This was by no means the greatest game ever but i played it for so many hours with friends on the GameCube back in the day. Have a lot of great memories and nostalgia for it.
The N64 ones would always make me really close to throwing up from the framerate, sometimes dipping down to like 2. I did like the more nature-y aesthetic tho. 15:56 Also remember when red crosses were on healthpacks
It took 1-2 years for games to look hopelessly outdated back in the day. Games which suffered production delays were cursed upon release, because there was no way they'd hold up to expectations.
@@SianaGearz I'll never forget the gigantic upgrade that PS2 felt like after being used to PS1's janky polygons held together with thread. Point being that technology did indeed move fast.
For Alex: Turok Evolution is DirectX 9 and you can use Reshade to try fix the visuals with it and I would ask you to maybe make a video on this. For John: The Xbox port do use 2xMSAA, it's easy to spot it even on this video. Edit: Infinite Ammo cheat in Turok Evolution gives you all the weapons available in the stage and removes older weapons, it's strange indeed but it's how the cheat code works.
@@gamingblowsofficial I don't understand either, MSAA is the most easy AA method to recognise just by looking at the screen and the lower the resolution the more evident MSAA becomes.
It wasn't msaa in turok evolution on Xbox, it was QAA. Xbox has msaa capabilities on paper but not really the hardware to run it effectively, it crippled performance down to 15fps when enabled in most cases.
I remember PC ports of many games being very poor or broken in the early to mid 2000s. Things seemed to get better after steam became more mainstream in the later 2000s.
@@concinnus Yes. And you could be thankful if PC got a port of your favourite games at all, and you had to pray the Xbox 360 version was good, because that's where the PC version was ported from.
@@offspringfan89 GTA4 is an interesting one. It runs like crap even now but looks a lot better than the console version. I just went through the PC version this weekend.
@@Edmundostudios Played it recently too on PC, fantastic game. To me framerate drops mainly when going from one island to another as the game streams assets, but for the most part it was solid. It seems to drop less at higher resolutions too. At 4k I got fewer drops than 1080p. My screen is 1080p, but the game benefits dramatically from supersampling, so I played it like that.
This kind of port is EXACTLY why I am so glad there are talented people out there making emulators. Between bad PC ports and games not being maintained on PC at all, emulation is the only way to have the best (typically) version of games maintained for all time long after the original hardware die off.
Ah yes, the 'Unreal Tournament 2003' era of PC gaming, where pixel shaders existed, but no one used them because of NVIDIA's scammy marketing of mass market cards that claimed to support them but were actually feature-incomplete dog-isht (Geforce4 MX and FX5200). It wasn't until HL2 and Doom3 dropped and ATI ran them better that any of that got straightened out. Kind of a cautionary tale of what happens when there is no competition in the GPU space.
I hope they see this, makes perfect sense and I remember this stuff and things like it even tho it was right around when I moved to Xbox as I couldn't afford a real gaming PC lol.
@@hi_tech_reptiles You didn't miss much - it seemed like there were at least 2-3 years where every PC port had a fallback to a DX7/shaderless 'uprezzed Dreamcast' mode (if they implemented higher levels of shaders at all) because of those cards.
@@mastersplinter8910 lol well now I buy many of the old games on PC either that I did play on console or would have preferred too back then. I don't have a Switch or anything, just old consoles and stuff people have given me or I bought/imported from Japan like a Dreamcast and Saturn, PC Engine etc. I actually prefer mostly games I didn't play as a kid these days lol
I remember being really excited to get this on Gamecube as a kid because Turok 1 and 2 were staples of my earlier childhood. I got to the second level and never played it again because it was very clearly not great. It's less like Turok and more like "We have Far Cry at home"
I loved Evolution back in the day and I was curious if it's still holding up with all the trash that's being talked about it. So I popped it back into my PS2 last year - and I still love it. It's not Turok 1, but neither was Turok 2. The series constantly changed and 3 was already a linear game with small areas like Evolution. So in that sense this is a next gen Turok 3. The guns are extremely fun with different modes, the AI is pretty solid, the gore is amazing and satisfying. Some stuff didn't work that well, mostly the flying sections with the one hit kill environment collisions, but I do have a softspot for the game. It's a janky but solid shooter with a lot of personality.
Everything about Turok 3 and Turok Evolution were inferior to Turok 1 and 2. It is sad how far of a step backward the later Turok games were in terms of ambition with dinky level maps and inferior visuals, enemies, and weapons.
Same. That intro was crazy as a kid. Another crazy moment was using the swarm bore "Evolution's cerebal" for the first time during split-screen, that scared me lol.
I remember settling for Turok when I couldn't get the more straightforward PC shooters as a kid because I couldn't get my mom to let me install much on the family PC, didn't get to play the full PC Doom or Quake til later and settled for Shareware and the N64 versions. Luckily this was a great game, as was Doom64 though different, and idk when I played Quake 64.. The Nightdive remasters are great, but I can't get Turok 2 to run 144hz for some reason so it's hard for me to bother, hopefully they'd add that at some point or fix it.
Same here. When you’re a kid, your imagination fills-in the slow frame rates. For example, it never occurred to me that Goldeneye64 or Perfect Dark 64 had bad frame rates during 4-player multiplayer. Looks horrible now.
I love you guys doing these retro gaming videos. I would to see more! Especially with two of your team reviewing a game! We normally just see John talking about these old gems (although I love listening to him!).
I'll never forget the original IGN comparison. "Once again, there's no reason to even consider the other two (PS2/GC) unless you'd prefer the sometimes-jumpy 60 framerate of the GameCube version over the much more realistic Xbox at 30"
Hahaha, God IGN has some terrible reviews, especially back then. The Alien Trilogy (or was it Resurrection?) Dual Shock thing always blows my mind. Makes me wonder if that game would have blown up and gotten the credit instead of Halo, as have others I'm sure.
Alien resurrection was GameSpot that complained about the modern dual analog controls. That being said the Gamecube's framerate is hardly a stable 60, it's also stuck to 480i instead of 480p.
Medal of Honor actually beat Alien Resurrection by a year so that's another thing IGN were wrong about. Medal of Honor was released in 1999 and already had support for several dual analog stick layouts for Dualshock controllers, including some that are surprisingly modern. Though Alien: Resurrection was one of the few FPS games to support the Playstation mouse so at least that's something (most of the games with PS Mouse support were either strategy games or point and clicks).
