The video includes side-by-side comparison between the original upscaled 480p and 720p. Around 7:00 you hear about what it takes to get 720p and maintain around 30fps gameplay. Not only a great article, but also a great video to summarize the changes needed get the higher resolution.
> I often get comments saying “[720x480]’s not not a 16:9 resolution” or “that’s not real 480p”, but “480p” encapsulates a range of resolutions and aspect ratios and 720×480 is the resolution the Xbox considers to be 480p (so take it up with Microsoft, not me…).
“The February 1980 note further suggested that the number of samples per active line period should be greater than 715.5 to accommodate all of the European standards active line periods. While the number of pixels per active line equal to 720 samples per line was not suggested until the next note, (720 is the number found in Rec. 601 and SMPTE 125), 720 is the first value that “works”. 716 is the first number greater than 715.5 that is divisible by 4 (716 = 4 x 179), but does not lend itself to standards conversion between 525-line component and composite colour systems or provide sufficiently small pixel groupings to facilitate special effects. Arguments in support of 720 were provided in additional notes prior to IBC in September 1980.
[…]
As noted above, Rec. 601 provided 720 samples per active line for the luminance channel and 360 samples for each of the colour-difference signals.
When the ITU defined HDTV, they stipulated: ‘the horizontal resolution for HDTV as being twice that of conventional television systems’ described in Rec. 601 and a picture aspect ratio of 16:9. A 16:9 picture ratio requires one-third more pixels than a 4:3 picture ratio. Starting with 720, doubling the resolution to 1440 and adjusting the count for a 16:9 aspect ratio leads to the 1920 sample per active line defined as the basis for HDTV [9].
Accommodating the Hollywood and computer communities’ request for ‘square-pixels’, meant that the number of lines should be 1920 x (9/16) = 1080.
Progressive scan systems at 1280 pixels per line and 720 lines per frame are also a member of the ‘720-pixel’ family. 720 pixels x 4/3 (resolution improvement) x 4/3 (16:9 aspect ratio adjustment) = 1280. Accommodating the Hollywood and computer communities’ request for ‘square-pixels’, meant that the number of lines should be 1280 x (9/16) = 720.
Therefore, most digital television systems, including digital video tape systems and DVD recordings are derived from the 4:2:2 basic standard format. The 720 pixel-per-active-line structure became the basis of a family of structures (the 720-pixel family) that was adopted for MPEG-based systems including both conventional television and HDTV systems.”
It's true that 4:3 is also anamorphic on DVD since the 720×480 MPEG transport is a 3:2 resolution. I think it's a pretty elegant compromise halfway between 4:3 and 16:9 so both can look equally decent. A lot of DVD video has a program area of 704×480, and most DVD rippers don't differentiate so you wind up with 8px pillarbars and very slightly wrong dimensions: https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/269644-DV-to-704x480-or-...
DVD-sourced media can look great on modern displays if you…
– Encode at 720×540 slash 960×540 to avoid throwing away that extra horizontal detail, as most encoders do by crunching 4:3 video down to 640 (with pillarbars lol) × 480. Also to take advantage of integer-scaling to 1080/2160/etc which is especially beneficial on cheap TVs with crappy scalers.
— Deinterlace to double-FPS (60000/1001 fields-per-second for color NTSC) to avoid throwing away the actual benefit of interlacing in that sweet sweet motion detail. Most rippers crunch it down to 30FPS like Handbrake leads people to do.
— Convert the video to HD-standard color primitives, again to avoid cheap displays' poor treatment of SD colorspace. Chroma-subsampled video is already a little washed out by design and this can compound to make it look even worse.
Other than "hacker spirit" (which is completely legitimate), is there a reason you'd want to play Halo 2 this way—going through the effort of modding your console to add memory and overclock the gpu—instead of playing the PC version?
I've played lots of Halo 2 as part of the Master Chief Collection on Steam. It's a lot better than the box-release version. I couldn't even play Halo 2 standalone on PC without forcing vsync on via the Nvidia Control Panel, which is an option the game does not give you, or it misinterprets and mistimes all of its control inputs and you can't aim worth a damn.
