The most realistic things in gaming

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Games can't do skin but they CAN do these...

To accurately simulate real sand, you'd need millions of individual physics objects. Obviously, that's not likely on even the most powerful supercomputers right now. But even last-gen Xbox was creating sand effects that worked brilliantly. For some reason, these were left out of the Xbox 360 sequel, which featured sand non-dynamic sand. You may argue that you're not supposed to be looking at the sand effects when you play DOAX but, clearly, it's your loss if you don't.

A field

2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa has got this nailed. The grass here looks more like grass than real grass. Its non-repeating textures look amazing from afar, and there are 3D blades of grass when you get up close. The human appendix may be surplus to requirements now we don't digest grass, but we reckon it's about to get a work out. This stuff isplainly good enough to eat.


Above: Up the Cherries!

Shiny things

Games have been full of shiny ever since Gran Turismo pretended to reflect stuff back on PSone. Suddenly every game had to have shiny bits in it otherwise people would scoff and throw stones. But what's the pinnacle of shiny things? We're going to go with the reflective flooor boards in the NBA 2K series. Not only are the reflections accurate, but they're subtly distorted by ridges in the wood.

Anyone can do a reflective floor (see 'water' above), but to do it properly and so spectacularly takes real programming prowess:


Above: Shiny floors make our hearts sing just as much as slam dunks

Still, as if to illustrate the point about skin, not even the shiny floor can convince us that that's a real person. There's still a looong way to go there...

What's the most realistic thing you've ever seen in a game? Let us know in the comments.

01 Jun, 2010

Justin Towell
Justin Towell

Justin was a GamesRadar staffer for 10 years but is now a freelancer, musician and videographer. He's big on retro, Sega and racing games (especially retro Sega racing games) and currently also writes for Play Magazine, Traxion.gg, PC Gamer and TopTenReviews, as well as running his own YouTube channel. Having learned to love all platforms equally after Sega left the hardware industry (sniff), his favourite games include Christmas NiGHTS into Dreams, Zelda BotW, Sea of Thieves, Sega Rally Championship and Treasure Island Dizzy.