Reminds me of the very first port of RE4, no lighting effects whatsoever and no mouse support either, though even with kb-only controls you can still be a crackshot, which is a testament to how well it's designed I suppose.
Turok evolution is over hated. I loved it back in the day. It's not the best thing ever but it's still fun. I also much prefer this level design over the sprawling easy to get lost level design of the others.
And this is why I hope Nightdive gets their hands on the code for this game. They will put their usual nightdive polish on it and probably add some quality of life improvements as well. One can hope.
I’d play it but the game was by no means amazing.. It felt like a major step back in gameplay compared to Turok 1 while only somewhat “evolving” the graphics.. I honestly preferred the bleak otherworldly feel and atmosphere of Turok 1 even if Turok Evolution had newer technology to play with.
@@Mr.Honest247 I agree 1 is a superior overall game. Turok Evolution though, I remember three main positives. The weapons, specifically the spider mine and the dark matter cube (and the animations as mentioned in the video. The evolution, no pun intended, of the gore/violence system. Lastly the multiplayer seemed like it had potential (screwing around in it, I never had people to play against). I'd probably give it a 7/10 or so, definitely a great rental back in the day. :P
The map geometry looks like it's using a pretty basic vertex lit rendering path on both versions, might be some light mapping in there? The dynamic mesh objects in the scene clearly uses a different render path, and that render path has completely suffered on PC, likely due to the Xbox version perhaps using a per pixel shader to resolve the final colour for each fragment, while the PC version looks to use dare I say ... a fixed function method for rendering. There's two likely reasons for this, the developer was either very inexperienced with programmable shaders and had a hard time porting it to PC or they had extremely limited time to port it. OR the game had a hard target for supporting older DX 7.0 video cards to increase market coverage, without creating a separate DX9/8.1 shader rendering path. It very much resembles playing Halo PC on a DX7 card like the GF4 MX440, where it's simply the diffuse textures being used for rendering and no specular, normal map or shadowing effects. However, I find the second scenario hard to believe because the dynamic meshes don't have ANY lighting, nothing, even with a fixed function graphics pipeline, you can do vertex lighting, like how the map geometry is vertex lit, which comes off as extremely odd to me. This highly suggests a lack of time or graphics programming experience, I'd love to know the story behind it honestly.
This reminds me of the PC port of San Andreas - missing the colour grading, heat haze and (I think) motion blur of the PS2 version. The effects are present in the PC build but are never turned on / activated due to issue in the rendering pipeline (RenderWare sucks on PC), so you wind up with a visually incomplete game.
Love this game. Really good. Just different than the originals. The campaign is just epic and the flying parts are gold. I also enjoy the setting, silly story and the weapons and their upgrades.
I suspect that on PC they tried to make it DX 7.0 compatible, as to work on Geforce 1, 2, MX (200, 400, 420.... 4000), Radeon (7000-7200), etc. The Xbox was DX 8.0 level, with a Geforce3 class GPU core. So, I blame this suspected decision with a lack of care, on top of zero support for additional effects from DX 8, 8.1, 9.0a or 9.0b that were available at the time of the PC release. Otherwise, I just can't understand the downgrade in graphics quality.
Lol! I remember being blown away with turok 2 on n64.... not understanding that it was probably running at like 11 fps, like a lot of good lookin n64 games
Love the hell out of this game. Played multiplayer all the time with my cousin on the maps with dinosaurs roaming around just merkin them. Bring Turok back!
Kinda wish we got to see some PS2 and GC footage also to compare. I've always found this game fascinating. I actually kinda enjoyed it back in the day on GC. It's multiplayer is pretty fun also.
Ps2 was the worst... Looked about like the pc port, GameCube had better framerate (could hit 60 but wasn't a stable 60) but worse lighting and textures than Xbox though it did have the distortion effects from the rocket launcher, flamethrower, and one of two other weapons (which are very much missing from the pc and ps2)
Great analyze! Good grief and even more grief that Turok along with Red Faction and Duke Nukem (Forever ( 2001 gameplay content now released ) are in a damnable limbo and lack of competent dev ( except the Nightdive studio folks with Turok remasters on Steam ) studios to resurrect these francises with care, respect and keeping their franchises spirits. Turok, Red Faction and Duke Nukem were my childhood, teen years and now my adult life TONS more than Doom, Halo, Blood, Quake, Perfect Dark, Shadow Warrior, Triade etc
This was by no means the greatest game ever but I played it for so many hours with friends on the Xbox back in the day. I have a lot of good memories and nostalgia for it.
I remember playing this on the gamecube with my brothers and having a blast. It was so glitchy it was like playing the game with a random event modifier.
Played it on gamecube back in the days. I liked it a lot even though there was a game breaking bug that stopped me from beating the game. But I still remember how impressive the Jungle and the Dinosaurs were at the time
I remember the game being shunned back in the day but i bought it for PS2 in late 2002/early 2003 and enjoyed it quite a bit. Was also pretty cheap already at that point.
So back in 2004 when I built my first PC in preparation for Half Life 2, This was actually the first game I bought for it. It must have been around April 04 and I got it for around 3.99 online still in its cellothane wrapper. Sure it was either from Gameplay or Play .. those were my go to websites back in the day.. I think I played it for around an hour or so then went back to playing my older games and newer demos... before splurging for Far Cry. That seen me through till Half LIfe 2's launch. Athlon 3200+ , 1GB DDR, ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB. Always regretted not going for a socket 939 board as I built on the cheaper 754 socket on a MSI K8T NEO but when HL2 launched it didn't matter.. the 9800 Pro was awesome.
Far cry instincts: predator for original xbox was awesome, the melee and mutant powers combined with jungle stalking felt AMAZING. I kinda wish something like that with modern games, to be a predator on a sunny jungle island 😅
I would love this game to get the NightDive treatment. Include 2 versions: the original cut and a Nightdive cut, with streamed line levels and cutting the fluff such as the annoying aerial levels. Help us Stephen Kick, you're our only hope.
@@FatherOMalley yes, they are important, I agree. But not cutting them completely, just smart cuts to make them shorter and less annoying because they are too long, especially by the end.
I wondered the same thing. Metal Gear Solid 2 pre-patch, for example, was a port from the Xbox that only worked correctly on GeForce 3+4 (+FX if using early drivers).
