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Games That Push System Limits
Retro Gaming with racketboy has a look at games that pushed the limits of gaming systems. At the end of every console's life, the last few games released for the system are (generally) the shiniest examples the hardware has to offer. The article's author starts with the Atari. From the piece: "I'm by no means a 2600 expert, but Solaris is definitely one game that comes up quite frequently in terms of innovative 2600 games. Considering the 2600 wasn't originally intended to do much more than play Pong variants, Solaris is a technical masterpiece with its sophisticated gameplay and relatively high resolution graphics. Although the game played much like a first-person space shooter, you can always see your ship at the bottom of the screen. The graphics for Solaris were first-rate as the multi-colored aliens are flicker-free and glide along smoothly, even when attacking in groups."
And even on my new system it locks up.
/AboveNormal in a script to push the game into high-use mode
But to properly pay Sims 2, I had to:
1. upgrade my RAM to 708MB
2. turn off all other programs
3. use
4. turn my monitor to a lower display resolution.
Luckily, it was worth it.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I remember back when Microsoft game out with Solitaire ...
... kept freezing and requiring reboots.
My Windows 95 machine could barely handle it
So that's when I upgraded to Windows 98.
Mainly due to the cartridge system. You could stuff extra RAM and processing units into the cartridge to expand the ability of the base console. Nothing like that in today's optical drives. Theats one of the reasons generations are so much shorter now- we were basicly buying upgrade hardware in each cartridge.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Roller Coaster Tycoon 3... All that beautiful 3d scenery and detailed rides, optimized by drunken chimpanzees... I've yet to see a box that can handle even a medium sized park without chugging like a frat boy on a thursday night...
Rogue Squadron on the N64.. especially with the V-Wing's seeker cluster missles. If you had the RAM expansion, I assume it would be less of an issue, I didn't have it though. One time I used my Game Shark to get myself unlimited secondary weapons. Bad idea.. I spammed those seeker clusters like no tomorrow, and I locked it up. Fun times.
I'd say stopping at the SNES is too bad bacuse other more recent systems showed how it pushed the performance of the system:
SNES: Stunt Race FX....which also used the FX chip (2nd game to use it) Sega 32X: Virtua Fighter...worst looking version of the series, but at least you didn't need a Saturn to play it. N64: Perfect Dark...pushed the N64 a little too hard..almost unplayable at some points. N64: Resident Evil 2...huge game for the N64..I'm suprised they managed to fit it all onto a cartridge at all. Playstation: Gran Turismo 2, Metal Gear Solid...both just grabbing all the PSOne had left for performance.
man, that thing ran so slow that it died.
And what really burned me up, was Maxis included all but one of the changes I wanted in the game - wind turbines, hydro dams, etc. - but I couldn't get them running with anything other than a minimal map and few active boxes.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
PC games are all programmed under the assumption that people can upgrade their hardware. There is no limit to push on a PC because of this. This is all about pushing the limit of a known system and not just coding wastefully under the assumption that the "next generation" will be able to handle it. Console programmers know that the current hardware is all that they are going to get.
The only thing that the PC world has that comes close to this is the demoscene.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
PC games are all programmed under the assumption that people can upgrade their hardware.
I've got a laptop. Other than the memory, I can't upgrade the video or sound cards.
On my GameCube, I did upgrade the memory.
My xBox is upgradeable, not that I ever did.
I fail to see how this is different.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
A game released in 2003, being played on my late-2005, 2.1Ghz iMac G5, with the 128MB Radeon X1600, it runs like ass nearly from the get-go.
Thanks a lot, Maxis - oh, and I'm sure Aspyr didn't really help things out, either. Seriously, was anyone able to play this game at all when it was released, on recommended system hardware.
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
I haven't played Solaris - I'll have to dig up a copy of that one. But I was blown away by Pitfall 2 on the 2600 with its more realistic graphics, better sound (with a musical sound track!).
Donkey Kong Country for SNES. Mmmmm that game was too good. And the first SNES game I know of to use the scanline trick to push the max on screen colors from 256 to 4096.