MCC was allegedly an entirely fresh port by 343 without using either of the previously deficient PC ports. It is said the port/rewrite was a big part of 343 getting familiar enough with the engine(s), documenting what Bungie hadn't entirely documented and 343 hadn't pulled in as headcount in the messy divorce, and making the engine their own in the path to building Halo 5. In my experience that seems to track in that a lot of the "feel" changes from the original Xbox versions seem to me to align with how Halo 5 feels to me.
Whenever an old device is supposed to be unsuitable for doing something it usually feels great to use it for just that, proving it's well capable or even better.
This probably is a psychological disorder (usually mild and fun to have though) - an opposite counterpart of obsession with being among the first to buy the newest model of the most popular gadget. Both give a sense of superiority :-)
This is subjective. I personally always loved upgrading the hell out of old PC (install the maximum possible memory and CPU after patching the BIOS and soldering the socket, add a SATA card to a computer which only had IDE etc).
Its just hacker spirit. You can play halo 2 right now in online lobbies or the campaign with either the original graphics or remastered hd graphics from 343.
Modern 4K games have almost 150x the pixels per frame of Space Invaders.
And the framerate has increased by... erm, no, decreased by 50%, in many cases.
Yet the push for 8K resolution, seems to be be getting started, with PS5 Pro rumors. The imbalance between the push for spatial resolution and 'temporal resolution' is quite ridiculous. But likely mostly about selling TVs.
FTA: "The tag data system is designed to be as flexible and performant as possible, and, in my opinion the inner workings are really a feat of engineering. I could write an entire blog post about the inner workings of the tag data system and why I think it makes the Blam engine one of the most flexible engines ever made, but that isn’t relevant to this post."
I would love to read this article if it ever gets written.
me too I was into halo 2 modding when I was young and knew very little programming at all.
the concepts there blew my mind, almost, I was too green to follow how it worked even to start. it was so dynamic I fundamentally didn't understand how something could be like that.
how could a player position be within the same context as a weapon that had configurations and then effects themselves were in that same list.
a lot of the stuff I'm interested in very much circles around these same concepts.
I do really wish the era of Xbox & Halo 2 modding returned in modern times. I owe that point in time to my career choice and still believe Halo 2 was the most innovative online game of all time.
Just buying a simple tool to load game saves and you could have a soft-modded Xbox in minutes. Now consoles blow e-fuses and prevent downgrades on top of tons of other security enhancements.
Was a great read and trip back in time. Pair this with projects like Insignia launching Halo 2 support and its a great time for classic Halo 2.
For better or worse, in a lot of ways, I think the last decade of developers have done a lot to kick the ladder out from underneath them.
One of the reasons I'm a software engineer today is because I could easily examine webpages to see how they work, tinker with the memory of programs, open up hardware to see what's inside (relatively low risk of destroying the device), and so forth. And yeah, back in the day of Halo PC, modding the levels taught me a lot about what goes into the game. Knowing what a "BSP" is can be a pretty useless piece of trivia, but it made me feel smart and capable of understanding more.
It's still possible to get into tech and learn things today, but I have a hard time seeing how this can be accomplished by genuine tinkering. Software is way harder to crack/debug today; certainly not impossible, but the barrier of entry is much higher. Plus there's a ton of moving parts that go into getting software to work securely on not just mobile but modern desktops, adding another layer of hassle. You can still examine what a webpage is doing, but even that has changed significantly; so many websites today are div soup (yes, worse than in the early 2000s) to support JavaScript monstrocities that are also minified and obfuscated. When it comes to games, you can almost forget it in some cases because they're so heavily dependent on content streaming from servers. As far as hardware goes, you've either got to face various security hoops that can brick devices, use a heat gun to unglue the bezels on certain things, and face a lot more risk in permanent damage.
All of these changes were made for a reason, but we've also taken the fun out of everything. Even game modding really wasn't what it used to be in spite of some of the tools available today technically being better than those in the past.
