Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter - PC Retro Time Capsule vs Xbox 360/PS2 - Old-School Cross-Gen!
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- Опубликовано: 20 сен 2024
- In a new Retro PC Time Capsule video, John and Alex go back to cross-gen gaming, 2006-style, with Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter. Join us for a look back at a time where Xbox 360 out-performed mainstream PCs by a long chalk, resulting in some games receiving almost completely different versions of the 'same game'... and not even Ageia PhysX support can help PC on this one! Meanwhile, it's a sorry state of affairs once we get to look at the PS2 version of the game...
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This game right here in 2006 on X360 is really the last time I remember being blown away by what a new console could pull off. It really felt "next-gen".
Booting up GRAW for the first time after the midnight launch of the 360 here was one of those moments I’ll never forget. Also that e3 demo of GRAW was when Ubisoft was starting to show things that didn’t fully line up to the press event demos. I remember walking towards the US embassy in Mexico in the game. It Looked amazing but nothing like what was shown to be “gameplay” that year and the year prior at E3. Still it did look amazing, just different/a slight downgrade technically but not something a “regular” player would perhaps even notice.
Gears of War was released the same year and it blew me away, though.
@@duxnihilo yes it was amazing. I miss those days of true “leaps” between generations instead of these days. Sure technically the hurdles being jumped over are at times amazing but the progression is just less big ticket items and more iterative/granular.
Also; let’s not forget the, “oh it’s available now” stealth drop of the Fight Night Round 3 demo! The KOs in that game were amazing.
Also was it ever confirmed that when Fight Night Round 3 debuted at the PS3 conference that it was actually running on 360 devkits?
That was the scuttlebutt that came out after the fact at least.
@@gokhan7482 Yup
Gears of War 3 looked insane
Same. In fact I bought the 360 for this game.
My first ever Xbox 360 game. I'll never forget how cool it felt controlling the UAV. Wish we could get another single player focused Ghost Recon.
Same. The graphics were unbelievable at the time, especially as someone who didn't have a gaming PC back then. Sadly, it would also be the last time I was blown away by the graphical leap of a new console generation.
Multiplayer was great tho. Terrorist mode as well in coop
I agree with you totally. The leap from xbox to this game on the 360 was mind blowing unlike the 360 to the xbox one and so on.@CaptainKenway
There's GRAW 1 AND 2. And the multiple versions of them by system. It's same thing with GRAW 2, I'm pretty sure, multiple versions. Then there's Future Soldier which is still on Steam and U-Play. That's pretty good, more of the same. You have your old school GR games too, but they're tough. Would be nice to get a new GRAW game though, for sure. I agree. Not that I necessarily have the confidence modern Ubisoft could pull it off.
We had a great group of guys online for this on 360. We used to marvel at our American buddy's 10mb Internet connection 😅
The 360 version is backwards compatible on the Xbox Series X and actually runs at 60fps, its amazing. Definitive way to play the game. Same with GRAW 2 as well. Future Soldier(closest we ever got to GRAW 3) is also back compat but still runs at 30fps I think.
Technically not FPS Boost - which specifically refers to doubling the framerate cap - as the game always allowed 60 fps, though rarely hit it on the 360. The Xbox One X and the Series X/S can hold it at 60 fps no problem, like you said (and was mentioned in the video too).
Think its 720p though?
Yeah it’s fantastic
If only there was an online community to play with
It's a damn shame the Xenia Canary emulator team has damned this game to be forgotten for some bizarre reason.
GRAW and R6 Vegas was really fun in co op on 360. This was a trip down memory lane.
Co-op terrorist hunts in R6V were definitely a highlight of that generation.
Man R6 Vegas was great! My cousin introduced it to me and once I bought it he was driving over every weekend to play co-op. 😂
Graw was a technical showpiece on 360 at the time
Plus CoD2, Condemned, Oblivion, and others
That or the rb6 vegas series. Coop with a mic was a must.
@@AliAbidalkareempgr3!
No it wasnt etf is wrong with you? It was on the PC.
@@truthseek3017Did you watch the video? GRAW on PC was a different version
When you talked about destruction, I realized I‘d love a DF Retro or Time Capsule about the PS2 Criterion FPS BLACK, that featured an absolutely stunning display of destruction especially for it being a PS2 generation game.
