Just tested this on my PAL Dreamcast with the gdemu installed and the first load for the street intro took 19 seconds and the second load about 24 seconds. What a difference...
It makes me wonder if the reader in this particular machine was good though. Since the Dreamcast disc reader was notoriously unreliable even back then, maybe it wouldn't be quite these long loading on a new system.
It's probably how the developer filled the disc. To load faster games should fill the outside of the disc first since that's the fastest spinning part and holds the most data. Whatever the dev did, they messed up.
@@BurritoKingdom With how much the reader is trying to move based on the read noises, the slow loading is probably down to how badly the data was structured/placed on the disc, like you said. I have also heard some PS1 and 2 games doing this sort of hard back and forth loading noises, but those have usually been when you get into or out of a FMV. I dont know much about Dreamcast, but I wonder does it have similar mechanical read issues as the phat PS2s with a worn out worm gear and mechanical parts? Those systems also make some nasty grinding and screeching noises when a plastic bit doesnt stay in the groove, which can slow and even prevent loading.
@@JukemDrawles87 literally capable of going from 60 to single digits from scene to scene. I haven't played the second game yet, but I think it's really similar to the first game in terms of performance based on what other people have said about it. 4 enemies shooting at the same time in a small room can tank the framerate down to 5FPS easily, but staring at a wall or going through a small corridor can hit 60, though most of the time the game runs 10-30. It's dreadful, but also really interesting to compare to some other games that managed to maintain near rock solid 60 on the PS2. Actually, I would say that Commandos Strike Force has some similarly bad framerate, but it's also a bit more grandiose, so you only hit those single digit 5FPS scenes when there's 10 enemies shooting at the same time, so I guess it's still not quite as bad as Max Payne.
@@shotgunmasterQL I played Commandos Strike Force on the OG Xbox and can't remember the performance been to bad it maybe that i never noticed at the time or have simply forgot. One thing i can remember is how the game was incredibly easy and should was nowhere near as good as the previous games. I'd love to see a new Commandos game made for current gen and PC as the first two games and the expansion pack were great the third game just didn't do it for me. Max Payne was all good.
Suggestion for the editor: please label the platforms “Windows PC” and “Dreamcast” different COLOURS. It’s easier to follow while the screen captures switch around. Otherwise we have to reread/check regularly which is which. Thanks! Edit: zZiL341yRj736 below said to just use the logo. They're right, best solution. And it's been done in other videos already.
Also please don’t switch in which side you display the system. It’s a bit hard to follow when I watch the long loading time of the Dreamcast on the bottom right and with next cut, windows is on the right side and Dreamcast on the left.
@@Kevin-du5vf or take 0 second x 40 times to check because you don't even have to track the screens/read the labels. It doesn't take more time for the editor, so I thought it was a no-brainer suggestion for legibility. But it's not really about gained or lost time. It's just less distracting. Interesting video nonetheless, i'm sure we can agree on that.
I would hope that when the Activision Blizzard deal goes through Raven software is allowed to work on rejuvenating some of their old IP like Soldier of Fortune, Herectic/Hexen etc. they have worked closely with ID in the past and would be great if they worked on new titles or remasters using the new ID-Tech engine.
I'm surprised that when John discussed the Dreamcast port's controls he didn't mention that this game has full keyboard & mouse support. With adapters like the Brook Wingman you can even use USB keyboards.
🤔 Do the DC and PS2 ports support _hybrid controls_ with a controller similar to how PS2's Red Faction 2, Half-Life and Unreal Tournament support DualShock - for movement, grenade select, jump, crouch, night vision, etc. - and USB mouse and, additionally has a third input device for additional features, keyboard?
@@papasnejk87 The damage model was definitely cutting edge for the time, and Soldier of Fortune 2 which was on id Tech 3 still has more detail than a lot of modern games despite the obvious lesser graphical fidelity.
I’ve got special memories of this game in that I was a bug tester at Activision the summer of 2000; and I remember asking my boss about it and how to get a copy. She reached into her desk and pulled out a full retail box copy and handed it to me and it totally felt like F’ing Christmas. I was only a temp worker. She was/is awesome
@@AJDOLDCHANNELARCHIVE I mean, I think COD games were using a modified IDTech 3 aka Quake 3 engine, but even then unless explicitly said and confirmed otherwise, I wouldn't be surprised if some of Quake's engine code still lingered in the new COD games as well. A lot of modern engines are built on the foundation of the old engines, rarely are new engines just made from scratch or the foundation is rewritten just like that, it's not some sort of point of shame. For example, I think even Frostbite engine is forked from Unreal Engine, possibly from UE3, and UE3 obviously has roots to even older Unreal Engine versions. The fact that the semi modern COD games had any sort of decent multi core CPU support with a modified IDTech 3 is applause worthy, as any sort of deeper multi core utilization on IDTech 3 required some extensive engine part rewrites, which is why many indie and basic IDTech 3 projects and forks only had single or dual core support (sound processing on the second core was easy to implement allegedly).
@@birb_person Yeah, I'm not 100% sure and don't remember where I heard about it the first time, but since Frostbite is DICE's and EA's property and they have been hyping it for years as their marvelous own engine, I don't think they would care to open up about the history of the engine too much, not that it would matter too much. Especially when their competition has been blasted for recycling some old engine for years, engine forks and modifications aren't that marketable or attractive to your average joe. If I had to make any sort of loose connection between UE3 and Frostbite, If I remember correctly, for the original Mirror's Edge DICE had ported over the shader (or shading?) systems of Frostbite to the UE version Mirror's Edge was running on. Which doesn't make too much sense, unless the port job was pretty straightforward and required minor work. But yeah, I'm not confident enough to call it a fact. Usually new engines don't come out of nowhere, and 7th gen had plenty of games using variety of "modified UE3" engines, so I doubt DICE wrote Frostbite from scratch either. But I would love to have a source for it too. Either way, engine forks and modifications are fine, it all depends on how far you go with it
You're supposed to shoot the pilot in the helicopter with a sniper rifle on the train level. One good shot is enough to take it down. Also, iirc you can hold down alternative fire for closer zoom.
