maximus wrote on 2020-10-30, 02:00:
The Xbox port of Doom 3 is also pretty impressive. Too bad some levels had to be cut down to fit in 64 MB of RAM, but the game still looks good and runs smooth. The engine has a render path tailored for the NV20 architecture; probably helps a lot.
But yeah, Half-Life 2 on the Xbox is superb. The whole game is there, and it actually looks better than on a GeForce3. Xbox renders water reflections, GeForce3 doesn't. At least that's what I've seen.
Doom 3 on the XBox also came with a co-op mode, which the PC lacked. Though modders (who are brilliant!) did produce a co-op mod for the PC version. The BFG edition of Doom 3 doesn't have a co-op mode, so if you play Doom 3 on the XBox 360 or PS3, then you can't play cop-op, even though you can on the earlier XBox.
Come to think of it, there are three XBox first person shooters that I prefer to their PC versions:
The XBox game Serious Sam is a meld of the PC's Serious Sam: First Encounter, and Serious Sam: Second Encounter, and I actually prefer it to the PC originals, as (a) you can use the chainsaw through the full XBox game (whereas on the PC, the chainsaw is only available on the Second Encounter), and (b) the XBox game uses a score and lives system (with you awarded extra lives as your score increases), which sounds like a terrible idea for a first person shooter, but it actually works really well. Note that Serious Sam: Second Encounter is NOT Serious Sam 2, that's a whole different game, which was released on both the PC and the original XBox.
And Serious Sam (on the PC, of course) does have a modding scene, so likely someone has made a mod to add the above two features to the PC version. And yet again, the XBox 360 doesn't have the advantages of the version for the original XBox, as the 360 version (which is part of the Serious Sam Collection) instead contains the PC games Serious Sam: First Encounter, and Serious Sam: Second Encounter.
The XBox (and Gamecube, and PS2) version of James Bond: Nightfire, is also better than the PC version, since for some reason the PC version misses out all of the vehicle based levels, and also has more irritating stealth mechanics than the (already irritating) stealth mechanics of the console versions of the game. Though if you never play any version of the game then you're not missing much. It's an OK game, but not great.
And the XBox port/remix/whatever of Far Cry, called Far Cry: Instincts is also better than the PC version, if you ask me, though I'd imagine many people would disagree with me there. Far Cry: Instincts largely does away with the open world(ish) nature of the PC game, no doubt mainly to compensate for the XBox's smaller memory pool, so that instead the game is much more linear, though it does pretty well at hiding that and seeming like you could, if you choose, go off in a random direction. Far Cry: Instincts starts off like the PC game, but half-way through deviates enough to introduce new player mechanics, and doesn't have the bullet sponge attack creatures (or the tedium) of the PC game.
I can't find any screenshots to illustrate the new features of the XBox version, but the game does look great by XBox standards:
On the other hand, Thief 3: Deadly Shadows has a serious bug that was never fixed on the XBox, though the PC version was fixed in a patch (though I can't remember if the patch was official or fan-made; the Thief games have a very lively and intelligent community on the PC, and their mods and fixes are often high quality). The bug forces you to play most of the game in the normal difficulty mode, as anytime you load, either when you load a save-game, or when you pass an in-game loading point, then the game resets the skill level to normal (if you'd set it to any other level when you started the game). As a result, even if you choose a different difficulty level, you still have to play the XBox game in normal difficulty after the game loads something. As a result, you always have to play against enemies who have tunnel version, the attention span of a puppy, who are hard of hearing, etc, instead of those enemies being sharp and alert. The XBox had XBox Live!, which allowed for downloadable patches, plus the official XBox magazine could put patches on their cover-disc, so a patch for the game was possible and practical (and patches did exist for XBox games, Unreal Championship had a post-release patch with a shopping list of bug-fixes). But no, the XBox version will forever have this flaw, unfortunately.
I can't find a screenshot to illustrate the Thief 3 bug, but here's a screen of some of the game's barrels. They're almost as intelligent as the NPCs you'll be up against in the XBox version of the game...