Black is on Xbox as well.
It looked awesome, but AFAIK was based on predefined meshes - objects and walls were crumbling in the same way every time.
Red Faction was very cool for the time
I used to have a disc for this game that was scratched so I only could get around an hour into the game before it froze up and I couldn’t play anymore. So I was left with pretty much the world’s greatest PS2 tech demo.
Odd tried looking it up but felt that they did do a video of the game in the past.
This game felt like the future, specially the 360 version indeed. It was so immersive. The sound design was also superb. When you run you can actually hear your different gear rattling.
This game, along with the great "Need for Speed: Most Wanted," was the reason I bought my Xbox 360 on launch day in 2005. I was so obsessed with the lighting, especially in Ghost Recon. The sun felt so real back then I mean, it was something we had never seen before.
I really loved 6th gen things like summertime and fantasy settings. People tend to complain about it these days, but devs going so crazy with effects gave games such an inviting, ethereal feeling. I really miss the high bloom, glowing moon/sun, and crystal clear water physics and stuff games used back then.
I find it so disappointing that phsysics simulation has taken a back seat ever since the Xbox One/Ps4 gen. It was the most fun thing to do in games for me. I remember Star Wars The Force Unleashed let you really feel the impact of your Force attacks enabled by Havok physics. Respawn's Jedi Games don't come close to that.
The godawful cpus the Xbox one/ps4 were rocking are to blame for that. Gaming really took a longgggg step back because of those consoles they were all “pretty graphics but dumb” type of games. Horrible NPCs, bland game types, etc etc. I really do believe the second half of this console generation will bring back a lot of that physics fun and creatively risky that we miss very much from the Ps2 and 360 era
@@deliriousdenis2774I doubt the focus on physics will make a return this generation, or in the forseeable future.
The entire industry is so hellbent on LoD, ray-tracing and reconstruction these days that the only thing that might shift the focus of developers is "AI".
And with AI, physics can be simulated/approximated with minimal performance impact, but there has to be a desire for it first, because we're already using that processing power for AI upscaling.
@@GENKI_INU ray-tracing is pretty important tho. Lighting/shadows in a game is super important.
Also, reconstruction technique are important. Hell it's super important for physics stuff.
@@deliriousdenis2774 Yup! Those Jaguar CPUs were originally made for high-end tablets/low-end notebooks. AMD just basically duct-taped 2 Jaguars (each Jaguar had 4 cores) and up the speed.
@@GENKI_INUafter the success of Tears of the Kingdom, I think physics will make a comeback. This industry is a copy cat industry.
The 360 versions of G.R.A.W. 1 and 2 are some of my favorite games. I still enjoy playing them and fondly remember originally going through them. I bought G.R.A.W. 2 on PC, and it's interesting, but I wasn't quite as into it and never got too far. But a big issue was how it ran with a stuttery frame rate for me, which is probably the main reason I didn't stick with it. As much as I love The Division, I don't see it as much of a Tom Clancy game in the same vein as classic Ghost Recon, Rainbow Six, and Splinter Cell games, and did everything in Wildlands and played a lot of Breakpoint, but those games do not compare to the games that came before.
When they canceled Patriots and announced Rainbow Six Siege and how it was an online multiplayer game, to me it was all downhill. I love The Division, I loved Splinter Cell: Conviction, and liked Blacklist and Future Soldier, but after those Ubisoft went in the wrong direction. I just wish we got campaigns again without as much focus on online play as they go too big and rely on mindless fun which you'll notice if you explore Auroa and even Wildlands, with its repetition and silly, superfluous side quests.
I hope the remake of Splinter Cell is getting taken care of because all signs point to trouble right now.
I feel you brother
GRAW on the Xbox 360 was the first time I'd experienced a game where you could shoot through walls with a sufficiently powerful rifle. Dunno why but that blew my socks off at the time.
Perfect Dark did that on n64 believe it or not.
Legendary game. It truly looked amazing for the time and it's probably the last time I was truly blown away. Thank you for doing these videos; they're very special.