John, it seems you are forgetting that when Soldier of Fortune was releasend on Dreamcast, Sega already announced that they would leave the console market and stop production roughly half a year prior. So the publisher on console Crave just wanted the game out and move on as fast as possible without caring for the quality anymore (sales for all software tanked at that time and even new games were reduced in price at launch already). It is a small miracle that it wasn't even scrapped completely as it was done with so many other games.
I remember it like it was yesterday! I had the demo of this game on PC. I replayed that demo so many times, toying with the I.A. being amazed by the gore system. Shooting the guns off of the enemies and see them react....and the demo had not 1, but 2 levels, the second being the train ride, were you could shoot the pilot of a chopper hunting you! The attention to detail.... Oh man, it's amazing how much fun we had back then even with just a demo...this game was groundbreaking.
Using a GDEmu or ODE these issues are negated big time! It does still have loading times, but its way more tolerable! I would have liked to have seen them have access to one in order to compare with the stock dreamcast because its honestly night and day. I could provide some video of the loading times to them if they wanted.
@@mark_pereira Shenmue II on the DC is the same. Using an ODE the load times are almost non existent and the game is very enjoyable to play. The load times have always been a GD-ROM issue and not a CPU issue.
7:55 DC version is also missing the windows on either side of the door, PS2 port is very solid and I didn't expect the load times to be so similar to PC version.
Aside from technical differences of the consoles people have to remember that Dreamcast already was a dead system at that time so the publisher and developer had no incentive to care for the quality on Dreamcast anymore, whereas Playstation 2 was the hot shit where they could make lots of money.
@@cellspeed8682 Oh yea the port is bad but the DC itself was great, I still have a working DC from the first week of launch, loved the system it's a shame it didn't last longer, also I believe the PS2 port was made by a different developer.
I thought the Dreamcast port was fine when I first played it but even then I noticed the overly long loading times and the slow frame rate. The reason the PS2 version is better is most probably because Pipedream Interactive was using the patched Gold edition for the port.
Definitely. Especially since older games and their ports often had vast difference or even were entirely unique to a given console (although that wouldn't make an interesting comparison, to put two entirely different games against each other). Maybe Rayman 2 could make an interesting comparison, even though PS1 and PS2 versions are very different from the original versions and even from each other. Not too different to still be comparable. Even though PC vs Dreamcast vs PS2 in SoF's case were all pretty similar, they still had some relatively big differences compared to how similar modern game ports are on different consoles these days.
@@Harvester88 Indeed, Tripwire explicitly cited SoF during development, of course with the enemies being non-human and the mad grindhouse aesthetic it doesn't feel quite as gratuitous. Or I'm more jaded now maybe?
Love this video! I remember fondly watching/playing this game as a kid with a schoolmate on his pc. And also remembering how amazed and stunned i was with the graphics, gore and realism of SOF. A real golden FPS classic! I would love to see a follow-up video of this with SOF2.
This was an amazing flashback. I could imagine i would remember the stage all these years later. Brought back alot of memories. Back in the days when there was no real multiplayer you could play the campaign over and over without getting bored, today the campaign is more of an addon in games rather then the game itself, some games doesnt even have a campaign. This game made me think about "deer hunter", remember that game? You could blast the legs and heads off deers, that was fun times.
Played it again recently with the sofplus patch that fixes widescreen amongst other bugs and its still fun, even with some wonky difficulty here and there. The tone was perfect 80s action movie, people try to reproduce it today but it always comes a bit too self aware.
@ 32:10 A train goes under the grate thing on Alex's version where as it looks like a block of geometry is obscuring what would've been that train tunnel on Dreamcast.
I used to work in an small game shop and can recall a few people who bought this on Dreamcast returned it for any number of reasons from the really slow and too frequent loading times to the fact that that the game was kind of buggy. I think one or two people experienced that helicopter glitch, but as they weren't game testers, they didn't know how to describe it other than to say the game stopped working on that level.
That extra texture layer serving as an environment map worked well in Quake3's metallic surfaces, but I think how well it works really goes hand-in-hand with having higher level geometry so that the individual surfaces/facets are too small to invite close inspection.
@@wayn3h The RAM determines how much of a game's assets you can load into memory at a given time. The frequent load times would explain that, but long seek times also explain the long load times. I argue both are at play here
Actually impressed by the PS2 version, only played SoF on PC back in the day and always thought that the the PS version would suck, fun to be proven wrong though. I remember trying to play the Xbox version of SoF 2 on Xbox and that was not particularly good at all… which was a shame as I yearned for SoF 2 based on the early screenshots of the soldier with his eyes and the grass which would sway in the wind…my imagination raced, as it would do back then… in the ”simpler” times. Great video, fun to see, would love a follow up.
Hah I remember that screenshot with the camouflaged soldier with the eyes. The caption in the magazine said something about this looking like it'll be very graphically impressive, built on the Q3 engine, which was still pretty exciting back then
@@olaf3140 I always thought it was a great leap in realism, the weapon models looked great too, they glistened in the screenshots. Sadly I haven´t played it besides a couple of hours on Xbox, I need to remedy this I believe.
Seeing SoF on PS2 reminds me of the port of Star Trek Elite Force (also from Raven Software) to PS2. It had mouse/keyboard support too and the save system works similarly also reminding you to save after each level the same way. That port wasn't so good though. The framerate would easily drop to 20s and below sometimes. The splitscreen multiplayer was fun at least.
🤔 As with Red Faction II, UT and Half-Life on PS2, does Star Trek: Elite Force support hybrid controls - using Dualshock alongside a mouse - or are [PC controls] a separate scheme? If hybrid controls are supported AND if it's supported in multiplayer (not always well-implemented with Red Faction II being an example where USB mouse for MP was not supported), am curious how 2P split-screen for Star Trek: Elite Force compares to 2P split-screen Unreal Tournament when using a pair of mice and Dualshock controllers. If I recall correctly, 2P split-screen for Unreal Tournament hybrid controls is a decent enough experience but it does take hits to framerate and, IIRC, bot count (and/or maps?) which is why I'll typically do full-screen MP via PS2 system-link over iLink/Firewire. So many more titles could have used the mouse support with Tribes: Aerial Assault, Quake III, Serious Sam, Alien games among other FPSs coming to mind if the PS2 had the performance capabilities.