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
Elite for the BBC pushed it a long long way. Split screen with mode 1 at the top and mode 5 (or was it 2?) at the bottom, an impressive sight.
I heard a rumour that they even used up bits of keyboard buffer memory for space. Is this teue?
I'd also nominate:
For NES, The Guardian Legend (Winter 1988), created by Compile. Innovative mixture of gameplay, extremely fast scrolling, an endearing soundtrack, dozens of enemies on the screen at once, HUGE bosses...lots of fun.
For Genesis, Shining Force 2 (Summer 1994). An excellent sequel, it included the best cartoon-style graphics ever seen on the Genesis' limited color pallette, and the instrumental soundtrack, with fake reverb and rich sounds, was way beyond anything else ever attempted on the platform (remember, most Genesis games went with a techno or electronica-inspired soundtrack because the FM sound synth was pretty poor).
That's about it. The article was pretty complete considering how many systems it coverd.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Wing Commander games have been notorious for demanding system requirements. Not sure if that qualifies as "pushing" a system. But myself and many others I have upgraded thier PCs to play these game in the past. I don't remember the specs off the top of my head but I remember Strike Commander having some very heavy requirements that would not run on half the machines sold at the time it came out.
I know that my 386 SX 16 went from 1 meg of ram to 2 because of a version of Ultima. Worth the $50 cost of 1 meg of ram I saved up for back then! And the excuse to save up for and move to a 486 DX 75? Wing Commander III of course. Those two games give me so many good memories. Ahhhh... Avatar adventures and fighting the Kilrathi. Good days... good days...
1) Developers cannot know what the capabilities of your laptop are. They have to generalize for many, many hardware configurations, and any attempts to push the envelope of systems currently available risks making your system requirements too high for the game to sell. My PC does not equal your PC. My PS2 does equal your PS2.
2) Developers can assume that a laptop sold the year after yours will be more powerful than yours. What is a limit today is not a limit one year from now.
These two things combine to mean that PC developers cannot really push the limit of a PC because defined limits don't exist.
Pushing the limit of a console is truly a feat of wizardry because you're constantly striving to get more and more out of the same hardware instead of just coding for machines that don't yet exist or aren't yet common. On the other hand, there's an incentive to go all out since you are rewarded for hitting the limits of a system by increased sales instead of punished by decreased sales. It's an entirely different way of programming for an entirely different market.
A system with an add-on like a hard drive for an Xbox, a network card and hard drive for a PS2, or a memory pack for an N64 is not the same as an upgrade for a PC. In essence, what you have is an entirely new system. Console games are coded under the expectation that either:
A) You cannot assume that the hardware is there and the game cannot rely on it.
B) The game requires the hardware and will not run without it.
In other words, two systems with or without an added capability are essentially two completely different consoles, and pushing the limits of those systems works completely differently. You'll note that because of lower market penetrations of Console++ over Vanilla Console, most games written for add-on hardware are commercial flops.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Amazing to see full shaded 3d produced on the humble spectrum (and look around some of its billions of individual window views!)
Crash magazine gave it 97% the highest rating ever, and it really pushed the boat out.
(I only just remembered about this talking about HL in a previous discussion)
liqbase
Pool of Radiance - upgrade(?) to CGA from Hercules mono and to 3.5" floppy. First time I installed it, onto 360k floppies, it took something like 5 hours.
:D
:D
Tradewars - upgrade from 1200bps modem to 9600bps modem
alt.binaries.pictures.erotica - upgrade from 14" SVGA to 17" SVGA (Mag DX17F, I still have the damned thing), and to 4MB ET4000 video card so I could use truecolor at 1280x1024 and look at the pretty pictures at full size.
Quake - I saw it on a 486/100 and decided I needed a better computer. I ended up with a dual Pentium-133 with an unheard-of 128MB RAM. Yup, Quake ran pretty well on that guy.
glQuake - Orchid Farhenheit.
Unreal - Voodoo 3 3000 + Celeron @450MHz, another 128MB RAM
Quake 3 - I first tried a Geforce2 GTS, which was a POS and soured me on nvidia forever. I think I went to an original Radeon after that.