Then I must step in. Subnautica base building blew me away LoU1 seamless transitions blew me away The UE5 city demo blew me away and star citizen seamless indoors to outdoors transitions blew me away
You can never go wrong with Digital Foundry Time Capsule and DF Retro, the best series on the channel, keep them coming John
There's also an OG Xbox version which isn't that terrible lol. It actually got animations and some physics, and your teammates bodycam. Clearly the PS2 version was a cutdown port of the Xbox version.
It's horrific that games in 2024 have less realistic physics than a game from 2006. Utterly unacceptable! Why have developers forsaken the physics?
Why talk like you’re a discord mod 💀Utterly unacceptable! ☝️🤓
but thankfully we have such things as microtransaction... and always online games. Who cares about physics.
This was my first game on the Xbox 360 and on the back of the box it said, "a masterclass in what the 360 can do." They weren't wrong, and I absolutely loved that quote. My second game was PGR 3 and then I got Condemned: Criminal Origins. Which to this day is still one of my all time favourite games. The next game I got after that was the legendary Gears of War. And I ran that game through a surround sound home cinema kit. It was absolutely nuts. From what I can remember you can dive and slide in this game, which was pretty cool.
There is a distinct and special joy in listening to two specialists in their element breaking things down, regardless of my own familiarity. Never even heard of this game but I will forever be here for these comparisons and conversations. In today's squalid sea of content, DF/DF Retro are islands of pure Good.
Ahhhh Lost Planet shoutout! Would love to see a video about that game in the future lol. It’s a favorite of mine
Go check out the AI HDR video they did a while back. Basically a Lost Planet/Blur love in.
Man, I miss this game so much. This era on 360 got me into split screen online gaming before everyone took everything so serious. The custom lobbies on this game were insanely fun. This, rainbow, gears, dead rising were my childhood.
Rainbow six Vegas 2. Arguably the best Co op fps campaign. Definitely need another.
@@AaronDunnill Ready or Not is the answer
@@AaronDunnillR6 Vegas was the downfall of R6, they went the arcade cover shooter route.
Smoke physics are better than new recent games, that is awesome
i remember the object physics like granades being thrown and other debris, it was awesome
The destruction physics and number of particles alone are better than virtually any modern game.
The attention to detail as well. Like where else can you shoot the doors open and the wheels off, and have the entire vehicle respond physically to the missing tire?
We've moved so far into LoD, ray-tracing and reconstruction these days that we've forgotten about the possibilities of physically based destruction, or much of anything to do with physics really. It's a shame.
The 360 versions of the GRAW games definitely needs a remaster for modern platforms. One of the best militarty shooter campaigns ever, the multiplayer was also a lot of fun.
They should have done a remaster last generation, Ubisoft today would create a online only game that you don’t own
I would say Ghost Recon Summit Strike had a better campaign. But who cares both games are amazing.
@@PegLegManlet Indeed the Xbox version Ghost Recon 2 and its expansion is also being lost to time and more should experience it
why? its already 4K60fps, no?
@@MrVoland44 the campaign is, multiplayer is still 30.
These are some of the most fascinating stuff on YT. It manages to encapsulate a contemporary tone while bringing us back contextually to a point in the past, as if we’re existing in that moment with the foresight of the future.
Takes me back to times when next-gen was a thing. I wanted to play X360 version so bad bacause PC version looked cheap in comparison (same with NFSMW) and I couldn't run it properly on my outdated Radeon 9600 128mb.
This brings back so many memories! Great video as always! Cheers from Brasil
The thing about GR:AW on PC, it was not only pretty much unsurpassed graphically until Crysis came around; and unlike Crysis, it ran smooth as Irish butter even on a midrange gaming PC/
It was also one of the last games to rely more on actual polygons rather than texture mapping techniques.
Ehhhhh GR:AW didn't run great on PC at the time. This video shows this. It was OK at best
I used to always be jealous of the console version of GRAW, but today I appreciate how good and realistic the pc version is. Still enjoy it today
Oh fuck, I'm old now.
The dinosaur of the last millennium.
That's a good thing
Played this when I was 16 years old. Now, I’m 31 😅
There are adults who are younger than this game. Let that sink in. :)
I was 26 when I played this on 360 in 2006😮
Fun fact, the devs for the PC version started Overkill Software when GRIN was shutdown and led to making Payday The Heist and Payday 2. It's kind of annoying knowing that both Payday games and GRAW PC used the same Diesel engine, yet GRAW seemingly handled large maps better than Payday 2 ever could.