Played this on the DC at launch and I still enjoyed it despite the horrible load times. I was just happy to play a similar game as my friends with PCs. I definitely wouldn't be able to handle these load times today though.
Dreamcast also had the associated keyboard and mouse, I remember playing fps games like SoF or Quake III Arena online with K+m, fun times. These loading times are PTSD inducing though, I didn't remember it that bad, holy crap.
Never had SoF1 but had SoF2 for PC not long after having broadband, great fun online. Better than the console versions just for the online play, same with the Worms games.
it was a really sloppy port, out of all the pc first person shooters the only one to make it across in a decent shape was Quake 3 arena. If it was just a matter of power, a game like shenmue 2 would simply have been impossible with the amount of assets/npcs in scenes. Sony did a vastly better job supporting 3rd party developers in their ports than a cash strapped Sega did.
I had this on Dreamcast. :-( One of the few moments in my gaming life where I felt like I got scammed. Years before I'd narrowly avoided getting Pit Fighter on SNES because no one had it in stock. Lucky me.
I remember playing through SoF1 on Dreamcast & getting to the last level. Yeah, the load times were terrible (though it looks like it was more of a disc reading problem, as people are indicating with ODE solutions), but it was still an overall solid port; John's glitch with the helicopter was definitely not my experience. Anyway, the PS2 port does look to be much better, and that's interesting as it was one of the few ports done by Pipe Dream Interactive, Majesco's short-lived in-house development studio. Pipe Dream also did the Dreamcast ports of Rainbow Six 1 & 2, the PS2 port of Star Trek: Voyager Elite Force, and (uhhhh.....) the Game Boy Advance port of Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure. So I guess maybe SoF Gold was Pipe Dream's best port?
Pipedream was working with a patched copy of the game in terms of it being the Gold Edition so that contributed to ease of porting it with less glitches.
Heh, had this for my Dreamcast. Fond memories from throughout my high school years. And due to the loading times, one playthrough really did last THROUGH my high school years.
I remember playing this on my 166MMX with a Voodoo 1 back in the day. It ran rather well as far as I remember at 640x480. Still have that Voodoo 1, but not system to use it on. But last I played it was on a PIII with Voodoo 3 and it was still fun. To bad most of the sequels were not as good.
42:45 That moon is OBVIOUSLY a Day of the Tentacles reference (the fake puke on the celling) I'm mostly kidding but it really looks 98% like the fake-puke just at an angle we never saw in DotT.
Maybe I should buy this game. It would be so dope if Nightdive updated this with good looking shadows and other modern effects. The gunplay looks so satisfying.
I thought the Dreamcast port was fine when I first played it but even then I noticed the overly long loading times and the slow frame rate. The reason the PS2 version is better is most probably because Pipedream Interactive was using the patched Gold edition for the port. I'm pretty sure with the train carriage you're supposed to end the level by opening it, not shooting down the helicopter.
Is it me… or can you see a ghostly image of Rich Evens from red letter media appear on the Dreamcast loading screen at 18:18? If yes, I’m so curious to know why? hahaha.
The main things I remember about SoF at the time was how much of a big deal they made about being able to shoot people sunglass off (rightfully so, that was awesome), and the phrase "I'll be damned, only one nuke".
About the helicopter - the easiest way to deal with it is to aim down the scope of the sniper rife and aim at the pilot when the helicopter is almost facing you and moving at the same speed as the train.Then you get a sweet blood splatter on the windshield and the helicopter crashes.
8:48 The Dreamcast has proper electricity bolts shooting out of the rows of monitors while the PC doesn't. You can hear the zapping sounds, but nothing to see.
I remember back in the day I bought a bootleg version of this game and it would never get past the start, I wonder if the loading time was so bad that I thought it was faulty.
Constructive feedback: I don't like how you edited this video. Don't change the position of the viewports of the games. I was confused many many many times which is which because you kept shuffling it around.
I can remember going to get this game from Electronics Boutique in the UK i was hyped up to see the gore system as the demo released earlier was censored. I later bought the game on the Dreamcast purely out of curiosity and the loading times were horrendous.
That was one of the problems with some dreamcast ports like the canceled half life port it was a loading each 5 minutes and the frame rate was all over the place.
Gotta love it how RUclips's algorithm again decided to put the most non-descriptive part of the video as the video preview! This time it's from 3:21 onwards from a previous game by the developers of Soldier of Fortune (the same happened with John's Gran Turismo video where the algorithm picked up a part of the clips from the Macross game/anime, which was shown in the video). Unless..? It's all hand-picked by Digital Foundry, but they wouldn't, wouldn't they..?!
I'd love to see a follow-up. I really enjoy these side-by-side comparisons of games from a time when the disparity between platforms was more than just negligible. Soldier of Fortune 2 would be cool. Doom 3 would be pretty great. Oni could be pretty interesting too, but I concede that I may be the only person who would get excited over more Oni coverage on DF
These are cool and all, but when do we get a video on the Ukrainian classic - STALKER? More popular than most of these retro games, still retro too, better rated, with more mods, and with technology (ballistics, A-Life simulation, 100% dynamic lighting) that is rare even in modern games?
Stalker is great but this IS a popular game and Sof 2 really took of in multiplayer. It was infamous for it's gore. You can't compare this to Stalker, it's too different and Sof is older, a mostly straight up shooter, it's not open world and it's the Quake 2 engine. But it was Q2 engine pushed to the max.
Young me remembers the dismemberment aspect, really stood out as chunky...no idea what PC I ran, was quite some time ago.. maybe a K6 AMD450Mhz and same GF2 MX.
I had this for my Dreamcast and PC back in the day, but I always preferred the Dreamcast version. Playing it on my 32inch CRT with the mouse and keyboard was glorious. My PC was high spec back then tbf, but my monitor was only something like a 20inch if that... Definitely best played on DC with the mouse and keyboard over the controller though...
Bought this game when it came out. Impressive, but I couldn't appreciate it at the time because my computer was too slow. The same computer that could play Q3 at 60fps could barely get 30fps on a Quake II engine game!
