Digital foundry - Quake 2 on Xbox 360.

[Mindf!3ldzX]

With no effort given,Mario Kart?
Sonic the Hedgehog ? I grew up playing split screen / same screen games....

[ninenullseven]

Actually what really makes it stand out - it is the only faithful split screen quake 2 port. Without any compromises - it offers split screen DM and Coop up to 4 players on single console, and even allows split screen + online/lan combo. All at solid 60fps. That's a achievement.
Everything else was done better million times on PC. I don't care much about consoles, because my platform of choice is PC due to it's superiority.
I don't understand all this 'shaders over low-poly stuff' that's going on with source ports, but I appreciate proper social interaction like split screen deathmatch with friends. That's social and that's a lot more fun than playing with people I don't care over the internet. Quake 2 and Perfect Dark are great. Too bad you can't buy Quake 2 for xbox360 anywhere these days, the thing is hard to find (to the point it's cheaper and easier to get used modded xbox 360 just for the Quake 2 - that's what I did).
What's bothering me even more - people keep talking about their childhood memories of split screen deathmatch, and yet I haven't seen a single source port (apart from FTE and Spearmint) that offers it. Hell, nowadays PC is as simple as console - hook up controllers and your 40+ inch TV and you are all set, we can make dreams come true. How could I be the only one who just want to kickback and play some deathmatch with friends? LAN parties is (was) awesome, but as grownup guy it's pretty hard to do - LAN party should be planned beforehand (wires, tables etc), while playing halo in split screen on xbox 360 is like 'oh, we are drunk, let's shoot each other, kkay?'. I'm not elitist (I don't have time for BS these days), and I consider FTEQW as the best engine just for it's support of split screen (pretty broken though). Spearmint Q3A is a blessing, and it's controllers/split screen support is rock-solid. Too bad my favorite quake was first one...

[golden_boy]

Gives it a Quake 3 kind of look, with the intense colours. I never really noticed that the machinegun had an orange stripe.

[Spike]

There is also different texture filtering or something to make the xbox version look more pixely.

that'll be the 'full 16x anisotropic filtering' that gives greater texture resolution when viewed at an angle.

NPOT helps too, although I had thought most q2 textures adhered to this (I admit I never checked for any that didn't).

regarding colours, kinda looks like they just doubled the intensity in an overbright kind of way.

[golden_boy]

I dicked around with that image in GIMP for a bit and here's what I came up with:



I'm sure it is the same texture. It might have been downscaled in the original Q2, but the main difference is that there's some kind of postprocess colour/brightness/contrast type filter in the xbox version.

There is also different texture filtering or something to make the xbox version look more pixely.

Edit: maybe they actually photoshopped the Q2 textures to have some more contrast and more intensive colour. I'm thinking the blue wall in the xbox shot looks quite intense. Either that or some sort of finely tweaked colour filter or set of filters.

[Adam]

Texture comparison:


They mention something about them having access to the original artwork but I don't think that they would have gone to that much trouble. The difference looks like its caused by the rendering method. I could be wrong tho'

I will have to google "Q2 high-res texture pack" and see whats out there.

[golden_boy]

Indeed, interesting.

I guess Quake 2 is an order of magnitude simpler than Quake 4 and modern shooters, so 60fps with 16x AF isn't that surprising. I wonder which source ports do the texture thing though.

It really still looks pretty dated unfortunately.