Now this is a game that could use a remake in a good modern engine. I mean yeah Ill take a crysis like Turok game. The panzer dragoon\air section is cool, cooler if it would work like Halo or even earlier drakan, again its something a new engine could pull off easily today.
I played the game on the Gamecube, while the single player campaign was buggy it was kinda fun. That was without playing any previous Turok games. The weapons were amazing to be honest, each had their own unique multiple modes. Lastly the split screen multiplayer was fun (not the flyer stuff). In the single player, the environment was really nice for the time. It had a lot of foliage compared to games like Halo.
so glad to know i wasn’t the only one who had control troubles when i downloaded it on pc afew years ago, they explained what i was feeling when aiming.
I really like this format of playing retro games on different platform and comparing them. John and Alex chemistry is so good it's ridiculous, I could listen them talk about technical stuff all day long.
I played this game during my formative years. You might think a 7 year old shouldn’t be playing it but my friends and I had so much fun with this game. More than halo sometimes. Wish it was remastered
"It always goes back to the tomahawk" . I can bet that the game load a map , and then pick the default weapon by default each time , no weapon retention because it wasn't coded that way and each section is separate .. it was probably easier to debug during dev time.
I own the xbox and gamecube versions. Surprisingly gamecube version runs @ 50/60 fps (pal/ntsc), not steady tho. Think graphics maybe better on xbox, but never bothered playing it 'cause it was 30 fps lol
I remember watching a making of video on this game at the time (because unbelievably, I was excited about it), and iirc the lead designer was just some guy who they hired because he was good at drawing guns. I didn't understand that decision back then, but in hindsight it was maybe out of desperation. His inexperience is on full display.
If I'm not mistaken (it was a long time ago now) the PC port looks to me like it's running the fixed function pipeline (possibly emulated on shaders.) The Xbox was, I believe, the first console to support pixel shaders and the functionality could not have been assumed on PC (depending on your targeted baseline of course.) The fixed function and programmable shader pipelines were basically two completely different ways of doing 3d rendering, so the developers would probably have had to build two separate rendering engines and decided not to bother. EDIT: Another possibility is that I don't think DX8+ support would have guaranteed a certain number of texture samplers, so it may be that the shaders have been built to not access enough textures simultaneously to do techniques like lightmapping. The way I remember it, hardware capability was a mess at this time.
Guess the best way to play this would be GameCube? I see that it's 60fps, and it doesn't seem to be missing many effects compared to Xbox. Also, the cliffs seem to be more detailed- I know the studio's other big game of the time, Vexx, had noticeably bad texture filtering on Xbox, so you'd end up seeing the lower-quality mipmap at even a fairly short distance (complete with an abrupt cutoff where it switches detail levels!). In that case, the GCN version came out looking sharper at times. Anyway, textures look a bit blurry in TE for GameCube, but their higher-quality equivalents can easily be copied out of the PC version, so I'm thinking I'll do that.
@@WllKiedSnake I have Vexx on GameCube and Xbox, and both copies say on the box that they support 480p. Can't test for myself, though, as I don't have component cables. I believe PS2 is the only version that has a progressive/interlaced toggle in the options menu, though, so is that what you're thinking of?
I used to play this on ps2 all the time when I'd visit my dad as a kid. (this and destroy all humans 2) I'd either watch my dad play through the story mode, or duke it out with my siblings on the bloodbath mode. My sister and I would specifically go to the map where the entire arena is in the trees, and raptors roam around below, and we'd team up to see how long we could survive against them. Luckily I backed up most of my ps2 games a while back so im gonna boot this up via emulator and give it a go
I'm sure my opinion is a bit warped through the lens of nostalgia and the simple fact that kids tend to not be as critical of details, but I absolutely loved this game and played it for years (12-15ish). I had enjoyed Turok since the first entry on N64 and was stoked to see a release on the new console generation. This is a good and informative video but I do somewhat disagree on one thing: I didn't find the game as completely linear as is implied here. I very distinctly remember a huge fortress level that had multiple pathways between areas and options to approach fights with stealth or go in hot. I agree it could have been a lot less linear like the earlier games, but it's also not quite a completely straight line. There were also some visuals on the Xbox that I thought looked genuinely good. I may be completely wrong, but I think the lackluster distant textures and so on were to make up for what seemed at the time to be some quite high resolution textures, dense particle effects and animations. Combined with the low frame rate it feels like they were pushing the Xbox to its limits.
Alex, are you also a Turok fan? You sometimes come up with a picture of Joshua Fireseed in your videos. Turok is to this day my favourite shooter franchise despite its flaws and inconsistencies, but I would love to see remakes/reimaginations of the first five games!!!👌🏻👌🏻👌🏻
2003 I purchased my first ever console - THIS game the store included in the package, first ever game I owned. Back then I perceived the characters looked blocky, so so gameplay. I'd slaughter lizards, triggering alarms and a while later everything back to normal like nothing happened. Flip side weapons abundant, multiplayer could go down well. Year following Ninja Gaiden entered the scene for comparison. The T eternally holds a place.
The game taking away weapons is a bug, even if you play the game legit without cheats, some weapons will be gone from your inventory for some stages. For instance, if you get the rocket launcher on the third stage, you won't be able to use it on stage four. The nuke is also another example, you get two ammo shots when you pick it up but if you carry it to the next stage that ammo will be gone from your inventory.
When I see PC gamers with money scoff at the idea that GPU prices are raising the barrier to entry being a problem for PC gaming, I feel like they're too young to remember what it was like before PC got a large install base (FROM being price:performance competitive with consoles from 2007-2016) When the install base shrinks, it doesn't matter how fast your RTX 3090 is if the games are often rubbish ports, or built for the GTX 1060 the average PC gamer is 'still' running.
Absolutely, I ll keep my 1660 super and 1080p and be dragged screaming into 4k ray tracing one day. Voodoo 2 changed everything back then for being accessible. I will not abandon pc for consoles maybe ever again, but hey.
@Dan Gir In those days PC had its own ecosystem of games that were generally simultaneously more technically advanced with worse production values. Think of what games you know that meet that description, that's the future of PC gaming as long as a console equivalent PC still starts at $1000
@@Atrahasis7 My GTX 970 is still kicking & I've got diamond hands on my bank account until the day comes where I can get 2.5 - 3x performance for the same money. It's been 8 years lol. Before that, it was 3.