7:09 lol seeing a video of this game where the player used a knife in a fight and the enemy model had *knife wound textures appear on it,* is the reason I bought it in the first place 😂
The loading times got extremely long in SoF 2 on PC, it was so frustrating and the game itself was a nightmare to run. Hopefully once MS acquires A/B they'll put Raven Software to good use.
One simple why that won't happen, the Soldier Of Fortune IP doesn't actually belong to Acti Bliz since they liscenced it from the magazine which I think is still running. MS would have to go through the process of reacquiring the gaming rights to the IP and they might be made to put the games on other sustems like Sony has to with MLB The Show.
You're right about the soldier Fortune Magazine it ran from 1975 to 2016 where it stopped publication Microsoft probably could just pay them a little bit of money and get the license
@@cruelwraith2games926 Thing with 3rd parties is that they'll make certain demands such as platform availability in exchange for said license, hence why I don't think any possible remasters would end up being Xbox/PC only.
I remember playing this at a PC store demo right after it came out and thinking it was awesome, particularly the dismemberment. The Dreamcast version looks about as good as you would expect given the hardware and time it released, apart from the loading screens.
the pixelated gore just made alex's dismemberment of that dispatched criminal all the more disturbing, felt like i was playing kane and lynch 2 all over again
My DC is one of my retro consoles that stays in my living room hooked up to a VGA CRT. I have my gaming PC too. This is a game I'd happily play on the latter lol.
Was the dreamcast version running on the hi-res setting ?, it looks too sharp X) maybe it would have fared better at a lower resolution with also better asset placement on the disc. As it is it feels like it's relying on the random access speeds of a hard drive like if it was installed on a pc.
I thought this game was awesome when I was younger because it was the first game I remember that had that kind of dismemberment. Half life would blow people into chunks, but it wasn't specific parts of the body. Speaking of half life, watching this Dreamcast version reminds me of when I first played Half-Life on my super weak pc. Every time a new map had a load it would take a couple minutes.
In further levels in DC version there is fog that doesn't allow you to see the enemies, but you can see their masks. The worst part is that they see you no matter how far you are, once you enter that area. The result, floating mask shooting you at 2 miles.
I played through the DC version of SoF with a mouse. Thank god it supported the system’s mouse peripheral because fuck trying to play any FPS with that controler! Lol
It's interesting that on the DC the textures are compressed but it looks like its mipmapping is biased so that farther surfaces are displayed with a slight aliasing to make them look a bit more higher resolution. It definitely looks blurrier, the textures themselves, on farther surfaces.
![Blox Fruits Dragon Rework Update [Full Stream]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/EqDAp8udhm0/mqdefault.jpg)
Just tested this on my PAL Dreamcast with the gdemu installed and the first load for the street intro took 19 seconds and the second load about 24 seconds. What a difference...
So it is a disc read issue? What about general performance?
It makes me wonder if the reader in this particular machine was good though. Since the Dreamcast disc reader was notoriously unreliable even back then, maybe it wouldn't be quite these long loading on a new system.
Exactly. Runs perfectly with gdemu, great performance and plays great with mouse and keyboard. On vga. The dreamcast imo is far better than ps2
It's probably how the developer filled the disc. To load faster games should fill the outside of the disc first since that's the fastest spinning part and holds the most data. Whatever the dev did, they messed up.
@@BurritoKingdom With how much the reader is trying to move based on the read noises, the slow loading is probably down to how badly the data was structured/placed on the disc, like you said.
I have also heard some PS1 and 2 games doing this sort of hard back and forth loading noises, but those have usually been when you get into or out of a FMV.
I dont know much about Dreamcast, but I wonder does it have similar mechanical read issues as the phat PS2s with a worn out worm gear and mechanical parts? Those systems also make some nasty grinding and screeching noises when a plastic bit doesnt stay in the groove, which can slow and even prevent loading.
Videos like this make me so happy, such an interesting concept!
I wonder how a video like this would go with a game like Max Payne 2...
Oh man, Max Payne 2! Yes, please!
Max payne on PS2 has the worst frame rates I've ever experienced
@@JukemDrawles87 literally capable of going from 60 to single digits from scene to scene.
I haven't played the second game yet, but I think it's really similar to the first game in terms of performance based on what other people have said about it. 4 enemies shooting at the same time in a small room can tank the framerate down to 5FPS easily, but staring at a wall or going through a small corridor can hit 60, though most of the time the game runs 10-30.
It's dreadful, but also really interesting to compare to some other games that managed to maintain near rock solid 60 on the PS2.
Actually, I would say that Commandos Strike Force has some similarly bad framerate, but it's also a bit more grandiose, so you only hit those single digit 5FPS scenes when there's 10 enemies shooting at the same time, so I guess it's still not quite as bad as Max Payne.
@@shotgunmasterQL The Xbox versions are however very playable. I'm glad they're releasing the games again on newer consoles though
@@shotgunmasterQL I played Commandos Strike Force on the OG Xbox and can't remember the performance been to bad it maybe that i never noticed at the time or have simply forgot. One thing i can remember is how the game was incredibly easy and should was nowhere near as good as the previous games. I'd love to see a new Commandos game made for current gen and PC as the first two games and the expansion pack were great the third game just didn't do it for me. Max Payne was all good.
Suggestion for the editor: please label the platforms “Windows PC” and “Dreamcast” different COLOURS. It’s easier to follow while the screen captures switch around. Otherwise we have to reread/check regularly which is which. Thanks!
Edit: zZiL341yRj736 below said to just use the logo. They're right, best solution. And it's been done in other videos already.
Also please don’t switch in which side you display the system. It’s a bit hard to follow when I watch the long loading time of the Dreamcast on the bottom right and with next cut, windows is on the right side and Dreamcast on the left.
Or, make them differently coloured windows
Or take two seconds to read a word. Lol you're not gonna miss much
@@Kevin-du5vf or take 0 second x 40 times to check because you don't even have to track the screens/read the labels. It doesn't take more time for the editor, so I thought it was a no-brainer suggestion for legibility.
But it's not really about gained or lost time. It's just less distracting.
Interesting video nonetheless, i'm sure we can agree on that.