GRAW 360 doesn't look like an 18-year-old game. I miss the 7th generation when games were pushing more attention to detail, an emphasis on physics and destruction, etc.
I remember that I knew about this game after watching the movie Disturbia, in which Shia Labeuf's character, Kale, plays it online on Xbox Live.
Purchased it myself a couple of weeks later, it was amazing!
Co-op was incredible in this game with the camera of your pals streaming in real time. Always having positional awareness of your team made triangulating opponents on the map so easy and fun. Made my sessions feal more like couch co-op than online play.
sad physics and destruction are gone in most modern games. a step backwards. looking at you battlefield.
It was one of the last times I got my mind blown by videogame graphics, back in 2006 those visuals were insane. Great times
I have never clicked on a video this fast. Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six are two of my most beloved franchises growing up. I’m presently playing through Breakpoint after picking it up on a Steam sale.
Wow, I never realised GRAW was so different between platforms.. My memories from this fantastic game are all from the 360 version.
Thanks for the super comprehensive video showing off each version and comparing them. I really enjoyed it 🙏🏆👍
I just did a playthrough of these 3 versions a couple of weeks back. Great timing! Love this era of gaming.
Also - OG Xbox and PS2 have differences. The Cross-Com displays your teammates perspective on the OG Xbox in the top left hand corner but at a very, very low refresh rate whereas the PS2 has a mini map in its place. The OG Xbox animations update at a higher rate than the PS2 version but framerate on the OG Xbox can still drop during firefights, particularly in the opening level when you regroup with your squad.
Please consider comparing Splinter Cell Chaos Theory on PS2 and PC. They're very different, most people don't know.
Played a lot of this on co-op on PC. So goddamn hard, you die of only few hits and no respawn in the middle of a mission, just stare a blank screen until others pass or fail the mission. It was very tense and frustrating and fun, but we never succeeded on the last missions and had to cheese a bit on others with rifle grenades.
Found out much later the PC and 360 versions are completely different.
I never made it more than a few missions in on PC, it's just way too easy to get one-shotted and have to start the entire mission over, especially when you don't get a UAV and are effectively going in blind. You had to creep and inch around every corner, and then a mortar lands on your head from a thousand yards away.
@@moosemaimer yeah gotta spam that quick save.
This is peak digital foundry
Disagree. John's actual DF retro videos complete with the historical archive footage are peak DF. They actually require effort.
@@jez49647Word, always John’s long form DF Retro videos
@@jez49647johns legendary DF retros are how I stumbled upon this channel
I remember as a kid, I played Advanced Warfighter 1 on PC and loved the game, then when AW2 came out, I decided to get it on the xbox 360, because I finally got my hands on one. All I remember was being angry at how AW2 was not like AW1 at all, just completely unaware that each console were just different versions lol. I was a dumb kid.
I would love to see more videos showing the cross-gen difference between the PS3/X360 and the PS2/GC/DC/Xbox, not only because the generational leap in this generation was huge but because the PS2 managed to live for a long time receiving games until 2014.
Some games like Call of Duty 3, Tomb Raider: Underworld and Need for Speed: ProStreet really show how the PS2 hardware was already quite dated back in 2009 and was starting to struggle to run the same games as the PS3/X360/Wii (which justifies some late games being ports of PSP instead of PS3/X360 or even Wii version like SpiderMan: Web of Shadows and Toy Story 3 ), I really think it was an interesting time in the transition between generations.
Amen to all of this.
And I really need to check out those ProStreet console games; the DS port was a showcase for what you can achieve with Nintendo's bizzaro version of the Sega Saturn. (512kb textures, quad rendering possible, and similar geometry counts as compared to the Saturn's best engines. But, the DS has true transparency, even if it suffers in resolution.)
I can only imagine what two generations of progress beyond that modest target were able to achieve.
@@juststatedtheobvious9633I actually think NFS Carboon looks way better than any other Need for Speed game on the Nintendo DS.
