Metroid, Super Metroid - no words needed here
Ultima Underworld: Stygian Abyss (1992) - probably first true 3D FPP game that was released even before Doom and Wolfenstein, and was miles away from them in technical aspects, single-handedly influenced The Elder Scrolls series, you could run, jump, fly, and even swim in water, you had a fully 3-D environment, the game had mouse movement, it pioneered 3D FPP RPG genre and was a blueprint for other great series to come - The Elder Scrolls, NPCs had own rooms and sleeping places
System Shock (1994) - one of the first to feature a pre-rendered FMV intro, precursor of WSAD controlls on keyboard (SXZC), ability to lean left and right, great fusion of RPG and FPP shooter that influenced Half-Life and Deus Ex, with means of story-telling seamlessly integrated in the game in form of audio logs that create a back story without ever interrupting the flow of the gameplay, superior technology - resolution of 640x480,true 3D objects, advanced physics, in addition to standard running, the hacker can jump, crouch, lean, strafe, peek over ledges, look up and down and crawl; the ability to lean if I'm not mistaken was then later used in Thief: The Dark Project in 1998 by the same authors, customizable difficulties of puzzles, combat, cyberspace, and overall difficulty that greatly change the game; GameSpy wrote:
All of the preceding elements blend into an experience that is pure magic. The setting, the style, the sounds, the voices, the writing, the tension, the music, and most of all, the atmosphere combined into one near-perfect whole; System Shock is the progenitor of today's story-based action games, a group with titles as diverse as "Metal Gear Solid," "Resident Evil," and even "Half-Life." But in my opinion, it bests them all.
BioForge (1995) - Precursor to action games with static camera angles, like Resident Evil; Alone in the Dark was first game to feature that, but BioForge was much closer to what became a standard for quite some time; BioForge pioneered quaternion-based skeletal animation, with pose interpolation and interchangeable skeletons, this would later become a common technique in 3d computer and video games, it was basically the first game ever to use motion capture; BioForge uses a software-only 3D engine to draw polygonal objects and characters against pre-rendered backdrops with a fixed resolution of 320x200 pixels in 256 colors, as a character gets more and more injured in combat, wounds and blood appear on the model, which will also limp or move awkwardly, indicating its overall health (effects that diminish while the players regains health), BioForge had the first single-skin, fully texture mapped, skeleton-based characters ever seen in a computer game; the animations were created using the rotoscope technique on live-actor movements captured with the Flock of Birds on-body motion detector system, using an in-house pose editor named System for Animating Lifelike Synthetic Actors (S.A.L.S.A.) that was capable of displaying captured movement as fully rendered models in real time; great story and means of story-telling that still stand the test of time
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