Yes, that created confusion and eye strain
I would hope that when the Activision Blizzard deal goes through Raven software is allowed to work on rejuvenating some of their old IP like Soldier of Fortune, Herectic/Hexen etc. they have worked closely with ID in the past and would be great if they worked on new titles or remasters using the new ID-Tech engine.
Yeah, a new hexen would be awesome. Damn, forgot that game 👍 awesome Coop over LAN a long time ago, or maybe was it direct connect? 😁
Yeah that was actually the first thing that crossed my mind when i heard about Ms buying them.
@@unrealdevon I hope Microsoft brings back Wolfenstein 2009, Heretic 2 and makes Enemy territory Quake Wars free to play.
@@themasterofgaming4149 a remaster of that game would be awesome
Singularity!!!!
I'm surprised that when John discussed the Dreamcast port's controls he didn't mention that this game has full keyboard & mouse support. With adapters like the Brook Wingman you can even use USB keyboards.
From some of the comments here I guess he mentions it later on actually.
@@oneidavf he mentioned it for the ps2 version. Didn’t say anything about the Dreamcast version iirc
He is an expert on this matter, if he didn't said is because DC can't do it. Hope you understand my words as should be ;-)
@@Malosoxyz I have the DC version and I played with keyboard and mouse...
🤔
Do the DC and PS2 ports support _hybrid controls_ with a controller similar to how PS2's Red Faction 2, Half-Life and Unreal Tournament support DualShock - for movement, grenade select, jump, crouch, night vision, etc. - and USB mouse and, additionally has a third input device for additional features, keyboard?
Soldier of Fortune was so cutting edge when it was first released. My cousin and I used to fawn all over its graphics.
It wasn't cutting edge. There was Quake 3 for instance already in 1999
@@papasnejk87 The damage model was definitely cutting edge for the time, and Soldier of Fortune 2 which was on id Tech 3 still has more detail than a lot of modern games despite the obvious lesser graphical fidelity.
@@papasnejk87 Nobody can seen the physics models like that before so it was cutting edge.
Me too
I’ve got special memories of this game in that I was a bug tester at Activision the summer of 2000; and I remember asking my boss about it and how to get a copy. She reached into her desk and pulled out a full retail box copy and handed it to me and it totally felt like F’ing Christmas. I was only a temp worker. She was/is awesome
18:15 Rich Evan with the laser noise has me rolling!
It's really impressive how much they managed to extract out of the good old Q2 engine
Sof and Heretic 2. Hell yea. Those 2 pushed it to the max.
All the COD games up until the modern reboots used a modified Quake engine.
@@AJDOLDCHANNELARCHIVE I mean, I think COD games were using a modified IDTech 3 aka Quake 3 engine, but even then unless explicitly said and confirmed otherwise, I wouldn't be surprised if some of Quake's engine code still lingered in the new COD games as well. A lot of modern engines are built on the foundation of the old engines, rarely are new engines just made from scratch or the foundation is rewritten just like that, it's not some sort of point of shame.
For example, I think even Frostbite engine is forked from Unreal Engine, possibly from UE3, and UE3 obviously has roots to even older Unreal Engine versions.
The fact that the semi modern COD games had any sort of decent multi core CPU support with a modified IDTech 3 is applause worthy, as any sort of deeper multi core utilization on IDTech 3 required some extensive engine part rewrites, which is why many indie and basic IDTech 3 projects and forks only had single or dual core support (sound processing on the second core was easy to implement allegedly).
@@shotgunmasterQL first I've heard of frostbite having roots in UE3, can't really find any claims online about it tho.
@@birb_person Yeah, I'm not 100% sure and don't remember where I heard about it the first time, but since Frostbite is DICE's and EA's property and they have been hyping it for years as their marvelous own engine, I don't think they would care to open up about the history of the engine too much, not that it would matter too much. Especially when their competition has been blasted for recycling some old engine for years, engine forks and modifications aren't that marketable or attractive to your average joe.
If I had to make any sort of loose connection between UE3 and Frostbite, If I remember correctly, for the original Mirror's Edge DICE had ported over the shader (or shading?) systems of Frostbite to the UE version Mirror's Edge was running on.
Which doesn't make too much sense, unless the port job was pretty straightforward and required minor work.
But yeah, I'm not confident enough to call it a fact.
Usually new engines don't come out of nowhere, and 7th gen had plenty of games using variety of "modified UE3" engines, so I doubt DICE wrote Frostbite from scratch either.
But I would love to have a source for it too.
Either way, engine forks and modifications are fine, it all depends on how far you go with it
You're supposed to shoot the pilot in the helicopter with a sniper rifle on the train level. One good shot is enough to take it down. Also, iirc you can hold down alternative fire for closer zoom.
John, it seems you are forgetting that when Soldier of Fortune was releasend on Dreamcast, Sega already announced that they would leave the console market and stop production roughly half a year prior. So the publisher on console Crave just wanted the game out and move on as fast as possible without caring for the quality anymore (sales for all software tanked at that time and even new games were reduced in price at launch already). It is a small miracle that it wasn't even scrapped completely as it was done with so many other games.
I remember it like it was yesterday! I had the demo of this game on PC. I replayed that demo so many times, toying with the I.A. being amazed by the gore system. Shooting the guns off of the enemies and see them react....and the demo had not 1, but 2 levels, the second being the train ride, were you could shoot the pilot of a chopper hunting you! The attention to detail.... Oh man, it's amazing how much fun we had back then even with just a demo...this game was groundbreaking.
True I also had blasts with demo CDs..back them I was a teen so I could not buy the games so I enjoyed what I had
The DC version is awful for the horrid loading times (seriously) but once playing, it's a fairly decent port given the architecture of the console.
Definitely. Can't say I saw something really bad during actual gameplay.
Using a GDEmu or ODE these issues are negated big time! It does still have loading times, but its way more tolerable! I would have liked to have seen them have access to one in order to compare with the stock dreamcast because its honestly night and day. I could provide some video of the loading times to them if they wanted.
@@mark_pereira Shenmue II on the DC is the same. Using an ODE the load times are almost non existent and the game is very enjoyable to play. The load times have always been a GD-ROM issue and not a CPU issue.
This was such a fun watch. Looking forward to more videos in this format!
7:55 DC version is also missing the windows on either side of the door, PS2 port is very solid and I didn't expect the load times to be so similar to PC version.