I agree with you in general, but I think it has to be said that we also live in the era of things like the source for Unreal Engine 5 being completely and wholly available, along with a zillion tutorials and extremely well documented source. This is unlike anything we had, and better in basically every single way imaginable. In the hardware world there's Pi's, dirt cheap PCBs that you can have delivered in < 24 hours, and so on endlessly. It's like instead of breaking into a trailer, we've all been granted carte blanche access to a mansion.
But maybe there was something about how counter-culture and esoteric stuff was itself attractive precisely because of that. There was also a lot more reward for a lot less work, largely because so few people were doing it. Now if somebody wants to go learn Unreal then it's just a pretty mundane and common thing, and you'll also be largely incompetent unless you're willing to dedicate years to it. By contrast when I was a kid changing the text in a shareware installer was enough to wow my friends with my leet skills, and that's something that took about 5 minutes to do, and not that much longer to learn. Oh and then creating secret directories by naming them alt+255, and so on. Dumb stuff, but it soon enough led me to much more than parlor tricks.
> But maybe there was something about how counter-culture and esoteric stuff was itself attractive precisely because of that.
There's definitely that element, but I also think something missed by compartmentalizing hardware "tinkering" to devices designed specifically for the task. Nothing about a Raspberry Pi, for instance, is mysterious. If a person is going to buy one, they already have a significant level of interest and base knowledge. A kid's not gonna have one lying around and get curious about it unless their parent is a geek who owns those things, and even then said kid may have no good reason to even bother with one. Practically nobody today is opening up their laptop or their phone to mod it or even just see what's inside. I'm not saying the modern situation is bad, but a significant amount of it is artificial in a way that wasn't when the devices one would play with were the devices actually being used, and it's not clear to me whether what we have now is actually better in regard to inspiring future generations. Engaging with one's everyday hardware is an exercise in the power process that fewer and fewer generations are experiencing.
The big difference is that people used to mod existing games. That allowed modders to leverage the game's engine, gameplay design, art, and even its existing playerbase.
Having a full-featured open-source game engine is great, but starting with that means starting at square one.
By obsessively enforcing copyright and "anti-cheat", we effectively bury the game-making process 6 feet underground. Every game is declared dead at the very moment of its release. Every decision its creators made up to then is set in stone. The game studio itself must exist in isolation, ignorant of the very world it is creating its games for.
It's no wonder that AAA studios are so out of touch with the people who play their games. Gamers are explicitly excluded from the creative process.
That's their loss. Meanwhile Minecraft is the most sold game ever, and Roblox is probably not far behind. (That one comes with its own issues, but hopefully children are sick of those by the time they become teens and are ready to move on to something more open ?)
One consideration is maybe stuff that's "hackable", i.e. immediately accessible, can be incrementally and reversibly modified, is more accessible to "play" while stuff that's extremely capable but has a high activation cost (setting up the environment, learning all the stuff to make something basic etc.) is more accessible only to "focused / goal oriented study" and this has all kinds of implications on who does it, who succeeds, under which circumstances etc.
e.g. my friend tells me you can open game.exe in notepad + change this value to walk on lava, then I fiddle with it and tl;dr make a map of my school, then get frustrated with limitations and start learning a game engine with some practical background on what these concepts are etc.
vs. I decide want to make a game because that's cool, I buy a book on game programming, it depends on these libraries, I install them, I install a compiler, the libraries don't work with the compiler/each other, ......... and give up because the grit in my life is reserved for stuff other than video games.
... like really, what is the overlap of people that are really mind blowingly creative as artists, and the people that are super type A driven to go through all this frustration up front? less friction, more better art
I agree with your concern, but I'm quite happy to see what's going on in the retro emulation & decompilation/reverse-engineering scenes[1]. A lot of that is being done and is driven by "the kids". It's an appealing, easy, and low-risk entry point for newer developers who want to dive into low level stuff, and it even has a bit of a "fuck the man" bent to it, which is fantastic. You're right that the environment is different from what we grew up with, it was always going to be. But I think the kids will find their own way.