This port is from the era of Doom 3, Far Cry, Half Life 2, UT2004, Battlefield 2 etc. All of those games pushed high end PCs to their knees. At the end of the day this was just a shitty console port job, nothing else. Those will continue to exist in any era regardless of install base.
I remember when this was released. It was attractive right off the bat simply due to being able to play Turok on something other than a N64 - the PC equivalents were out of bounds for a lot of school kids that time! I always loved the wildlife, free roaming dinosaurs in this game. I felt certain presentation direction was on point, just shoddy execution from a game play direction. I absolutely hated the flying level. They did retain the wicked weaponry however..
Early to mid/late 2000s were the dark ages of PC ports. Not only was there a HUGE anti-PC discourse among developers and publishers, labeling all PC gamers are pirates and completely dismissing the market - but the ports that made it through often had lacking graphical features compared to the consoles. Controller inputs on PC at the time had also not been standarized. It wasn't until late 2000s PC ports started to be taken more serious gradually, more so from 2010s.
I wonder what the GameCube version looks like compared to these. I liked this game a lot. I still play it here and there. I can confirm that the GC version looks similar to the XBOX version but with downgraded textures and no fake reflections.
PC version have mods to fix the issues now, or able to use reshade on modern pcs to fix some of the issues. It be nice if Night dive studios can remaster and improve this game and also port the 3rd game on pc.
As a obsessed Turok fan i was so disappointed with Evolution. It had potential.. and it so sad it didn't deliver on the hype. It really saddens me..😔 I want a new great Turok game! Ffs get us another adventure! Turok is such an amazing world to build a new epic fps.
My family computer was a lga 775 Pentium 4 3.2ghz with 1gb of RAM!! No sound card and on board vga output. Its PC I grew the courage up to try and put a video card in. My cousin's discarded geforce 4 to play a burned Halo CE my friend gave me. Good times!
The flying levels killed this game for me . The path you had to take was super linear and if you flew off the path you could get stuck ramming into a wall repeatedly . That said , the pistol upgrades and arrow variants were really fun .
I had it for the GameCube and played it non stop as a kid. So much nostalgia watching this. Wish the pc version was good enough because now I wanna play it again lol
same, I bought this when a friend bought Time Splitters 2, TS2 was in many ways a better game tbh but yeah a lot of nostalgia for this one. Poison arrows ftw
John. You should give Battle Zone-series some DF Retro love... 98 & Battle Commander, plus Redux-versions. Such an excellent games! And that brings Carrier Command to my mind...
Just bought the Xbox version to play on Xbox 360 through OG backwards compatibility. Love owning an original Xbox 360 to play original Xbox games. Looks like it's gonna be a nice nostalgic playthrough. EDIT: It's not. The controls are fucking terrible. Absolutely impossible to aim and hit an enemy even when standing totally still. That's why, I'd guess, they added an auto-aim option I had to turn on. The deadzone and acceleration on joystick is nuts. Starts of moving slow with a lot of movement required then speeds way up with little movement. Atrocious. It looks good for an old Xbox game though.
NO WAY. This was my favourite childhood game. This and the OG battlefront. Good memories man. Honestly though this game was not bad by any means. Maybe a bad Turok game but not a bad game by any means. 4 Player Split-screen on this slapped too.
This was by no means the greatest game ever but i played it for so many hours with friends on the GameCube back in the day. Have a lot of great memories and nostalgia for it.
The N64 ones would always make me really close to throwing up from the framerate, sometimes dipping down to like 2. I did like the more nature-y aesthetic tho. 15:56 Also remember when red crosses were on healthpacks
There are still only so many FPS games that throw dinosaurs at you.
To bad it kept hanging my GameCube.. 😂
Same here bro ! Awesome 👍🏻
Yes I loved this game it definitely was unique and weird and there weren't any other games like this one at the time...
Hard to believe Crysis came only 4 years later. these two games feel like they are decades apart from each other
It came 5 years later and to be fair back at the time when technology was advancing that rapid 5 years felt more like an eternity.
pc game.
It took 1-2 years for games to look hopelessly outdated back in the day. Games which suffered production delays were cursed upon release, because there was no way they'd hold up to expectations.
@@SianaGearz I'll never forget the gigantic upgrade that PS2 felt like after being used to PS1's janky polygons held together with thread. Point being that technology did indeed move fast.
I feel the same way w/ half life 1 & 2 being just 6 years apart from each other
For Alex: Turok Evolution is DirectX 9 and you can use Reshade to try fix the visuals with it and I would ask you to maybe make a video on this.
For John: The Xbox port do use 2xMSAA, it's easy to spot it even on this video.
Edit: Infinite Ammo cheat in Turok Evolution gives you all the weapons available in the stage and removes older weapons, it's strange indeed but it's how the cheat code works.
Yeah, how did he look at the visuals and think "no AA?"
@@gamingblowsofficial I don't understand either, MSAA is the most easy AA method to recognise just by looking at the screen and the lower the resolution the more evident MSAA becomes.
Everything about the PC graphics looks like driver mismatch and not a bad port.
It wasn't msaa in turok evolution on Xbox, it was QAA. Xbox has msaa capabilities on paper but not really the hardware to run it effectively, it crippled performance down to 15fps when enabled in most cases.
Is PC same as xb graphic under Reshade patch?
I remember PC ports of many games being very poor or broken in the early to mid 2000s. Things seemed to get better after steam became more mainstream in the later 2000s.
I think PC ports quality was worse during the PS360 era, GTA 4 being a textbook example.
@@offspringfan89 The IBM CPUs in that generation were infinitely more difficult to port from (and between) than x86.
@@concinnus Yes. And you could be thankful if PC got a port of your favourite games at all, and you had to pray the Xbox 360 version was good, because that's where the PC version was ported from.
@@offspringfan89 GTA4 is an interesting one. It runs like crap even now but looks a lot better than the console version. I just went through the PC version this weekend.
@@Edmundostudios Played it recently too on PC, fantastic game. To me framerate drops mainly when going from one island to another as the game streams assets, but for the most part it was solid. It seems to drop less at higher resolutions too. At 4k I got fewer drops than 1080p. My screen is 1080p, but the game benefits dramatically from supersampling, so I played it like that.
This kind of port is EXACTLY why I am so glad there are talented people out there making emulators. Between bad PC ports and games not being maintained on PC at all, emulation is the only way to have the best (typically) version of games maintained for all time long after the original hardware die off.