Aside from technical differences of the consoles people have to remember that Dreamcast already was a dead system at that time so the publisher and developer had no incentive to care for the quality on Dreamcast anymore, whereas Playstation 2 was the hot shit where they could make lots of money.
@@cellspeed8682 Oh yea the port is bad but the DC itself was great, I still have a working DC from the first week of launch, loved the system it's a shame it didn't last longer, also I believe the PS2 port was made by a different developer.
I thought the Dreamcast port was fine when I first played it but even then I noticed the overly long loading times and the slow frame rate. The reason the PS2 version is better is most probably because Pipedream Interactive was using the patched Gold edition for the port.
Would love to see more retro comparisons, I like the idea.
Definitely.
Especially since older games and their ports often had vast difference or even were entirely unique to a given console (although that wouldn't make an interesting comparison, to put two entirely different games against each other). Maybe Rayman 2 could make an interesting comparison, even though PS1 and PS2 versions are very different from the original versions and even from each other. Not too different to still be comparable.
Even though PC vs Dreamcast vs PS2 in SoF's case were all pretty similar, they still had some relatively big differences compared to how similar modern game ports are on different consoles these days.
I really loved the damage mapping on enemies. I can’t remember any other game doing it to the same level.
Killing Floor 2 is the best one I can think of that is “current”.
maybe Postal 2
@@Harvester88 Indeed, Tripwire explicitly cited SoF during development, of course with the enemies being non-human and the mad grindhouse aesthetic it doesn't feel quite as gratuitous. Or I'm more jaded now maybe?
@@Datenschutz_Datenschutz Postal 2 is no where on the level of these games.
Left 4 Dead 2 still has the best enemy damage in my opinion. The chunks you can blow out of zombies is just insane haha
Bring it back Microsoft
Microsoft doesn't own Activision yet. It's not a completed deal.
It already happened. GOG brought it back a few years ago and it's on sale now for $6.50
Love this video! I remember fondly watching/playing this game as a kid with a schoolmate on his pc. And also remembering how amazed and stunned i was with the graphics, gore and realism of SOF. A real golden FPS classic!
I would love to see a follow-up video of this with SOF2.
This was an amazing flashback. I could imagine i would remember the stage all these years later. Brought back alot of memories. Back in the days when there was no real multiplayer you could play the campaign over and over without getting bored, today the campaign is more of an addon in games rather then the game itself, some games doesnt even have a campaign. This game made me think about "deer hunter", remember that game? You could blast the legs and heads off deers, that was fun times.
Hey John, could you make a similar video for Max Payne 1? We used to swoon over the PC version with its increased visuals compared to PS2.
That Rich Evans image on the loading screen is top tier.
I talked to someone who worked on this port and they said it wasnt possible to make it better and it was a miracle they got it running period.
Played it again recently with the sofplus patch that fixes widescreen amongst other bugs and its still fun, even with some wonky difficulty here and there. The tone was perfect 80s action movie, people try to reproduce it today but it always comes a bit too self aware.
@ 32:10
A train goes under the grate thing on Alex's version where as it looks like a block of geometry is obscuring what would've been that train tunnel on Dreamcast.
G0dl3ss sw1n3!
18:22 RLM RICH EVANS CAMEO! THE CROSSOVER OF THE CENTURY! I can die happy now.
I used to work in an small game shop and can recall a few people who bought this on Dreamcast returned it for any number of reasons from the really slow and too frequent loading times to the fact that that the game was kind of buggy. I think one or two people experienced that helicopter glitch, but as they weren't game testers, they didn't know how to describe it other than to say the game stopped working on that level.
That extra texture layer serving as an environment map worked well in Quake3's metallic surfaces, but I think how well it works really goes hand-in-hand with having higher level geometry so that the individual surfaces/facets are too small to invite close inspection.
Major load times? When one considers the amount of ram available on the Dreamcast vs the compared PC, it's quite incredible.
@@wayn3h The RAM determines how much of a game's assets you can load into memory at a given time. The frequent load times would explain that, but long seek times also explain the long load times. I argue both are at play here
Actually impressed by the PS2 version, only played SoF on PC back in the day and always thought that the the PS version would suck, fun to be proven wrong though. I remember trying to play the Xbox version of SoF 2 on Xbox and that was not particularly good at all… which was a shame as I yearned for SoF 2 based on the early screenshots of the soldier with his eyes and the grass which would sway in the wind…my imagination raced, as it would do back then… in the ”simpler” times.
Great video, fun to see, would love a follow up.
I really loved the 2nd game on Xbox, but I was young and didn't know better.
A shame the xbox got a shit version, it was a much more capable machine than ps2
Hah I remember that screenshot with the camouflaged soldier with the eyes. The caption in the magazine said something about this looking like it'll be very graphically impressive, built on the Q3 engine, which was still pretty exciting back then
I think the geforce 2 is making things on the PC version a bit more fuzzy than other cards would look, just a bit less sharp
@@olaf3140 I always thought it was a great leap in realism, the weapon models looked great too, they glistened in the screenshots. Sadly I haven´t played it besides a couple of hours on Xbox, I need to remedy this I believe.
The Left Trigger on Dreamcast is used to lean left and right when held and pressing A or B, respectively.
Seeing SoF on PS2 reminds me of the port of Star Trek Elite Force (also from Raven Software) to PS2. It had mouse/keyboard support too and the save system works similarly also reminding you to save after each level the same way.
That port wasn't so good though. The framerate would easily drop to 20s and below sometimes. The splitscreen multiplayer was fun at least.
🤔 As with Red Faction II, UT and Half-Life on PS2, does Star Trek: Elite Force support hybrid controls - using Dualshock alongside a mouse - or are [PC controls] a separate scheme? If hybrid controls are supported AND if it's supported in multiplayer (not always well-implemented with Red Faction II being an example where USB mouse for MP was not supported), am curious how 2P split-screen for Star Trek: Elite Force compares to 2P split-screen Unreal Tournament when using a pair of mice and Dualshock controllers. If I recall correctly, 2P split-screen for Unreal Tournament hybrid controls is a decent enough experience but it does take hits to framerate and, IIRC, bot count (and/or maps?) which is why I'll typically do full-screen MP via PS2 system-link over iLink/Firewire. So many more titles could have used the mouse support with Tribes: Aerial Assault, Quake III, Serious Sam, Alien games among other FPSs coming to mind if the PS2 had the performance capabilities.