[1] If you haven't been tuned in, check this out, it's the goddamn Super Mario 64 source code in C, reverse-engineered from the game ROM: https://github.com/n64decomp/sm64/blob/master/src/game/hud.c Similar projects exist for a ton of other classic games. It's jaw dropping what they're doing out there.
Yeah, I've heard of that decompilation, and have been more closely following the complete decompilation and PC port of Perfect Dark, which is pretty amazing.
To be fair you have to realize how much more dependent the global economy is on software nowadays. Halo was a Bungie product, and when Bungie left as Microsoft took it over yeah, the product had loftier business goals that needed to be protected. Smaller devs can't really reach critical market saturation anymore like they used to.
You can criticize where things has gone with MTX but I don't think that was a choice by the game developers. I also think it's a generational thing as you and I are now too old to spend all day fucking around with some game we played a ton. I'm sure the kids of today are tinkering with minecraft/fortnite/whatever replaced those games.
Also to me it's a bit of wanting to try and put the tooth paste back in the tube. When we were teenagers modding Halo we maybe didn't fully understand the impacts it had on the game's community and the overall experience. As an adult I just see how games like Call of Duty appear to be constantly losing the fight against hackers, and using over engineered matchmaking algos with SSBM to try and maximize the typical user's gameplay experience. But I can't regain my naivety and be one of the many younger adults who probably don't even really notice these issues, the way I didn't when I played Halo 3 on Xbox Live which had boosting, standby, and stealth servers.
I started coding with an Action Replay cartridge. Press a button and you get dumped into a new context where can fully inspect the machine and running program, and can modify any of it.
That's easier it was later on Windows (which for 15 years was how 99% of people used computers) and anything after.
CheatEngine exists on modern systems and can still do a lot of this, though modern game engines are less friendly to the simple "scan for the health variable and set it to 1000" workflow of yesteryear. However, newer versions of cheat engine include C#/monogame decompilers that let you screw around with some unity games
I think you're making the classic mistake of thinking that because your on-ramp isn't available anymore there are no on-ramps anymore.
I read an extremely similar comment two decades or so ago about a dev saying that no-one would learn computers anymore because everyone now used GUIs instead of CLIs...
Yes modding might be harder nowadays, but you have things like Scratch and Hedy, or the freely available Unreal/Unity dev tools with asset stores.
I agree with you, but would suggest that the thing to focus on is the next layer of abstraction. The thing that barely works. Our generation screwed around with the PSX and Xbox, the Wild West era of the internet, etc. Now the most obvious thing I can think of that is the same level of not done is AI. Yeah there’s a higher barrier to entry, but look at that guy the other day that posted about improving performance by dynamically pruning a model. Or half the crazy shit on huggingface. Generative video and image AI seems to have a lower entry barrier too.
Again I’m not saying you’re wrong. It just seems like the thing that’s always the most prime for screwing around with is the thing at the bleeding edge. There’s still some fun to have.
I would look elsewhere. SBCs like Pi Zero costing peanuts, myriads of few dollar sensors enabling all kinds of easy to hop projects, virtualisation, cheap (if non gaming) x86 hardware, much better OSS landscape, much more learning resources, GPT to help with questions... it can be easily seen as paradise as well.
> It's still possible to get into tech and learn things today, but I have a hard time seeing how this can be accomplished by genuine tinkering.
I agree and have the same feeling we've lost something as so much computer-centric tech has become relatively inaccessible in the name of 'security' (although much seems like efforts 'secure' business models or IP). As you observed, the tech has also evolved in ways which make it relatively undiscoverable through casual tinkering. Although perhaps we suffer from a generational perspective bias, I think there really was a 'golden era' of computer tech hobbyist accessibility and discoverability.
When Did the 'Golden Era' Begin?
