Games that felt impossible for their console

[curl-6]

HoloDust said:

curl-6 said:

Some of mine:

Solaris, Atari 2600

Pseudo-3D flight combat and a large explorable map would be ambitious by SNES standards; doing it on a freaking 2600 is madness, yet somehow, incredibly, it works.

Doom, SNES

Playing a PC showpiece on an ageing 16-bit console was downright surreal.

Resident Evil 2, N64

The original game took up two CDs; that they got it to fit on a 64MB cart while retaining the pre-rendered cutscenes, something hardly ever seen on the system due to storage limits, feels like a miracle.

Doom 3, Xbox

Like it's predecessor, another case of a game that pushed PCs hard somehow making the transition to much weaker console hardware.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Wii

The original game was a late gen AAA PS3/360 game, something that had no business working at all on the overclocked Gamecube hardware of the Wii, but the devs made it happen.

All great choices - I'd argue except for Doom 3.

Doom 3 came just few months after Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay - and while everyone and their grandma was looking forward to it, it didn't, neither visually or gameplay wise, lived up to hype, with Riddick being better in both. And that one is also on OG XBOX.

I'd say game that was really bringing OG XBOX to its knees was Morrowind.

I never heard much disappointment about Doom 3 graphically, more that its gameplay diverging so much from the older games was controversial. Riddick was definitely an impressive showpiece in its own right; I believe it was one of the earliest games to utilize dynamic resolution scaling, which was how they gained the headroom to it off on Xbox.