Played this on the DC at launch and I still enjoyed it despite the horrible load times. I was just happy to play a similar game as my friends with PCs. I definitely wouldn't be able to handle these load times today though.
Dreamcast also had the associated keyboard and mouse, I remember playing fps games like SoF or Quake III Arena online with K+m, fun times.
These loading times are PTSD inducing though, I didn't remember it that bad, holy crap.
@@MrJeanjean2009 They aren't that bad.
It is you that's changed.
Never had SoF1 but had SoF2 for PC not long after having broadband, great fun online. Better than the console versions just for the online play, same with the Worms games.
it was a really sloppy port, out of all the pc first person shooters the only one to make it across in a decent shape was Quake 3 arena. If it was just a matter of power, a game like shenmue 2 would simply have been impossible with the amount of assets/npcs in scenes. Sony did a vastly better job supporting 3rd party developers in their ports than a cash strapped Sega did.
Yeah watching this I had a feeling people would have put up with the long load times back in the day. We weren't as spoiled back then.
I miss SOF, looked forward to playing it whenever I visited my relatives back then.
One of my most memorable and favorites. First one to be able lean around corners and blow limbs off!!
I had this on Dreamcast. :-( One of the few moments in my gaming life where I felt like I got scammed. Years before I'd narrowly avoided getting Pit Fighter on SNES because no one had it in stock. Lucky me.
I wish they made shooters like this again! No game has ever come close to the same feel and impact of shooting.
Very nice surprise you guys covering this game, so many good memories
From a 48 minutes video, the part that RUclips choose to show me when I hovered my cursor over the thumbnail is this : 3:22
Of course I clicked.
had sooo much fun playing this as a teen
17:23 - sounded like a captive grunt in Quake 2 lol
SoF 1 and 2, absolute classics. The sound design of SoF1 alone is hilarious.
RIP Raven Software.
Alright! I loved this game. The detail textures and limb-specific damage was so cutting edge and fun. What a treat!
I remember playing through SoF1 on Dreamcast & getting to the last level. Yeah, the load times were terrible (though it looks like it was more of a disc reading problem, as people are indicating with ODE solutions), but it was still an overall solid port; John's glitch with the helicopter was definitely not my experience.
Anyway, the PS2 port does look to be much better, and that's interesting as it was one of the few ports done by Pipe Dream Interactive, Majesco's short-lived in-house development studio. Pipe Dream also did the Dreamcast ports of Rainbow Six 1 & 2, the PS2 port of Star Trek: Voyager Elite Force, and (uhhhh.....) the Game Boy Advance port of Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure. So I guess maybe SoF Gold was Pipe Dream's best port?
The PS2 brain doesn't look that much better.
The overall lower constantly lower frame rate and grainy, jaggy graphics hold it back.
🤔 Soldier of Fortune have the better mouse support over Star Trek: Voyager Elite Force on the PS2?
Pipedream was working with a patched copy of the game in terms of it being the Gold Edition so that contributed to ease of porting it with less glitches.
God dammit guys, stop pumping out quality content so quickly! I JUST finished the 2nd Gran Turismo video this morning, and now I have to watch this!
Heh, had this for my Dreamcast. Fond memories from throughout my high school years. And due to the loading times, one playthrough really did last THROUGH my high school years.
I remember playing this on my 166MMX with a Voodoo 1 back in the day. It ran rather well as far as I remember at 640x480. Still have that Voodoo 1, but not system to use it on. But last I played it was on a PIII with Voodoo 3 and it was still fun. To bad most of the sequels were not as good.
2 was pretty good but payback was bad because it was done by a different company
42:45 That moon is OBVIOUSLY a Day of the Tentacles reference (the fake puke on the celling) I'm mostly kidding but it really looks 98% like the fake-puke just at an angle we never saw in DotT.
I didn't know Dr Phil was a Soldier of Fortune before his talkshow days. 1:47
Maybe I should buy this game.
It would be so dope if Nightdive updated this with good looking shadows and other modern effects. The gunplay looks so satisfying.
I thought the Dreamcast port was fine when I first played it but even then I noticed the overly long loading times and the slow frame rate. The reason the PS2 version is better is most probably because Pipedream Interactive was using the patched Gold edition for the port.
I'm pretty sure with the train carriage you're supposed to end the level by opening it, not shooting down the helicopter.
Had it on Dreamcast and really liked it but i will never forget those load times : P
I love those comparisions between different versions of older games. Great video
The worse thing about the Dreamcast version is if you take one step backwards after loading it will start loading the previous level again
"Fuuuuuck."
Still one of my favorites 3-4h campaigns.
Was this game that had new tech so limbs can be detached? I think it was a first at the time. At least they touted it that way. Blew my mind back then
Great video as always, and I loved the editing/presentation too.
Listen to that Dreamcast drive head whirring as it loads at 4:30 😀
Is it me… or can you see a ghostly image of Rich Evens from red letter media appear on the Dreamcast loading screen at 18:18? If yes, I’m so curious to know why? hahaha.
The main things I remember about SoF at the time was how much of a big deal they made about being able to shoot people sunglass off (rightfully so, that was awesome), and the phrase "I'll be damned, only one nuke".
About the helicopter - the easiest way to deal with it is to aim down the scope of the sniper rife and aim at the pilot when the helicopter is almost facing you and moving at the same speed as the train.Then you get a sweet blood splatter on the windshield and the helicopter crashes.
Please do Kingpin next! I love these retro playthroughs :)
8:48 The Dreamcast has proper electricity bolts shooting out of the rows of monitors while the PC doesn't. You can hear the zapping sounds, but nothing to see.
I remember back in the day I bought a bootleg version of this game and it would never get past the start, I wonder if the loading time was so bad that I thought it was faulty.
Awesome! I’ve completely missed this game when it came out, but watching this comparison was fun nonetheless. Would love the follow up.
Constructive feedback: I don't like how you edited this video. Don't change the position of the viewports of the games. I was confused many many many times which is which because you kept shuffling it around.
