| DirtyP2002 said: IF the Gamecube was the most powerful system, which is nonsense, why were the following games not released on it or the PS2:
And please tell me why SC CT looked so bad on GCN compared to Xbox |
I'll answer your question. All Gamecube ports of Splinter Cell were ports of the PS2 version done by Ubisoft Shanghai. That's true of most 3rd party games for Gamecube. Developers would downport the game to PS2 then use middleware to quickly port the PS2 version to GC. In some cases the GC version would be worse than the PS2 version. While the PS2 and Xbox versions of the game were optimized for their respective platforms, the GC version was not.
In the rare cases that a game was developed for the GC first, the game either ran worse on Xbox and poorly on PS2. In some cases the ports were cancelled ala RS2 and RS3. Sonic Heroes was developed on the Gamecube and ported to Xbox and PS2. The GC version looked the best and ran at a constant 60fps. The Xbox version's frame rate flunctuated between 30 to 60fps and had some slow down. The PS2 version couldn't keep a constant 30fps, looked worse, and had terrible pop in. RE4 on PS2 had half the polygon count of the GC version, worse texture quality, dumbed down AI, and all of the real time lighting effects were removed.
You are confusing hardware capability with software effort. The PS2 was the dominant platform and as such developers put their best foot forward on the systems software. There are multiple instances of the PS2 version of a multiplatform game being the best despite having the weakest hardware. Microsoft's use of money hats, Splinter Cell is an example of this, resulted games being optimized for the platform despite it's meager market share. The Gamecube had a similarly meager market share as the Xbox but Nintendo didn't dole out the financial incentives that MS did. Most Nintendo's deals had third parties developing existing Nintendo IPs. F-Zero GX being developed by AM2 for example. Tales of Symphonia and the Capcom "5" were the only real "exclusives" Nintendo secured. ToS was later ported to PS2. The Capcom "5" turned out to be the Capcom 3 and two of the three were ported to PS2. Out of the three only RE4 was a big budget title that pushed the hardware.
The lack of 3rd party effort on GC ultimately hampered the Wii as well. Developers were simply ignorant of the platforms capability. I remember when Lucasarts said the WIi couldn't perform bump mapping and shader effects. The irony was that their launch game for Gamecube, Rogue Squadron 2, made use of both.