I agree, but this game is just terrible in general and I don't recommend playing it
Ah yes, the 'Unreal Tournament 2003' era of PC gaming, where pixel shaders existed, but no one used them because of NVIDIA's scammy marketing of mass market cards that claimed to support them but were actually feature-incomplete dog-isht (Geforce4 MX and FX5200). It wasn't until HL2 and Doom3 dropped and ATI ran them better that any of that got straightened out. Kind of a cautionary tale of what happens when there is no competition in the GPU space.
I hope they see this, makes perfect sense and I remember this stuff and things like it even tho it was right around when I moved to Xbox as I couldn't afford a real gaming PC lol.
@@hi_tech_reptiles You didn't miss much - it seemed like there were at least 2-3 years where every PC port had a fallback to a DX7/shaderless 'uprezzed Dreamcast' mode (if they implemented higher levels of shaders at all) because of those cards.
@@mastersplinter8910 lol well now I buy many of the old games on PC either that I did play on console or would have preferred too back then. I don't have a Switch or anything, just old consoles and stuff people have given me or I bought/imported from Japan like a Dreamcast and Saturn, PC Engine etc. I actually prefer mostly games I didn't play as a kid these days lol
I absolutely loved this game on my OG XBOX as a kid.
Alex: This is why the PC port sucks
John: This is why the game sucks
at least it looks better than the ctysis1 remaster😅
@@DubElementMusic No it doesn't lol
@@Scornfull meh, pretty close 😅
@@DubElementMusic The remaster of Crysis looks way better than the original and runs better on new hardware, I'm not sure what the problem is
@@Scornfull jezz m8 you must be the king of party 😁
I remember being really excited to get this on Gamecube as a kid because Turok 1 and 2 were staples of my earlier childhood. I got to the second level and never played it again because it was very clearly not great. It's less like Turok and more like "We have Far Cry at home"
I loved Evolution back in the day and I was curious if it's still holding up with all the trash that's being talked about it. So I popped it back into my PS2 last year - and I still love it. It's not Turok 1, but neither was Turok 2. The series constantly changed and 3 was already a linear game with small areas like Evolution. So in that sense this is a next gen Turok 3. The guns are extremely fun with different modes, the AI is pretty solid, the gore is amazing and satisfying. Some stuff didn't work that well, mostly the flying sections with the one hit kill environment collisions, but I do have a softspot for the game. It's a janky but solid shooter with a lot of personality.
Everything about Turok 3 and Turok Evolution were inferior to Turok 1 and 2. It is sad how far of a step backward the later Turok games were in terms of ambition with dinky level maps and inferior visuals, enemies, and weapons.
I played the HELL out of this on gamecube, single player and with friends. That intro video of the raptor guy getting sniped is burned into my mind.
Same. That intro was crazy as a kid. Another crazy moment was using the swarm bore "Evolution's cerebal" for the first time during split-screen, that scared me lol.
I remember settling for Turok when I couldn't get the more straightforward PC shooters as a kid because I couldn't get my mom to let me install much on the family PC, didn't get to play the full PC Doom or Quake til later and settled for Shareware and the N64 versions. Luckily this was a great game, as was Doom64 though different, and idk when I played Quake 64.. The Nightdive remasters are great, but I can't get Turok 2 to run 144hz for some reason so it's hard for me to bother, hopefully they'd add that at some point or fix it.
Same here. When you’re a kid, your imagination fills-in the slow frame rates. For example, it never occurred to me that Goldeneye64 or Perfect Dark 64 had bad frame rates during 4-player multiplayer. Looks horrible now.
This is very relatable. Shareware, launching games from dos. Good times
I love you guys doing these retro gaming videos. I would to see more! Especially with two of your team reviewing a game! We normally just see John talking about these old gems (although I love listening to him!).
I'll never forget the original IGN comparison.
"Once again, there's no reason to even consider the other two (PS2/GC) unless you'd prefer the sometimes-jumpy 60 framerate of the GameCube version over the much more realistic Xbox at 30"
Hahaha, God IGN has some terrible reviews, especially back then. The Alien Trilogy (or was it Resurrection?) Dual Shock thing always blows my mind. Makes me wonder if that game would have blown up and gotten the credit instead of Halo, as have others I'm sure.
Alien resurrection was GameSpot that complained about the modern dual analog controls. That being said the Gamecube's framerate is hardly a stable 60, it's also stuck to 480i instead of 480p.
Medal of Honor actually beat Alien Resurrection by a year so that's another thing IGN were wrong about.
Medal of Honor was released in 1999 and already had support for several dual analog stick layouts for Dualshock controllers, including some that are surprisingly modern.
Though Alien: Resurrection was one of the few FPS games to support the Playstation mouse so at least that's something (most of the games with PS Mouse support were either strategy games or point and clicks).
Sounds like the other two versions had frame pacing issues
I mean much more realistic than those two and especially for the time.
Reminds me of the very first port of RE4, no lighting effects whatsoever and no mouse support either, though even with kb-only controls you can still be a crackshot, which is a testament to how well it's designed I suppose.
The Radeon 9800 Pro was the first GPU I ever bought. A whopping 128MB of VRAM. Good times. I miss the old ATI/Nvidia tech demos.
Turok evolution is over hated. I loved it back in the day. It's not the best thing ever but it's still fun. I also much prefer this level design over the sprawling easy to get lost level design of the others.
Exactly
Played this game in 2010 and had lots of fun
And this is why I hope Nightdive gets their hands on the code for this game. They will put their usual nightdive polish on it and probably add some quality of life improvements as well. One can hope.
I think this game just needs a remake period.
Man same here… that would be incredible. I want them to hit 3, rage wars, and evolution so I can have the whole collection remastered !
I want this on PC soooo bad. As well as JSRF but that's a different story.
I’d play it but the game was by no means amazing.. It felt like a major step back in gameplay compared to Turok 1 while only somewhat “evolving” the graphics.. I honestly preferred the bleak otherworldly feel and atmosphere of Turok 1 even if Turok Evolution had newer technology to play with.