Since then, the pace of my upgrades have exceeded that of any game that's come out.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
How on Earth did they port Solaris to the 2600?
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
"Part 1 of 2"
I remember back when Falcon 3.0 came out, Spectrum Holobyte made a big deal about how much more impressive the flight dynamics were with a 486 rather than at 386 because of the onboard math coprocessor. I never did find out if it actually made a big difference, but that's the first game I can recall that really taxed my system, and actively marketed itself towards higher end systems. As I recall, the specs on the side of the box listed the 80486 processor as "Sh*t Hot."
It's "no one," not "noone." Who the hell is noone anyway?
The machine is currently my brother's non-gaming Photoshop/Internet computer, and my current desktop plays GTA3 at 45-70fps even in Wine
Dragon Warrior 4 is NOT 1MB in size, it is 512k. I'd love to see this myth die.
The only 1MB version is an overdump which contains each 16k page duplicated somewhere else in the file.
Thay missed windows vista Windows vista looks like it will push meny systems and that is JUST FOR THE OS.
Games which were techincal marvels on the Commodore 64 included "Armalyte", "Turrican II" and "Mayhem in Monsterland". I think "Elite" and "The Sentinel" also deserve mentions, but both those games were realsed on the BBC as well.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
i am SO surprised no one has mentioned this yet. It was the only n64 game i knew of which had dynamic lighting, bots in mutiplayer, and high quality textures (for the time), plus loads of other beautiful graphical touches. and all of it on a 90mhz cpu with 8mb ram! i heard rare used all kinds of crazy tricks with the hareware to get it to run at all. i guess even then it only managed 25fps....but what a game!
Gran Turismo 4 on the PS2. The graphics in this game are so amazing they look almost as good as Xbox 360 games. Unfortunately, the amount of detail on each car model means the game can only display a handful of them at once (about six from memory). Games like God of War and GTA San Andreas are probably close to the limit of what the PS2 can do.
For PC games, I don't think anything can really top simulation games for processing requirements. Running Simcity 4 on my then-new Athlon 1800XP with 256MB RAM was OK until you got a few thousand people in your city, after that performance just dropped through the floor. Games like Civ 3 and Empire Earth were also very taxing on my previous PC (a PII-400). With PC games though, it's very difficult to tell what's really pushing the limit from the shitty optimising and "just upgrade your PC" mindset that the PC gaming industry is infested with.
Being 11 at time I could only dream of having a ZX81, let alone its 16K expansion. In a magazine I got there was an ad for a 3D maze game, where a tyrannosaurus rex would run at you in full 3D. Did anyone play this? Were you terrified? ;-)
I’m old enough to remember 16K of memory being described as “whopping”
The fact that the developers don't know exactly what hardware people will try to run a game on also hampers them. If the minimum system requirements say that it will run on a K7 Athlon...then there are no SSE enhancements at all, even though most gamers will have P4s and A64s that support at least SSE2. The same is more or less true with other optimization flags on the compilers as the developers do not want have a game not play on a CPU that could possibly be used to play it AND they don't want to compile and have to distribute separate binaries for different chips. Making a few CDs for each the Athlon K7, Athlon 64 SSE2, Athlon 64 SSE3, Pentium III SSE, Pentium 4 SSE2, Pentium 4 SSE3, Pentium M SSE2, Pentium M/Core SSE3, oh, and let's not forget SMP support for Pentium D and Athlon 64 X2 chips would make for one HUGE retail box. So performance is un-optimized and certain portions of games' processing (particularly anything involving floating-point math) is slower than it could be. I know- I code some C and do a lot of iterative math functions. Optimizing the binary with the -march=pentium4 -msse2 -O3 -ffast-math makes a HUGE (in some cases 2-3x as fast!) difference versus just using the gcc defaults. But in others, it barely makes a difference.
Maybe if everyone simply downloads games instead of buying CDs we will see optimization. I bet that will only happen with a boat load of DRM or if the game is open-source.
Just "gittin-r-done," day after day.
DOOM
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
The article included many great games and some of which I've never seen. But I'm surprised that nothing was mentioned of the "Mode 7" texturing the SNES executed so well for games like Mario Kart and F-Zero to simulate 3D environments without using extra hardware (like FX chip).