I'd peg it as starting around the late Usenet era. Interestingly, there was definitely a time period in consumer computer tech when it was too early. I know because I started "too early" and missed being a teenager in the golden era because I got my first computer as a teenager in 1981. It was a Radio Shack Color Computer with 4K of memory, a 0.9 Mhz 8-bit 6809 processor and storage via an external cassette tape player. Fortunately, the ROM BASIC on that model was perhaps the most evolved 8-bit ROM BASIC Microsoft ever made (vs the early Commodore & Atari flavors) and Radio Shack did a fantastic job on the large, well-illustrated color manuals.
Unfortunately, 1981 was too early because no one in my family's extended social network had ever touched a computer. So, beyond the BASIC manual in the box, I was on my own with my new computer. While there were a few big magazines like BYTE on news stands, very little in them applied to my computer. I eventually discovered a couple of zine-style publications at a distant big news stand. Although they were essentially overgrown stapled newsletters printed in B&W, they became my lifeline because they had articles written by hobbyists more advanced than I, as well as mail-order ads for cassette tape-based software. This was the key that unlocked the mysterious realm of assembly language for me when I ordered a $12 homebrew monitor program written by some random guy who took out a classified ad. The local library didn't have any books relevant to my new microcomputer, local colleges only offered computer courses under the math dept and those were focused on mainframes and COBOL (I think back then 'real' CompSci was limited to Ivy League and top tier tech unis). Even large bookstores had nothing useful to me I could order other than Osborne's 6809 CPU book which was really an architecture and instruction set reference manual mostly incomprehensible to an isolated teenage hobbyist starting out.
A few years later 300 baud modems became cheap enough for hobbyists to acquire but it took another year or so for BBSes to emerge which were targeted at my computer (most BBSes prior to that were run on CP/M hardware and focused on one platform (not mine)). So dialing BBSes focused on my platform involved long-distance charges which meant short calls. Another year later FidoNet connected larger BBSes and national-level info began to circulate and my local hobby scene stayed pretty much like this for a few years. New info centered around zines, local computer club meetings, mailed tapes & diskettes and short BBS calls. Info was available but it was scarce and you had to work at getting it.
That's why I think the true golden era truly took off in the late Usenet period. That's when anyone could subscribe to a ~$10/mo service providing 1200 baud access to Usenet feeds in their local area code. Before that, unless you were at a university studying CompSci or worked at a uni or large tech company, Usenet was a magical land you only heard about on BBSes or at user group meetings. When random home hobbyists got direct access to the firehose of high-quality, global Nerdverse content that was the Usenet CompSci feeds it felt like the Enlightenment dawning. From there the transition to the early web was pretty natural since a lot of early tech-centric websites were much like a BBS ring. We didn't need search because they mostly linked to each other and people were running them as a hobby so few had ads other than maybe a sponsorship from an ISP or modem company (usually just paid in free service or hardware). Fortunately, the tech hobbyist web wasn't impacted much by the 2001 dot com crash since it was never about revenue. Up until the slow decline gradually started in the mid-2000s, it was pretty great - flashing BLINK tags and all. Honestly, we didn't even realize how good we had it, or imagine that it might someday end.
When Did the 'Golden Era' End?
Having lived through the pre-Golden Era, the early days and through the end, I think the seeds of the Golden Era's slow decline were planted when the modern web business began to emerge from the ashes of the dot com crash. Although things were still pretty hobbyist-discoverable in desktop OSes and the web through 2010-ish, troubling signs were on the horizon. For those paying attention, the rapid dominance of iOS in the late 2000s was ominous. Apple's business model required a walled garden app store and their concept of users was not as active explorers but as purely passive eyeballs for media and app-snacking. Even though a few app developers did well in the early app store, the fundamental model relegated them to the role of sharecroppers working Apple's farm with Apple's tools and selling only to Apple's store (with no access to their app's end-users).
In all, entry-level, home-based tech hobbyists got almost 20 really amazing years in the 'Golden Era' from roughly the late 80s to the late 2000s. It would be wonderful if in the distant future that period is known as "The First Golden Era" but right now it's hard to be optimistic. While there is still an enormous amount of hobbyist info available online and more emerging, it's in a context of equally increasing locked down areas and ever decreasing discoverability (though open source and Github-like sites are notable exceptions).