I remember playing GRAW at launch and telling myself that better gfx wasn't just possible :)
Damn watching this made me realise that I really miss those early Xbox 360 years
Best years in gaming for a lot of people including myself.
Lmfao, the Jet Force Gemini music at the beginning was spot-on. It's epic enough to be the opening score for literally any video.
For some reason it blows my mind that Graw released on the same console as gta 5.
I was so blown away playing this game on the 360, the character movements, the combat and tactical mechanics, chef's kiss.
Holy cow you guys are hitting on all my favorite games recently, Mercenaries, GRAW, NFS: MW. This was the era right here, so many solid games launching together.
Oh boy, the OG XBox and PS2 versions of this game were a trip back in the day! Truly the final glory days of ports being buckwild and different to their main platform counterparts. The PC was just a weird mishmash of GRAW 360 assets and silly tech gimmicks in a new engine. Weird stuff.
Sonic Unleashed came out in 2008 with a really different PS2/Wii version, so GRAW in 2006 wasn't quite the end of the trend yet
I don't know what you're talking about, The PS2 version was easily the worst, the PC version is flawed but infinitely superior to the PS2 version
@@devostripes5964 eh? I didn’t say it was good mate, just said it was a “trip”. I only played the last-gen ports of GRAW as technical curiosities anyway so I have no idea if the last-gen versions of GRAW stand up.
Eh? The PC version is much more like the og GR and R6 games.
@@Spr1ggan87 better? Dude (I’m assuming) it’s basically a different game.
I still remember the first time I played GRAW and being blown away by how good it looked.
that fucking intro music hit me like a brick wall. God damn Jet Force Gemini
One of the first games I played on my 360 back in 2006, along with Hitman Blood money. Will never forget how amazed I was at gaming. Will always be of of the pivotal moments of gaming for me
Not even gonna lie, seeing "Pee-Pee Filter" on the back of the box is what really convinced me to buy the game. The game made me GRAW all over the place, especially that one surprise explosion in Surround Sound the first time it happened.
I appreciate the MS-DOS Commander Keen music that plays once the PS2 version comes out!
This video brings back memories of me seeing trailers of the 360 version of the game and wanting to play it...then playing the PC version for 10 minutes only to realize it is NOTHING like the trailers I saw (i.e. 3rd person action shooter in the trailers, first-person tactical shooter in reality on PC), wondering if I got the wrong game and then just abandoning the game altogether. 😂
I didn't know the game's PC version was meant to be different. Seeing DF mention that in this video had me yelling "RIGHT?!" and feeling so seen. 😂😂😂
Thanking you kindly for the tunes @ the beginning from jet force Gemini.👍
Great timing. I was never into Ghost Recon and I only just recently got into them with Breakpoint and Wildlands. Last week I went back and bought all the older games and have been playing through Advanced Warfighter this week (XBox version as I prefer the third person setup).
I miss when making a big impact on the culture, filling the game with detail and nuance and pushing the industry with new features were what sold games. Now it's literally cosmetic skins for games that have half as much effort put into them that dominate most publishers minds. This sucks.
One of my favorite ghost recon games full stop.. i still remember and adore the part where your hunkered down getting shot from all sides as a musical score blares out as you try to hold out until extraction.. so good.
For this Game, i kicked my CRT in my Retro-Gaming Room and buyed a Toshiba HD-Ready Flat Screen for way to much Money.
But the first time i fired up my 360 with this Blockbuster, i was blown away by this Graphic and Clearity-Boost. Amazing Game-Milestone for me.
I was just thinking of going back to finish this series on my Xbox 360 finally this year. Ghost Recon got me into the Xbox ecosystem and was my first experience to online gaming. Such a great game series!
I kinda miss when games differed in weird ways across platforms.
Where one version was the real game and the other was a cash grab? Nah
Like COD2 on the OG Xbox vs Xbox 360. Completely different games, both of them pretty good.
Or COD WaW Final Fronts on the PS2 being different from WaW on other platforms.
The Wii version of WaW has a missing mission as well (the plane mission "Black Cats")
@@ThomasVvV Nah. More like Splintet Cell: Double Agent, where the flagship release was, in many ways, actually a lower quality title than the last-gen releases. No that it's a good thing that that should happen, necessarily. But it's kinda neat having one game get made multiple times and effectively get more die rolls as to at least one version being good.
