📉𝙇𝙤𝙬-𝙋𝙤𝙡𝙮 📈𝙃𝙞𝙜𝙝-𝙍𝙚𝙨

@lowpolyhighres.bsky.social

Posting screenshots of retro low-poly games in high resolutions using emulators, camera hacks and other tools for a better, sharper look at the artistry involved in making them. Run by @maxmantic.bsky.social

A lovely carnival with some colorful bumper cars and floating rollercoaster tracks up on high while a mean looking gray crab fella runs up to you, his head tall and blue, with small thin yellow eyes, looking like he might be a cop, trying to ruin the fun for everyone.

It's hard to depict the visuals in a screenshot but the game has a beautiful wavy effect every time you dive in or dive out of a body of water, shown here as Robbit jumps into a small lake, looking down at his legs and lots of air bubbles floating up and the entire screen wobbles, perfectly retaining the effect even in high resolution.

A tropical resort with a rocky beach, one floating island with a couple of palm trees hovers in the distance and a little crab guy with big googly eyes is just looking at you in awe.

The villainous Baron Aloha flees to his home planet, Little Muu, after the events of the first game but is now invaded by the giant alien entity called Captain Kabuki that suspiciously looks like the King of All Cosmos from Katamari Damacy but with a white cone head, taking apart Little Muu and putting the pieces of land in giant glass bottles.

Baron Aloha swallows his pride and call for help from his adversary, so Robbit the robot rabbit is once more on the case.

The case being just lounging on this beautiful beach resort with palm trees, sunshades, lots of hotels, a floating island and a little green round kiwi bird with stick legs, two little dots for eyes and a long yellow triangle for a beak. He's mostly famous on the internet for being seen with a paraglider but is also instantly recognizable and smoochable as is.

A tunnel shaped like a five-petalled flower made out of a rainbow-colored neon grid as a ring of fire travels deep into the tube, annihilating everything in its path.

The main menu shows a smaller cut out rectangle of the gameplay as the ship rolls around the tube, shooting enemies while a big wasp flies out of the screen, buzzing around and trying to break out of your TV. Very tubular!

Aliens on the planet Neptune have built "The Torus", a tubular circuit that is made to create giant insects, built to invade Earth. Nitrous Oxide is a byproduct of the insect-creating process that also serves as the fuel for your Tunnel Runner ship on its mission to wipe out the insect menace.

Although none of this really matters because N2O is a hectic and smooth Tempest-like where you actually fly through the tunnel instead of just staying on the edge of it, shooting the swarm of various insects like these yellow beetle-like crawlies while rotating along the grassy ceiling that follows a yellow (well, really brown) brick road, picking up mushrooms and E coins.

All of this is augmented by a full soundtrack by The Crystal Method which elevates the simple arcade game into a techno music video as you bop your head to the heavy beats.

Kantaris lets her henchman, the neon-green double mohawk in a blue and yellow gimp suit man Web Spinner have a go, running around, leaving cool speed trails and throwing electric boomerangs.

The PS1 version offers an entire second mission that feels even more elaborately designed than the first, sending Richard to a hotel that runs as a front for a weapons factory with ties to Wild Dog. The briefing offers some amazing details on the plot such as:

"Your mission is to uncover the plan of the organization "Kantaris". This is their headquarters. (shows a photo of a hotel)
The hotel is actually a front for their weapons factory.
This is their leader, also known as Kantaris. (shows a photo of a beautiful woman with white hair tied in a ponytail)
Itell came up empty on Kantaris.
We don't even know a real name or gender. (dog, you just showed me a photo, but you're right, I won't make assumptions)
However, we do have positive verification that they are Wild Dong's arms supplier."

Richard blasts into the hotel lobby and later a big white ballroom with a marble floor and a piano, as a car just casually drives in and brings in a couple of terrorists in blue outfits, wearing black balaclavas while a bellhop in a blue uniform (and shades of course) draws his gun at you.