Even though FF7 gets all the attention, I still feel FF6 had some of the most beautifully done graphics and sprite animation. Pre-rendered backgrounds were colorful and realistic, characters came to life with expression and animation, transparency effects made spells worth watching, mode 7 airship & chocobo movements gave great depth to the play world, and scrolling backgrounds gave the scene a unique and finished feel (remembering when Celes jumps from the cliff, and when reaching the top of Mt. Koltz). Call me weird, but when I reached the top of Mt. Koltz I used to just walk around watching the scrolling background below and how cool that effect was.
Mayhem in Monsterland on the c64 gets my vote.
It was practically the last commercial game released for the c64 (or perhaps Lemmings was, but anyway), and the only game Ive ever seen that scored 100% in a magazine.
It used VSP scrolling though, so it didnt work on very early c64s. But it was fast, colourful (using colour mixing throughout), and extremely playable. Many people called it a 'Sonic beater', which was impressive for 10 year old hardware (at the time).
The Rowland brothers now make games for mobile phones I believe. Alas.
For more recent instances of pushing hardware beyond its limits, check out the alpha builds of Pinball Dreams, again on the c64. Its almost identical to the Amiga version.
Where's The Adventures of Batman and Robin on Sega Genesis? I don't believe there's a single, 16-bit, game on any platform (SNES, Amiga, etc.) that ever did the things this game does, graphically--the sheer volume of graphical effects, tricks, etc. that this game pushes is astonishing.
What about that last Sonic game for genesis. They mentioned sonic and knuckles but there was one Sonic game that imitated 3d, i though that was really cool.
Ironically, Castlevania 3 didn't actually use any of the special graphics capabilities of the MMC5 that were touted by Nintendo Power. The only games that did were Japan-only releases.
The Japanese version used a Konami custom chip instead of a Nintendo MMC that had better banking capabilities than MMC3 (graphics ROM was banked in eight independently-selectable pages vs. MMC3's six) and some extra sound channels (that wouldn't have worked on a NES anyway; the non-Japanese consoles had no external sound input lines) But it didn't have expanded VRAM, columnscroll, or any of the other unique capabilities of the MMC5. CV3 could have been done on an MMC3 cart with a little refactoring and possibly some minor animation cuts.
You do realize the binary is ~2MB (most of which is anti-copy measures and additional DLLs don't add more than a few megabytes)? All the space intensive stuff (textures, levels, sounds, models, animations) is platform independent, there's even a push for platform independent game logic (e.g. UnrealScript). Ten different build take up maybe 100MB at most, that's nothing. The DVDs games ship on these days hold 47 times that and you can even add compression.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Now that's a game. It surpasses FF6 in both graphics and sound, featuring a j-pop song and a kick-ass sound tester with a graphic equalizer.
You wouldn't need seperate CDs for different programs, they actual program bit of games are reletivley tiny, it's the rest of the game that's huge. As far as I can tell, out of the 5GB Unreal Tournament 2004 takes up on my hard disc, 20MB is taken up with executables (EXEs and DLLs). So, it's not exactly going to fill a DVD having a few different versions of programs.
Of course you would have to take your time testing and verifying several versions of the program. I agree you'd have to be a looney to do versions for every specific processor, if it was done I'd guess they'd go for a more general set, say SSE2, SSE3 and a 64 bit version. You'd also have have to come up with some way of installing the right version (or picking the right one at runtime). So it isn't that simple, but the program size isn't a problem.
Is there any way of optimising for multiprocessor / multicore other than just writing a multithreaded program though?
10 PRINT "LOOK AROUND YOU ";
20 GOTO 10
Exile is a sideways-scrolling action/puzzle/adventure game which pushed the 8-bit micros and 32K of memory further than anything had ever done and possible has done since. It has great physics, tons of particle effects, great (and varied) graphics, neat sounds, a plot that didn't suck, smooth framerates, trick NPC AI and more. I only recently discovered that every graphic in the game came from a 128 x 113 pixel block in memory - absolutely staggering when you look at screenshots or play the game. The like above has a game development section that is worth a read.