@@Mr.Honest247 I agree 1 is a superior overall game. Turok Evolution though, I remember three main positives. The weapons, specifically the spider mine and the dark matter cube (and the animations as mentioned in the video. The evolution, no pun intended, of the gore/violence system. Lastly the multiplayer seemed like it had potential (screwing around in it, I never had people to play against). I'd probably give it a 7/10 or so, definitely a great rental back in the day. :P
The map geometry looks like it's using a pretty basic vertex lit rendering path on both versions, might be some light mapping in there? The dynamic mesh objects in the scene clearly uses a different render path, and that render path has completely suffered on PC, likely due to the Xbox version perhaps using a per pixel shader to resolve the final colour for each fragment, while the PC version looks to use dare I say ... a fixed function method for rendering. There's two likely reasons for this, the developer was either very inexperienced with programmable shaders and had a hard time porting it to PC or they had extremely limited time to port it. OR the game had a hard target for supporting older DX 7.0 video cards to increase market coverage, without creating a separate DX9/8.1 shader rendering path. It very much resembles playing Halo PC on a DX7 card like the GF4 MX440, where it's simply the diffuse textures being used for rendering and no specular, normal map or shadowing effects.
However, I find the second scenario hard to believe because the dynamic meshes don't have ANY lighting, nothing, even with a fixed function graphics pipeline, you can do vertex lighting, like how the map geometry is vertex lit, which comes off as extremely odd to me. This highly suggests a lack of time or graphics programming experience, I'd love to know the story behind it honestly.
Turok is a franchise that needs to make a comeback
Honestly, watching this just makes me want to go back and play OG Turok. The Nightdive remaster that is.
This reminds me of the PC port of San Andreas - missing the colour grading, heat haze and (I think) motion blur of the PS2 version. The effects are present in the PC build but are never turned on / activated due to issue in the rendering pipeline (RenderWare sucks on PC), so you wind up with a visually incomplete game.
The heat haze effects probably used the eDRAM of the PS2. So using that effect wounn't be performant on the Xbox and PC port.
Love this game. Really good. Just different than the originals. The campaign is just epic and the flying parts are gold. I also enjoy the setting, silly story and the weapons and their upgrades.
Yea the nuke gun on deathmatches was insane :D
@@schwartzy65 yes the split screen death matches were the best part of the game ! The campaign was pretty sick too though !
I suspect that on PC they tried to make it DX 7.0 compatible, as to work on Geforce 1, 2, MX (200, 400, 420.... 4000), Radeon (7000-7200), etc. The Xbox was DX 8.0 level, with a Geforce3 class GPU core. So, I blame this suspected decision with a lack of care, on top of zero support for additional effects from DX 8, 8.1, 9.0a or 9.0b that were available at the time of the PC release.
Otherwise, I just can't understand the downgrade in graphics quality.
Lol! I remember being blown away with turok 2 on n64.... not understanding that it was probably running at like 11 fps, like a lot of good lookin n64 games
Ahh. This was one if my favorite gamecube games. I remember being amazed when i first used a poison arrow and made the enemy vomit.
Love the hell out of this game. Played multiplayer all the time with my cousin on the maps with dinosaurs roaming around just merkin them. Bring Turok back!
Please bring this game back to a full remaster.
Love this game!
I remember playing this for hrs on GC when I was a kid.
Kinda wish we got to see some PS2 and GC footage also to compare. I've always found this game fascinating. I actually kinda enjoyed it back in the day on GC. It's multiplayer is pretty fun also.
Ps2 was the worst... Looked about like the pc port, GameCube had better framerate (could hit 60 but wasn't a stable 60) but worse lighting and textures than Xbox though it did have the distortion effects from the rocket launcher, flamethrower, and one of two other weapons (which are very much missing from the pc and ps2)
Great analyze! Good grief and even more grief that Turok along with Red Faction and Duke Nukem (Forever ( 2001 gameplay content now released ) are in a damnable limbo and lack of competent dev ( except the Nightdive studio folks with Turok remasters on Steam ) studios to resurrect these francises with care, respect and keeping their franchises spirits. Turok, Red Faction and Duke Nukem were my childhood, teen years and now my adult life TONS more than Doom, Halo, Blood, Quake, Perfect Dark, Shadow Warrior, Triade etc
This was by no means the greatest game ever but I played it for so many hours with friends on the Xbox back in the day. I have a lot of good memories and nostalgia for it.
I remember playing this on the gamecube with my brothers and having a blast. It was so glitchy it was like playing the game with a random event modifier.
Damn the memories. I loved Dinosaurs as a kid so someone got me this for a birthday. My first exposure to an FPS of all games lol.
Played it on gamecube back in the days. I liked it a lot even though there was a game breaking bug that stopped me from beating the game. But I still remember how impressive the Jungle and the Dinosaurs were at the time
Besides 007 golden eye turok is the best firsts person game ever man
I remember the game being shunned back in the day but i bought it for PS2 in late 2002/early 2003 and enjoyed it quite a bit. Was also pretty cheap already at that point.
I wonder if Nightdive Studios could polish up Turok Evolution for PC. I would buy that. :)
So back in 2004 when I built my first PC in preparation for Half Life 2, This was actually the first game I bought for it. It must have been around April 04 and I got it for around 3.99 online still in its cellothane wrapper. Sure it was either from Gameplay or Play .. those were my go to websites back in the day.. I think I played it for around an hour or so then went back to playing my older games and newer demos... before splurging for Far Cry. That seen me through till Half LIfe 2's launch.
Athlon 3200+ , 1GB DDR, ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB. Always regretted not going for a socket 939 board as I built on the cheaper 754 socket on a MSI K8T NEO but when HL2 launched it didn't matter.. the 9800 Pro was awesome.
Far cry instincts: predator for original xbox was awesome, the melee and mutant powers combined with jungle stalking felt AMAZING. I kinda wish something like that with modern games, to be a predator on a sunny jungle island 😅
I would love this game to get the NightDive treatment. Include 2 versions: the original cut and a Nightdive cut, with streamed line levels and cutting the fluff such as the annoying aerial levels. Help us Stephen Kick, you're our only hope.
I want the non PC Turok N64 games to have the Nighdive treatment before This one(Turok 3 and RAGE WARS)
cutting flying levels is stupid. They are essential to the plot and make up a 3rd of the game.
@@FatherOMalley yes, they are important, I agree. But not cutting them completely, just smart cuts to make them shorter and less annoying because they are too long, especially by the end.
I wonder if this game was only tested on a particular graphics card. Perhaps on GeForce 3 it would look kinda ok.
I wondered the same thing. Metal Gear Solid 2 pre-patch, for example, was a port from the Xbox that only worked correctly on GeForce 3+4 (+FX if using early drivers).