Maybe this is why retro computing and retro gaming are booming now with new people who never experienced it the first time. It's a place where that unique Golden Era ethos, vibe and community still exists. Last year I went to a local user group meeting for Amiga computers, which is what I had mid-80s to early 90s. I met a bunch of enthusiastic Amiga users who hadn't been born when I bought my first Amiga. It was strange to feel both "old" and "OG Cool" at the same moment but also heartening to feel that same open community vibe still beating. :-)
I think adding your own touch to something you're more intimately familiar with helps ease people into it. Touching an asset file to modify a texture and instantly see the results in your favorite game is a lot more approachable (and appreciate-able) for someone starting out, I think.
>Just buying a simple tool to load game saves and you could have a soft-modded Xbox in minutes
Because that era Xbox was just a PC built form COTS hardware instead of custom HW. You can still tinker just as well today with a PC, or a PC based console like the Steam Deck, why bother fighting with a proprietary console designed to be locked down? What would you gain? Access to a custom X86 hardware that you can buy for cheap on the market anyway?
It is a stretch to call it just a PC built from COTS hardware. The NV2A GPU was a modified version on the NV20 and included the Northbridge. The MCPX Southbridge was custom. The DVD was customized for anti-piracy. The CPU is a (slightly) customized PIII. If it was all COTS, the XBox XEmu emulator would be further along than it is now.
Didn’t the SouthBridge turn up in some Nvidia ATX boards ? I recall positively salivating on realising that one particular Nvidia motherboard gave us a hardware encoded Dolby digital signal, just like the Xbox..
What novelty did Halo 2 introduce? At a high level, it is just another shooter preceded by all sorts of experiments: Quake, Counterstrike, Team Fortress, Unreal Tournament, etc.
Sure, it had tons of polish and was on consoles, but I never thought of it as genre defining.
I'm a hardcore Quake/Unreal apologist, but you gotta hand something to Halo and Halo 2. Gorgeous shader-based graphics for the time, vehicles, absurd arsenals, wide-open maps, and 16 player(!!!) LAN play. It's a game that would have sold like gangbusters on PC, and was only that much more successful for being well-supported on console too.
One might even argue that the success of Halo is what forced arena shooters like Counter Strike and Team Fortress to evolve or die. There was more at stake after it released, and outside the competitive circles there wasn't much demand for the FPS equivalent of Wheaties.
I have had tons of fun with Halo, but I am fixated on this “innovative” classification. It feels more like right place right time. Had Golden Eye been LAN play, would it have been termed as most innovative?
Edit: I should also give a shout out to Tribes for hitting a lot of those same notes
Halo 2 was basically synonymous with Xbox Live and everything that came with it when it launched (for better or worse). For example popularizing voice chat (including proximity!), rapid matchmaking, persistent parties between matches and gamemodes and player ranks and levels. They talk it about it a bit in the second half of this video.
Halo 2's online multiplayer introduced (or popularized?) party-based matchmaking. So instead of having to coordinate all your buddies joining the same pre-existing server, you'd join up as a party and then drop into a matchmaking queue, which would set up a game against opponents, optionally taking a skill-based ranking into account. They even did a bunch of marketing around this, since it was a new concept at the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGSuPZVgxLg
Hell, even Perfect Dark before that. I'm not one to defend Halo as the most-innovative, especially with the disproportionate amount of funding and manpower that went into it.
That being said, I think Halo deserves commendation for bringing a lot to the mainstream without compromise. The same people that casually enjoyed Halo were probably not also playing Goldeneye or Arma in their free time. And marketing be damned, Halo is fun even today. Hopping in a match of CE makes me lament how little team-based shooters have progressed in the past 20 years.
Something about halo just feels like such modern game, even halo ce. It’s so weird to think this game was contemporary with golden eye or quake. I think it was the polish with the animations, sound, and the physics. You pull out the pistol and do that satisfying pull back and click on it. You throw a grenade and hear it arm and see it thrown. You see your teammates throw grenades. You throw a grenade under a warthog, it flips it and knocks the occupants out. Even just scoping in and out of the sniper was satisfying with the sound it made.