The Switch is still around
@@supersardonic1179 The Switch actually ended this stuff forever
I didn't even know there was a console version of the game until the 360 version became backwards compatible on Xbox One. I only played the PC version that I got bundled with Geforce 8800GTS. There was like 2-3 games with PhysX support bundled with that card :D Oh btw there was ads in PC version too. I vividly remember an Axe ad on the first level.
This level of destruction is missing from modern games. I remember when physics were such a driving force in games. Around the time the half life 2 demos came to light all games were pushing for physics… then somewhere along the line the thirst for it disappeared. Far Cry 6 is a great looking game but the destructive environments are so limited..
like many here this was my first game on the 360. I remember plugging it into my 32" Sony CRT and being like wow! Good times
I have very fond memories of this from the 360 era. I just found my old disc and tried it in the Series X..... WOW. It looks super clean and plays so well. I think I am going to have to play through this again, not just for nostalgia, but because it's a genuinely good game still
Ubisoft was doing some weird stuff during this time. Splinter Cell: Double Agent also had a release where the PS2 version and Xbox 360 version were completely different games.
Ye I heard the 6th console gen version if Double Agent was much better game than the 7th gen Xbox 360/PS3 version.
I guess back then it was still counted to be profitable to make even entirely different versions for last gen consoles because they still had big playerbase.
But when you look at marketing from that time, Ubisoft clearly prioritized Xbox 360 version of GRAW in their advertising and it was the same thing with Xbox 360/PS3 version of Double Agent, I dont remember seeing them advertize last gen versions of those gamea at all back then
Almost 20 years later, why don't we have this level of attention to detail and destruction physics like this anymore? It's like we went backwards in these regards.
This was on a short list of games that I bought for 360 early on that I was so pleasantly surprised by. This game really had a lot of “advanced” stuff going on. I remember being so impressed by the the simulation of light bleeding through cloth on some of the outdoor environments.
Fact check: Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter came out in 2006, the same year as the 8800GTX. The 8800GTX was much more advanced than the hardware on the 360.
In fact, the 8800gtx I bought came bundled with GRAW.
@@dualpapayas well yes, the 360 came out in 2005. next gen for PC began with unified shader GPUS in late 2006 - thats what PC gamers were buying to play games like GRAW and oblivion.
Graw came Out on PC about half a year before the 8800 GTX came out
@@DigitalFoundry yes. and we waited to play the game on the new gtx cards, those of us who followed hardware news.
Every so often I revisit this game on the Xbox! Still such a good game
The first game demo I downloaded when I got went from dialup to dsl.. took forever to download but demo had multiplayer for free to try out.. truly felt next gen gaming at the time
On the topic of ageia cards, a retro time capsule video about Cellfactor would also be amazing - it was a very unique game in how it explores how far PhysX technology and dedicated cards can go.
Please look at Morrowind on the original Xbox, or DOOM 3 on Xbox. You've done both PC versions, but the console version were much more impressive in terms of what they accomplished.
Wow! So we actually moved from native 720p with 2x MSAA to upscaled 454p 18 years later! This gen is embarrassing.
I used to play this on an 2007 HP Laptop back in 2010, practically the game that introduced me to the whole Ghost Recon series, and it was like at 15FPS slow slow.
12:07 Tango simply refers to an enemy target.
i laughed at this moment out loud
The 360 multiplayer still works today, it gets busy in the evening (London time) around 10:30 p.m. It's still great...
My 1st experience with ghost recon was advanced warfighter on pc, thought it was a technical showpiece back in the day. Multiplayer was mad back then
Damn now my childhood is creeping into “retro”. This on the Xbox 360 back in the day was MIND BLOWING coming from PS2
Great memories of this on 360. Such a great game. I traded my PS2 for a 360 hard drive, extra controller, and this game.
Y'all unlocked some core memories today. I had the PC version first and then the PS3/360 version. Forgot all about the PC version
I was very happy as a pc gamer that they made a completely different game for the more authentic hardcore tactical shooters like the original games. Most impressive thing i thought at the time was the animation quality like guys diving after being shot at or rolling, feel of the weapons and details like mags being dropped on the ground instead of just disappearing. It had some insane difficulty spikes that made it almost impossible with so few checkpoints though.
