Tank controls, outside of a TANK I hate them, end of story, but I do agree in an always slow based angled view game they're less awful.
Dumping on Tomba is heresy. That game plays like a solid 16bit era platformer and dinging it just for being 2.5D seems fairly petty as it's actually a lot of fun and has personality. Remember I never had a PS anything until 2001-02 so I didn't grow up or have nostalgia love for the stuff.
Silent Hill I never got into, but I also don't like survival horror stuff as i never find it scary, shocking, or all that fun and usually stradled with god awful tank controls is a kiss of death but it's nice reading up on it. I think the movie wasn't that bad either for a game movie.
Maru is right about that era 1st 3D gen of consoles they may look a bit primitive (some more than others) but the real problems are the companies learning/experimenting as you get a lot of bad camera behavior and angles, jacked up controls, and some genres suffer more or less from it as it was a new medium coming off the SNES/Gen/TG16 (and arcade) 2D era stuff.
Maybe bone is right, 3D jumped in a generation, or at least a 1/2 generation too early. They wanted to one up each other and you had the learning curve made on the system instead of behind the scenes learning the system so you had weaker hardware and compromises.
The thing is like Ex there I'm with him, it is a hit and miss thing though as it was early, but there are a good number of PSX games in full 3D that play well. Now some are more obvious genres like your car, space combat flight types, but there are others too like the stuff he said. I know many spooged over how awesome Ape Escape was, imagine this I never tried it, but I'd like to. That was the game that tipped off their jump into the Dual Shock controller when they more realized how 3D gaming should work. I think some companies took their time to learn the environment and what worked best in those lessons. Capcom is a notable one, they played off their strengths with 2D mega man/mmx stuff and arcade ports, but moved into locked view 3D like Resident Evil, and then later you have a well working 3D space camera with Megaman Legends/MM64. They did it the right way learning, not using poor consumers as guinea pigs for bad ideas as much as others did who just threw crap together to see what sticks and stinks.
Oh by the way I'll have Omega Boost in a few days I hope, should be amazing fun as I learned it was by the Gran Tourismo guys and they're known for quality.