Would make sense if it did.
Yeah, I'm curious also, especially because Radeons had a lot of compatiblity issues back in the day
yea i feel like emulating the gamecube port will be much better than actually running the pc version. a bit like bge.
@@jonusiescu had? You mean... have 😁
27:35 Hahaha, i did not expect you guys using mega64's "badass" poster in this video. What a nice wholeseme surpise.
Now this is a game that could use a remake in a good modern engine. I mean yeah Ill take a crysis like Turok game. The panzer dragoon\air section is cool, cooler if it would work like Halo or even earlier drakan, again its something a new engine could pull off easily today.
I never played Evolution but I played the one they had on 360 and I remember it being a good throwback at a time when people crapped on throwbacks.
Reminder that Half Life 2 was a 2004 game
nightdive studios should remake this and fix it
I played the game on the Gamecube, while the single player campaign was buggy it was kinda fun. That was without playing any previous Turok games. The weapons were amazing to be honest, each had their own unique multiple modes. Lastly the split screen multiplayer was fun (not the flyer stuff).
In the single player, the environment was really nice for the time. It had a lot of foliage compared to games like Halo.
LOVED this game. So much fun back on my Windows XP machine Pentium 4 + Nvidia Geforce 6800 Ultra Back in Time, Great Episode.
Lol my dad got this for me from the bargain bin on my OG xbox back in the day. I was kid and was just amazed dinosaurs made it in a game
so glad to know i wasn’t the only one who had control troubles when i downloaded it on pc afew years ago, they explained what i was feeling when aiming.
That Turok Evolution comparison with Shawn's picture is gold
I really like this format of playing retro games on different platform and comparing them. John and Alex chemistry is so good it's ridiculous, I could listen them talk about technical stuff all day long.
27:35 never thought i would see a mega64 reference in a DF video
Night dive really needs to bring this back.
I played this game during my formative years. You might think a 7 year old shouldn’t be playing it but my friends and I had so much fun with this game. More than halo sometimes. Wish it was remastered
These are quickly become some of my favourite videos.
"It always goes back to the tomahawk" .
I can bet that the game load a map , and then pick the default weapon by default each time , no weapon retention because it wasn't coded that way and each section is separate .. it was probably easier to debug during dev time.
48:00 It's so funny to listen to John cursing, even though it is bleeped
I own the xbox and gamecube versions. Surprisingly gamecube version runs @ 50/60 fps (pal/ntsc), not steady tho. Think graphics maybe better on xbox, but never bothered playing it 'cause it was 30 fps lol
The Gamecube port is the best btw, it runs at 60fps (usually) and it's visuals on are on-par with Xbox.
Absolutely loved this game growing up, cant even tell you how many times i ran thru this story as a kid
I hope Nightdive Studios end up remastering this game with fixing all of the games problems and bugs.
I remember watching a making of video on this game at the time (because unbelievably, I was excited about it), and iirc the lead designer was just some guy who they hired because he was good at drawing guns. I didn't understand that decision back then, but in hindsight it was maybe out of desperation. His inexperience is on full display.
This was my favorite FPS game as a kid, and now I have no desire to play it on PC.
Loved that could listen and watch you guys all day 💪
The "wait for it" moments caught me off guard and are absolutely hilarious.
If I'm not mistaken (it was a long time ago now) the PC port looks to me like it's running the fixed function pipeline (possibly emulated on shaders.) The Xbox was, I believe, the first console to support pixel shaders and the functionality could not have been assumed on PC (depending on your targeted baseline of course.) The fixed function and programmable shader pipelines were basically two completely different ways of doing 3d rendering, so the developers would probably have had to build two separate rendering engines and decided not to bother.
EDIT: Another possibility is that I don't think DX8+ support would have guaranteed a certain number of texture samplers, so it may be that the shaders have been built to not access enough textures simultaneously to do techniques like lightmapping. The way I remember it, hardware capability was a mess at this time.
Guess the best way to play this would be GameCube? I see that it's 60fps, and it doesn't seem to be missing many effects compared to Xbox.
Also, the cliffs seem to be more detailed- I know the studio's other big game of the time, Vexx, had noticeably bad texture filtering on Xbox, so you'd end up seeing the lower-quality mipmap at even a fairly short distance (complete with an abrupt cutoff where it switches detail levels!). In that case, the GCN version came out looking sharper at times.
Anyway, textures look a bit blurry in TE for GameCube, but their higher-quality equivalents can easily be copied out of the PC version, so I'm thinking I'll do that.
Vexx has a 480p mode exclusive to PS2.
@@WllKiedSnake I have Vexx on GameCube and Xbox, and both copies say on the box that they support 480p. Can't test for myself, though, as I don't have component cables.
I believe PS2 is the only version that has a progressive/interlaced toggle in the options menu, though, so is that what you're thinking of?
I used to play this on ps2 all the time when I'd visit my dad as a kid. (this and destroy all humans 2) I'd either watch my dad play through the story mode, or duke it out with my siblings on the bloodbath mode. My sister and I would specifically go to the map where the entire arena is in the trees, and raptors roam around below, and we'd team up to see how long we could survive against them. Luckily I backed up most of my ps2 games a while back so im gonna boot this up via emulator and give it a go
I'm sure my opinion is a bit warped through the lens of nostalgia and the simple fact that kids tend to not be as critical of details, but I absolutely loved this game and played it for years (12-15ish). I had enjoyed Turok since the first entry on N64 and was stoked to see a release on the new console generation.
This is a good and informative video but I do somewhat disagree on one thing: I didn't find the game as completely linear as is implied here. I very distinctly remember a huge fortress level that had multiple pathways between areas and options to approach fights with stealth or go in hot. I agree it could have been a lot less linear like the earlier games, but it's also not quite a completely straight line.
There were also some visuals on the Xbox that I thought looked genuinely good. I may be completely wrong, but I think the lackluster distant textures and so on were to make up for what seemed at the time to be some quite high resolution textures, dense particle effects and animations. Combined with the low frame rate it feels like they were pushing the Xbox to its limits.
Alex, are you also a Turok fan? You sometimes come up with a picture of Joshua Fireseed in your videos. Turok is to this day my favourite shooter franchise despite its flaws and inconsistencies, but I would love to see remakes/reimaginations of the first five games!!!👌🏻👌🏻👌🏻
I had this on gamecube spent so much time on this game
2003 I purchased my first ever console - THIS game the store included in the package, first ever game I owned. Back then I perceived the characters looked blocky, so so gameplay. I'd slaughter lizards, triggering alarms and a while later everything back to normal like nothing happened.