The 360 version was THE version. The PC version, while decent looking, lacked the dynamic aesthetic of the 360 version. It had a sort of washed out color palette. The game still holds up to this day, imo.
This was the game that convinced me to get a 360 at launch. That CGI trailer from E3 2005 is iconic. I watched it so many times.
Although I didnt get 360 at launch, GRAW definitely was the first game that made me impressed and was the first game that wanted me to get Xbox 360, although it didnt happen until December 2006. Even though 360 had got games like Gears, Oblivion and Dead Rising by then, GRAW was still the first game I played on it.
Honestly all the Xbox 360 games before GRAW just seemed lame and not "true next-gen" by comparison.
that brief era where the 360 was more powerful than almost all gaming pcs (at least in terms of gpu grunt) was really special. games like this, condemned criminal origins, call of duty 2 and gears of war 1 were all really outstanding next gen showcases. (obviously could play condemned or cod 2 on a pc but it took a pretty beefy rig to hit a steady 60 fps)
13:18 John giggles like a schoolgirl finding out he can destroy this cardboard box block
I finished the PC version in co-op with a friend. It was amazing. A few years ago I finished the 360 version too. Both are excellent.
0:54 Man. That Matrix demo looked awesome even back then
I just played this game on the Series X for the first time yesterday. still very good
Wow... Ageia PhysX... Back when I first got into computer hardware. Feeling old all of a sudden. Great vid as always!
Back in 2006 I thought this game looked like real life. It had great physics and realistic animations!
For the 360 version, Ubisoft Paris worked on the Single Player campaign while Red Storm did the Coop/PvP Multiplayer. It would have been interesting to also take a look at the MP mode for the 360 since it was essentially a completely different game compared to the campaign in terms of graphics assets and even gameplay mechanics.
I remember buying this for 360, when i still had a CRT. Part way through I upgraded to a hd TV using VGA, as I didn't want horrible ghosting that LCD had at the time through hdi, and man the resolution Jump and clarity was mind blowing, that it felt like a different game.
4:14 There were OG Xbox games like Sudeki (2004) and Far Cry: Instincts (2005) that used real-time shadow mapping for the environment and characters well before GRAW, albeit with a more aggressive fade-in (with either no cascading or very limited cascading).
Even Jurassic Park: Trespasser (1998) uses shadow mapping on the vast majority of objects populating the game world and in a way that suggests it isn’t all just baked-in (shadows cast from both dynamic/physicalized and static objects all perfectly blend into each other). That’s without mentioning that it’s all done in software rendering (CPU only) along with per-pixel grayscale bump mapping.
This game brings back great memories. Back when games were focused on fun and gameplay
Game budgets kept increasing, necessitating larger audiences. This kinda game was always gonna be too niche for the larger budgets of more modern games. Hopefully that changes one of these days (in either direction, lower budget AAA games or broader acceptance of nerdier shooters). GRAW was one of the earliest "next gen" games I played on the 360 and still have fond memories of single player and co-op.
Man. I played this game (and GRAW2) on PC more than it deserves. To me, it looked decidedly "next-gen", and it was crazy difficult.
I love all of these types of major and minor details that developers put into their games. Especially the details that may never be discovered. It shows their love for the project.
I love this kind of videos, interesting and fun to watch can you guys do GTA IV comparison next?
I'm actually a big fan of semi-transparent shadows like the ones in the PC version. What they got going for them is the fact that they blend way better into the environment than those deep black moving "papercuts" ever did. It's the same with RT reflections which - because all other graphics are still so basic even now - tend to pop in a way they never do in real life. To me the impression of an "even", homogenous environment serves immersion a lot more than one or two highly articulated effects.
RT reflections have issues, but real life is wayyyyy more reflective than any computer graphics portrays. Not a fair analogy to shadows.
@@Wobbothe3rd Precisely my point: Real life has way more going on, not just in terms of reflections. Which makes them stand out in an unnatural way when developers don't increase the fidelity of the rest of the environment to the same level (which they usually don't do yet). Same was true for those ancient shadows and still is in some cases.