Exile was also squeezed onto the Acorn Electron (the BBC's smaller cousin). This version played inside a window on the screen where the border looked like noise, but was actually game data or code!
It's a shame that the article stops where it does, because we've seen some impressive late-cycle games over the last generation.
On the PS1, I thought that Final Fantasy IX (which was released, if I remember correctly, almost in tandem with the PS2), pushed the system right to its limits. It broke down a little bit in places, where it was obvious that the system couldn't quite handle what it was being asked to (for example, during the summon animations), but the overall effect was great. Although it wasn't quite released at the end of the cycle, Gran Turimso 2 pushed the system well beyond what most other games managed.
During this current cycle (or is it the previous cycle now the 360 is out?), we've also had some very impressive looking games come out right at the end. Ironically, the PS2, which has long been derided as underpowered compared to its competitors, has had some of the best of these. Shadows of the Collossus and Gran Turismo 4 really stand out, while Shadow Hearts 2 is also jaw dropping in places (although the battles are still a bit ugly). On the X-Box, Farcry Instincts actually, to my mind, looks better than Perfect Dark Zero does on the 360.
First of all, I want to thank you all for your contributions, corrections, and suggestions. As I mentioned in the article, this is a bit of work in progress.b oy
:)
I will be adding many of the suggested games -- some of which I was very aware of, but just slipped my mind.
As mentioned by somebody earlier, this was mainly for console games as that is what I am most familiar with and because of their limited and standard resources.
Also, be sure to keep an eye out for part 2 (and possibly 3 & 4). Not only am I planning on continuting with the era between the Jaguar and the Dreamcast, but I am also planning on doing a section on Handhelds such as the Gameboy, and possibly another misc section.
Feel free to subscribe to my feed for updates.
http://feeds.feedburner.com/RetrogamingWithRacket
Keep the contributions flowing!
Huh, I knew that the binaries were that small, but I thought that the DLLs would be a lot bigger than 2MB. Like another one of the people who responded to my post, then the issue becomes loading the *right* executable for your CPU, not fitting them all on the install media.
Just "gittin-r-done," day after day.
When the beta of glQuake came out, I had to buy a 3dfx voodoo. It was worth it.
On the Genesis: Gunstar Heroes, Mega Turrican, Batman & Robin, Earnest Evans, and Toy Story to name a few...
On the SNES: Donkey Kong Country 2, Chrono Trigger...
Weird, I don't really see people posting about many games that are technically difficult to pull off such as these.
Twinstiq, game news
There are instructions to find out what the CPU supports, the rest is just choosing different files to install.
Just checked, with Doom 3 the binary is 5MB including copy protection and all of the modding tools (because they're all included in the same file), the gamex86.dll is 2MB and the rest is platform independent data (except maybe for the shader scripts but they aren't CPU dependent). So it's a bit more than I thought but still nothing that would prevent having multiple versions on one DVD. Hell, UT2004 has the Linux and Windows versions on the same DVD, other games may include a Mac version on the same CD as the PC one.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
This is one of the last games to be released on the original Playstation, but (to the best of my knowledge) the first CD-based game that did not have any in-game loading time/ screens.
iv gotta say turok 2 or 3 for n64 with high rez (640 x480) turned on with the 4 meg expansion when explosions start to happen all hell breaks loose....
for ps2: shadow of the colossus is pretty intense i can feel the cpu's heat through the ps2 controller
Duke Nukem Forever has so far pushed everybody's limits!
My upgrade from the 4MHz XT to the turbo-charged 10MHz NEC V20 brought those 99+99+99+99 (you heard right, 396) berzerker fight from like a 45 minute battle to 10 minutes.
"BSD is about people pissing each other.." (Moid Vallat)
and not because it pushed limits in the traditional sense but because it did something no one thought was possible on that hardware at all
Don't know if it was pressing the machine but when I saw that on an Apple GS I nearly peed myself. The flying form of the robot was so responsive, unlike anything I'd experienced before. The (much uglier) PC port was no slouch--and I got to play at my house!--but *wow*.
Feeling so good natured I could drool