Richard goes deeper into the complex, revealing a hidden high-tech headquarters with a big green LCD table with maps and plans, lots of big shelf-sized computers and amongst the soldiers in white uniforms - the two black telepod machines from David Cronenberg's The Fly.

I'm just assuming they're the original props or replicas and that Sherudo Garo really loves that film.

Our hero, Richard Miller, a cool man with short brown hair, black jacket with a red shirt underneath and denim pants, standing on top of the ramparts of an old castle with the orange sunset seen in the background, doing a mix of the quick twist to the side with the gun pointed at the camera, the signature move of James Bond, as well as a little bit of that Elvis Presley swagger, you know with the knee and the "uh-huh" and his dingles dangling.

After the daughter of the president of a small country is kidnapped by the remnants of the previous totalitarian regime, he calls in Richard Miller, the one man army to rescue her and stop this nefarious plot.

Richard promptly swings in on a construction hook and into a hangar full of weapons and blows up a submarine, sending the terrorist thugs flying as he floods the room with the red glow of the blasts as well as the blood of his enemies.

The number 3000 in big 3D golden digits and above and below it the words thank you scrolling in opposite directions.

The upper part of the large mothership as its metal plated topside swooshes under you, a couple of mid-sized enemy ships with six hexagonal blue engine exhaust on their backs just sit there, docked, and ready to be blown up.

Flying over some industrial buildings in space as a couple of arrow-shaped green ships with green blades arranged as a cross fly towards you, ready to do some space-swordfighting.

One of the space asteroids (they're usually in space, I'm told) has a big cave drilled through it with some rays of sunlight shining through as you swing your ship to the right and mark four small enemy crafts with your targeting reticule and unleashing a barrage of green-trailed homing missiles at them.

A very minimalist and sometimes rather dull rail shooter if it weren't for the fact that it has some really nice blocky, low-poly ship designs and environments, here having the player's ship seen from the back, its larger wings angled downwards at a 45 degree angle while the smaller tail fins go upwards at the same angle with a hexagonal engine exhaust split on the middle and glowing white from the blasting power of whatever atomic energy they have contained in that small ship.

I got sidetracked by the ship's angular cakes, I was gonna say that it's flying currently over a rocky asteroid area with flat plateaus as big purple space ships fly over and try to shoot you with rockets.

The downtown metropolis at night becomes a real trench run between the dark, endless skyscrapers, with long hanging highway bridges filled with tanks trying to stand in your way.

In a bizarre twist that only the French are capable of, Cryo Interactive somehow managed to make a game based on the comic book Hard Boiled, created by Frank Miller and Geof Darrow about an insurance investigator that finds out he's a tax collector robot called Nixon, and turn it into an on-rails hovercraft shooter, driving Nixon's brown old timer looking flying car through drab and dull environments like this factory complex full of shipping containers, gray buildings, cranes and a big, wide helicopter vehicle floating in his way.

I'll admit I didn't closely follow the story while taking screenshots but this kinda looks like Earth's orbit but there's like a smaller purple planet and a larger red planet all really close by so maybe like Mars and Neptune decided to get in closer on the action and see what's up.

A lovely look at a Navy frigate orbiting Earth with an honestly pretty high resolution texture of our lovely planet for a PS1, as a battle begins with blue lasers pew pewing around.

$A century after the events of the first game, the Earth Empire's Colonial Navy has been defeated by the League of Free Worlds and stranded in the Sol system, fracturing into groups and tribes warring with each other, until united by Kron with his anti-League propaganda. You play as Mertens, enlisting in the Navy in Sol and going through the ranks, fighting the tribes, League and even an alien threat. Here we a third person view of your fighter ship, flying towards a large Navy frigate, a light blue ship shaped like a mace with a binoculars-looking middle section that rotates, possibly for artificial gravity purposes. Speaking of gravity, the Frigate floats dangerously near a giant swirling wormhole, covering most of the screen in its majestic glory.$