Flip side weapons abundant, multiplayer could go down well. Year following Ninja Gaiden entered the scene for comparison. The T eternally holds a place.
The game taking away weapons is a bug, even if you play the game legit without cheats, some weapons will be gone from your inventory for some stages.
For instance, if you get the rocket launcher on the third stage, you won't be able to use it on stage four.
The nuke is also another example, you get two ammo shots when you pick it up but if you carry it to the next stage that ammo will be gone from your inventory.
I LOVED this game. So much fun back on my PS2.
I play this one on Game Cube in 2002 It will be interesting make a comparation againts The xbox, Game Cube and PS2 cool video
i remember playing this game for hours on end when i had it on the gamecube was so much fun at the time to bad it was never remastered
When I see PC gamers with money scoff at the idea that GPU prices are raising the barrier to entry being a problem for PC gaming, I feel like they're too young to remember what it was like before PC got a large install base (FROM being price:performance competitive with consoles from 2007-2016)
When the install base shrinks, it doesn't matter how fast your RTX 3090 is if the games are often rubbish ports, or built for the GTX 1060 the average PC gamer is 'still' running.
Absolutely, I ll keep my 1660 super and 1080p and be dragged screaming into 4k ray tracing one day. Voodoo 2 changed everything back then for being accessible. I will not abandon pc for consoles maybe ever again, but hey.
@Dan Gir In those days PC had its own ecosystem of games that were generally simultaneously more technically advanced with worse production values.
Think of what games you know that meet that description, that's the future of PC gaming as long as a console equivalent PC still starts at $1000
@@Atrahasis7 My GTX 970 is still kicking & I've got diamond hands on my bank account until the day comes where I can get 2.5 - 3x performance for the same money. It's been 8 years lol. Before that, it was 3.
This port is from the era of Doom 3, Far Cry, Half Life 2, UT2004, Battlefield 2 etc. All of those games pushed high end PCs to their knees. At the end of the day this was just a shitty console port job, nothing else. Those will continue to exist in any era regardless of install base.
980Ti here still going strong. Although Elden Ring is trying to kill it, it's a fighter though
As nightdive currently ports turok 3 - Do you think they will also do evolution (and finally fix it?)
I actually had a lot of fun with this game on the Gamecube back in the day.
I remember when this was released. It was attractive right off the bat simply due to being able to play Turok on something other than a N64 - the PC equivalents were out of bounds for a lot of school kids that time!
I always loved the wildlife, free roaming dinosaurs in this game. I felt certain presentation direction was on point, just shoddy execution from a game play direction.
I absolutely hated the flying level.
They did retain the wicked weaponry however..
Early to mid/late 2000s were the dark ages of PC ports. Not only was there a HUGE anti-PC discourse among developers and publishers, labeling all PC gamers are pirates and completely dismissing the market - but the ports that made it through often had lacking graphical features compared to the consoles. Controller inputs on PC at the time had also not been standarized. It wasn't until late 2000s PC ports started to be taken more serious gradually, more so from 2010s.
Now try 007 Nightfire, beautiful game on consoles... totally different on PC.
I wonder what the GameCube version looks like compared to these. I liked this game a lot. I still play it here and there. I can confirm that the GC version looks similar to the XBOX version but with downgraded textures and no fake reflections.
I would like to see the same comparison done to NFS Most Wanted. 360 vs PC
I need to find someone who likes me as much as Alex likes Turok
Just make sure it's not like Alex and crysis that's a whole other thing
@@dun0790I don't mind having someone completely obsess over me tbh
@@superwhizz114 famous last words
I don't know why, but I love analysis of older software!
PC version have mods to fix the issues now, or able to use reshade on modern pcs to fix some of the issues.
It be nice if Night dive studios can remaster and improve this game and also port the 3rd game on pc.
Been great if you had also looked at PS2/GC versions.
As a obsessed Turok fan i was so disappointed with Evolution.
It had potential.. and it so sad it didn't deliver on the hype.
It really saddens me..😔
I want a new great Turok game! Ffs get us another adventure!
Turok is such an amazing world to build a new epic fps.
My family computer was a lga 775 Pentium 4 3.2ghz with 1gb of RAM!! No sound card and on board vga output. Its PC I grew the courage up to try and put a video card in. My cousin's discarded geforce 4 to play a burned Halo CE my friend gave me. Good times!
The flying levels killed this game for me . The path you had to take was super linear and if you flew off the path you could get stuck ramming into a wall repeatedly . That said , the pistol upgrades and arrow variants were really fun .
Wow , my cousins and I would play this split screen on Xbox for HOURS everyday. Literally love this game
I had it for the GameCube and played it non stop as a kid. So much nostalgia watching this. Wish the pc version was good enough because now I wanna play it again lol
Use emulator
same, I bought this when a friend bought Time Splitters 2, TS2 was in many ways a better game tbh but yeah a lot of nostalgia for this one.
Poison arrows ftw
John. You should give Battle Zone-series some DF Retro love... 98 & Battle Commander, plus Redux-versions. Such an excellent games!
And that brings Carrier Command to my mind...
Yes. I wonder if he ever played it though. They always been such undiscovered masterpieces, for the most part that is.
yooo i loved it when y’all did this with the matrix game!!! looking forward to diving into this one. hope to see more of this fun format later on!
Just bought the Xbox version to play on Xbox 360 through OG backwards compatibility. Love owning an original Xbox 360 to play original Xbox games. Looks like it's gonna be a nice nostalgic playthrough.
EDIT: It's not. The controls are fucking terrible. Absolutely impossible to aim and hit an enemy even when standing totally still. That's why, I'd guess, they added an auto-aim option I had to turn on. The deadzone and acceleration on joystick is nuts. Starts of moving slow with a lot of movement required then speeds way up with little movement. Atrocious. It looks good for an old Xbox game though.
Would really like to hear from a developer on this. Last days of Acclaim interview or such.
NO WAY. This was my favourite childhood game. This and the OG battlefront. Good memories man. Honestly though this game was not bad by any means. Maybe a bad Turok game but not a bad game by any means. 4 Player Split-screen on this slapped too.