Digital Foundry Retro Discussion [2022]

[BRiT]

New Year, New Thread, Same old retro gaming topics.

Old Thread @ https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/digital-foundry-retro-discussion-2021.62232/

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[Shortbread]

Namco struck gold with the brilliant Splatterhouse - an arcade game that tapped into the horror movie genre that was so popular back in the 1980s. In this DF Retro episode, John Linneman, Audi Sorlie and a special guest revisit the entire series - from its brilliant arcade roots, through its many console ports and its eventual - and unfortunate - demise in the PS3/Xbox 360 era.

I really enjoyed this series on TurboGrafx-16. Still have them both somewhere in my gaming storage closet.

 

[Nesh]

Its sad that the reboots miss what made the original great.
Some games either cant be rebooted, or should retain their roots more. Sometimes they just to mimic other games.
The original Splatterhouse games had slow to medium pacing and gave time to digest the dark atmosphere they created.

 

[Shortbread]

A cult N64 classic was remastered for PC by retro-modern experts Nightdive Studios - and now Shadow Man Remastered has arrived for consoles! John Linneman and Alex Battaglia discuss the fascinating ports - and their settings. Yes, settings on a console game!

 

[Allandor]

Funny that such "simple" games on new engines need so much hardware.

But this should be another example that it is not always the content that is so hard to the GPU/CPU but the features that are in use. This illustrates quite good that features just have a base-cost when used even if a smart-watch has enough power to render the original game (to put it somewhat bluntly).

 

[Davros]

From the Readme of the original :

Minimum CPU speeds
------------------
Pentium 166 with a 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics card or equivalent.

Minimum memory requirements
----------------------------
32 Megs of memory

Note:
Full Installation = 620 MB
Meduim Installation = 329 MB
Small Installation = 20 MB

 

[Phantom88]

This one is so funny

 

[snc]

This one is so funny

Alex isn't best in this game haha

 

[Picao84]

This one is so funny

Oh my god I played this game and don't remember it looking so bad! I also played it on a Ti 4200.

 

[Shortbread]

I heard of a square meal, but them tires on the PC version...

Seriously, a terrible PC port/edition...

 

[PSman1700]

Was the OG Xbox basically having a Ti4200 gpu? Extremely capable for a console/time of release. No wonder it was so much ahead.

 

[Riddlewire]

I suppose in Shiny's terminology, the "W-Buffer" was for the fourth dimension in WXYZ. The "Time Buffer".

 

[Davros]

I may own this game (if I do I bought it from a charity shop for probably £1)

 

[Allandor]

I heard of a square meal, but them tires on the PC version...

Seriously, a terrible PC port/edition...

I don't remember those tires to be that .... square-like. Maybe this is a problem with the used driver or something like that. Wasn't that the time of n-patches (and the equivalent on ATI) to round up things?
Yes, sure the game was horrible in parts, but it had also some uniqueness for it's time.

 

[Dictator]

I don't remember those tires to be that .... square-like. Maybe this is a problem with the used driver or something like that. Wasn't that the time of n-patches (and the equivalent on ATI) to round up things?
Yes, sure the game was horrible in parts, but it had also some uniqueness for it's time.

It is explained in the video - if you watch it

 

[CHAOSHACKER]

Was the OG Xbox basically having a Ti4200 gpu? Extremely capable for a console/time of release. No wonder it was so much ahead.

It's somewhere in between a GeForce 3 and GeForce 4 in terms of feature set. It has the shader-pipeline layout of a GeForce 4 while only having the clockspeeds and the feature set of a GeForce 3

 

[see colon]

IIRC Enter The Matrix on PC was one of the first PC games released on DVD. There was a CDROM version of the game and it had some insane amount of discs. Like 8 or 12 discs I think. I owned both at one point, and I don't remember if they were different, I just remember the game being broken on PC. Tried to revisit it a few times, was always disappointed. But I did finish the game on Gamecube. Only fell through the world a few times.

 

[PSman1700]

In that time era that enter the matrix launched, it kinda drowned under all those other great games around at the time. It wasnt anything special visually nor gameplay wise even at the time, on any platform. I think its successor (path of neo i think) did bump mapping as the only PS2 game supporting that feature, or atleast, it was claimed to use the effect one the main model.

 

[jlippo]

I don't remember those tires to be that .... square-like. Maybe this is a problem with the used driver or something like that. Wasn't that the time of n-patches (and the equivalent on ATI) to round up things?
Yes, sure the game was horrible in parts, but it had also some uniqueness for it's time.

Shiny had their own dynamic LoD method for characters and most likely used something similar for tires.
For some unknown reason the lod just didn't work properly here.

On Sacrifice it did quite bit better.

 

[see colon]

It worked, it just caused massive slowdown when it's turned on. They talk about it about 4 minutes into the video. Here's a video of it maxed out on modern hardware with a widescreen patch.

One thing I always was impress with was how characters had physics applied to them. Not full simulation or anything, but if you kick or push enemies into other enemies they react to that. That was a thing in many 2d, 16bit beat em ups that wasn't in most 3d ones, but it was here.

Also, if they ever do a remake, I hope Rocksteady does it. Imagine the hand to hand combat with Arkham type controls and counters, with an open world city. And they are owned by WB, so there shouldn't be any licensing concerns.