Oh gawd, flash backs of those loading times are already flooding back and I've just started watching....
I can remember going to get this game from Electronics Boutique in the UK i was hyped up to see the gore system as the demo released earlier was censored. I later bought the game on the Dreamcast purely out of curiosity and the loading times were horrendous.
I approve of the Simon and Garfunkel reference. They may be my all-time favorite musicians.
That was one of the problems with some dreamcast ports like the canceled half life port it was a loading each 5 minutes and the frame rate was all over the place.
Alex's laugh is the greatest laugh. This video is a lot of fun :)
please do a OG Xbox vs. PC Episode! I love the first Xbox!
Gotta love it how RUclips's algorithm again decided to put the most non-descriptive part of the video as the video preview! This time it's from 3:21 onwards from a previous game by the developers of Soldier of Fortune (the same happened with John's Gran Turismo video where the algorithm picked up a part of the clips from the Macross game/anime, which was shown in the video).
Unless..? It's all hand-picked by Digital Foundry, but they wouldn't, wouldn't they..?!
I'd love to see a follow-up. I really enjoy these side-by-side comparisons of games from a time when the disparity between platforms was more than just negligible. Soldier of Fortune 2 would be cool. Doom 3 would be pretty great. Oni could be pretty interesting too, but I concede that I may be the only person who would get excited over more Oni coverage on DF
I love these kinds of videos. Your splinter cell and matrix ones were great.
Rich Evans meme in a Digital Foundry video, never expected that!
Alex gleefully going "HA! Look at your moon!" 🤣
These are cool and all, but when do we get a video on the Ukrainian classic - STALKER? More popular than most of these retro games, still retro too, better rated, with more mods, and with technology (ballistics, A-Life simulation, 100% dynamic lighting) that is rare even in modern games?
Yess
I'd love to see it, maybe even on era-appropriate hardware. STALKER is really fascinating and ambitious in some ways
Stalker is retro now? Damn I'm old.
@@csl110 it's 15 years old, yeah
Stalker is great but this IS a popular game and Sof 2 really took of in multiplayer.
It was infamous for it's gore.
You can't compare this to Stalker, it's too different and Sof is older, a mostly straight up shooter, it's not open world and it's the Quake 2 engine. But it was Q2 engine pushed to the max.
Young me remembers the dismemberment aspect, really stood out as chunky...no idea what PC I ran, was quite some time ago.. maybe a K6 AMD450Mhz and same GF2 MX.
I had this for my Dreamcast and PC back in the day, but I always preferred the Dreamcast version. Playing it on my 32inch CRT with the mouse and keyboard was glorious. My PC was high spec back then tbf, but my monitor was only something like a 20inch if that... Definitely best played on DC with the mouse and keyboard over the controller though...
I'm pretty sure you can peek around corners on the DC version. *Hold L and press B or X to Lean left or right.
Bought this game when it came out. Impressive, but I couldn't appreciate it at the time because my computer was too slow. The same computer that could play Q3 at 60fps could barely get 30fps on a Quake II engine game!
7:09
lol seeing a video of this game where the player used a knife in a fight and the enemy model had *knife wound textures appear on it,* is the reason I bought it in the first place 😂
One of my favourite games ever. That snow level was epic.
Yess, please do a follow-up covering Soldier of Fortune 2 on Xbox vs PC!
The loading times got extremely long in SoF 2 on PC, it was so frustrating and the game itself was a nightmare to run. Hopefully once MS acquires A/B they'll put Raven Software to good use.
One simple why that won't happen, the Soldier Of Fortune IP doesn't actually belong to Acti Bliz since they liscenced it from the magazine which I think is still running. MS would have to go through the process of reacquiring the gaming rights to the IP and they might be made to put the games on other sustems like Sony has to with MLB The Show.
You're right about the soldier Fortune Magazine it ran from 1975 to 2016 where it stopped publication Microsoft probably could just pay them a little bit of money and get the license
@@cruelwraith2games926 Thing with 3rd parties is that they'll make certain demands such as platform availability in exchange for said license, hence why I don't think any possible remasters would end up being Xbox/PC only.
An era where just having a certain gun was enough to buy it I loved this series
I remember playing this at a PC store demo right after it came out and thinking it was awesome, particularly the dismemberment. The Dreamcast version looks about as good as you would expect given the hardware and time it released, apart from the loading screens.
the pixelated gore just made alex's dismemberment of that dispatched criminal all the more disturbing, felt like i was playing kane and lynch 2 all over again
My DC is one of my retro consoles that stays in my living room hooked up to a VGA CRT. I have my gaming PC too. This is a game I'd happily play on the latter lol.
Is your gaming PC also hooked up to your VGA CRT?
Love your work....Please stop flipping the positions of the 2 screens....maybe expand in place if you want to emphasize something
Was the dreamcast version running on the hi-res setting ?, it looks too sharp X) maybe it would have fared better at a lower resolution with also better asset placement on the disc. As it is it feels like it's relying on the random access speeds of a hard drive like if it was installed on a pc.
I thought this game was awesome when I was younger because it was the first game I remember that had that kind of dismemberment. Half life would blow people into chunks, but it wasn't specific parts of the body. Speaking of half life, watching this Dreamcast version reminds me of when I first played Half-Life on my super weak pc. Every time a new map had a load it would take a couple minutes.
Remember this well. On my DIY PC at the time...
1:54 Woah that dude got blasted on hard 😳
In further levels in DC version there is fog that doesn't allow you to see the enemies, but you can see their masks. The worst part is that they see you no matter how far you are, once you enter that area. The result, floating mask shooting you at 2 miles.
I distinctly remember the game taking absolutely forever to load on PC back in the day as well.
I played through the DC version of SoF with a mouse. Thank god it supported the system’s mouse peripheral because fuck trying to play any FPS with that controler! Lol
It's interesting that on the DC the textures are compressed but it looks like its mipmapping is biased so that farther surfaces are displayed with a slight aliasing to make them look a bit more higher resolution. It definitely looks blurrier, the textures themselves, on farther surfaces.
God I miss the days when I'd go round my mates house to download maps for this game because he was the first in our village with broadband.