. Laura, along with every other character in the game, was composed of sharp edges and blocky coloring.

It was probably in everyone’s best interest that game visuals had only come so far in 1996. Most gamers probably weren’t prepared to see the kind of gore and unprecedented violence that Mortal Kombat introduced to the gaming community in HD.

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night reveals a side of gaming that the youngsters will never truly understand an appreciate. During a time when 3D gaming was receiving a huge boom in popularity, Konami put out this delighting 2D scroller that would go down in gaming history books as a surprisingly successful title. The game managed to capture a large audience even with blood splatter that looked like it had been added in later via Paint.

No explanation is needed, but we’ll give one anyway. There wasn’t a single redeemable quality about this games visuals even for a 1997 release. Despite being created for Sony’s flagship gaming console, Madden NFL ’98 comes dangerously close to looking like a game intended for the Gameboy Color.