What gimmicky effects amaze you every time?

[Rayne]

The moment the soldiers follow your footprints in the snow in Metal Gear Solid, that was awesome

[DreamcastRIP]

Uridium - the drop dead gorgeous sprite animation when you switch directions when controlling the Manta class space fighter.

[Budly Moore]

The classic MegaDrive waterfall effect, cheesey, over used, but mesmerising.

[Nemesis]

Fog! Yes fog in Lotus Turbo Challenge 2. My jaw dropped when I saw that. It looked like the real thing

In subsequent years, Foggy weather would become commonplace in PSone games to hide the short draw distance.

[Treguard]

Fog! Yes fog in Lotus Turbo Challenge 2. My jaw dropped when I saw that. It looked like the real thing

In subsequent years, Foggy weather would become commonplace in PSone games to hide the short draw distance.

I still think the rain effects on the Storm level are the best on any game I've ever played.

[Mire Mare]

I'm a sucker for impressive water effects too. I remember coming back from the pub one night, early 2000s, switching on the Gamecube to play Wave Race Blue Storm and instead of playing we sat back to discuss the impressive, mesmerising, water effects on the title screen.

Gears of War had some impressively dark and brooding water. Whilst playing co-op with a friend, a different freind, we took a moment out of the melee and stood side by side to admire the rolling waves. More than a little surreal.

I'm almost always lured in by slick human animation in 8 & 16 bit games. Impossible Mission was almost too good to be true when I saw it in '84 and I still love to see Agent 4125 stride around Atombender's lair like he owns the place. Then there's the obvious Flashback and Another World. I'm sure there are more, but I can't recall them.

I used to be impressed by the idle animations of characters. I think a lot of 16 bit characters developed some kind of nervous twitch when you left them standing for too long and some were actually pretty funny. I seem to recall a thread about this recently.....

[shiftytigger]

The parallex scroll used in 'Destiny Mission' for spectrum - ace effect. Game not so bad.

[Nemesis]

Lighting effects. I always tend to think of Need for Speed 3 on the PSone. There's a track called Hometown which you can play at night in stormy conditions. I was impressed when I first saw it. Racing at night, pitch black with only your headlights breaking the gloom. Interspersed with flashes of sheet lightning together with the red & blue lights of the police cars as they give chase.

[SJ_Sathanas]

Playstation GranTurismo; the way the wheels would do that optical illusion and appear to spin backwards. I LOVED THAT! Do they still do that in newer GTs ?
Usually I found it's the subtle things, though.

[Doddsy]

In leisure suit larry 3 I got impressed with the effect of seeing larry's reflection in the mirror in the hotel!

[joefish]

Fading the palette into different colours so it looks like the sun is setting in Ridge Racer Revolution. Also, I can't remember the first game I saw do it, but a similar trick to make the screen whiter to mimic the blindness of coming out of a tunnel into bright sunlight.

[AceGrace]

I tend to like the early clean polygon look in arcade games i.e. Virtua Fighter and Virtua Racing.

[The Laird]

Fading the palette into different colours so it looks like the sun is setting in Ridge Racer Revolution. Also, I can't remember the first game I saw do it, but a similar trick to make the screen whiter to mimic the blindness of coming out of a tunnel into bright sunlight.

That reminds me, Super Burnout on the Jaguar does this.

Day turns to night and the moon even rises and the lights on your bike come on, it's amazingly subtle and so impressive.

[gman72]

Me? You want to know what wows me? Well, I just love a scrolling message. You simply dont get them anymore. A programmer friend of mine said Hi to me in a couple of commodore 64 demo scrolling messages back in the 80's, you can imagine how elated i was. I think one of the demos was called Freakout and was a fairly basic arkanoid clone with several selectable tunes... ah, scrolling messages.

[OldSkoolCoolFool]

As an ST owner i was always impressed by any game that featured smooth scrolling (especially horizontal) and ran at a half decent speed!