To me it's crazy to think how far ahead of its time in terms of emergent behavior was Battlefield compared to other games, besides battle arenas. Probably it wasn't the first one either, but it's the one that comes to mind.
Picking up a tank or a jeep is one thing, but going for controlling an aircraft carrier or a submarine? Even if the controls were really primitive, it felt amazing!
The destructible environment aspect in some of those games was so cool. Can’t breach into the objective? Take down the building. No other game is or was like that. Even new battlefield games have walked back a lot of that behavior.
That last one was in other xbox live games before it, but Halo 2's Xbox Live brought online gaming to everyone's television room whereas before it was only on the computer.
Starcraft as the first eSport Game?
WoW as the first mass appeal Western MMORPG?
PUBG as the first Battle Royale and catalyst for Fortnite?
Minecraft for defining a demographic as much as a genre?
Dark Souls, Journey or Nier:Automata for redefining what actually constituted the role of 'online gamer' ?
The path from Quake or Perfect Dark -> Halo 2 was no great paradigm shift compared to the five above imo
> PUBG as the first Battle Royale and catalyst for Fortnite?
As I recall, H1Z1 actually came out before PUBG (though it has since faded into obscurity). A quick search on Wikipedia seems to back that timeline[0].
Some things Halo 2 had off the top of my head that aren't related to gameplay:
- Matchmaking. Almost all games at the time made you manually join lobbies, and now we take matchmaking for granted.
- Persistent party. You'd invite your friends to your party and then start the match-making process. During the whole process you could chat with your friends, and when the game ended, you were still a party and could talk to each other.
- Chat. Everyone had an Xbox Live headset which came with the service. So everyone was a participant of party chat, in-game team chat, and even "proximity chat" with the enemy. With Halo 2's chat systems + Xbox Live headset ubiquity, it was a highly social game.
- Split screen online. All of the above worked with playing with a friend in split screen. Your friend could come over and you could start Team Slayer matchmaking in split screen which was awesome—the game would have to find two more teammates—, and your guest could even chat. Something that could never be done on PC really.
These dominated the old "look for and join the server" model of past FPS and, frankly, I could never go back to that.
Gameplay wise, Halo 1 had most of the innovations that Halo 2 capitalized on but Halo 2 moved to the pure shield-is-your-health-bar system and removed health packs. After each battle you didn't have this scramble for a health pack just to get ready for the next confrontation, so the pacing was better than arena shooters imo.
Finally, Halo 2 didn't need to be the global first on each bullet point to be innovative. But it was probably the first game to have all these in one package. There was a lot of UX polish in setting this standard which you can tell because most games don't reach it even today.
A lot of people lament the death of community run dedicated servers, but I'm with you here. I don't miss trying to find a good deathmatch UT04 server that wasn't either super high ping, loaded to the hilt with obnoxious mods, or stuck running Rankin 24/7, only to give up after 40 minutes.
Oh wow, I had totally forgotten about server hunting.
I kept a list of "good" servers (based on ping, map rotation, who played there, mods, etc), but when they were empty finding somewhere else was a complete pain.
I miss the camaraderie on some of those dedicated servers, but I know I wouldn't be able to get into something like that these days.
I think a lot of that camaraderie and sense of community has moved to places like Discord and Reddit.
I have a group that regularly plays Overwatch together every Friday. Whenever more than 5 people show up, we play custom games. The workshop is surprisingly powerful, so it even gives us some of the experience we used to get with mods for games like Quake and Unreal.
When we have 5 or fewer people though, we really appreciate the game's matchmaking, even though it is far from perfect. It is a lot better at creating balanced matches than any server auto-balance feature ever was, while always keeping us on the same team.
Games like tf2 make parsing community servers pretty easy. You can do things like set ping cut offs, only look for nonempty and not full servers, look for certain numbers of people playing, certain maps or gametypes, and include or exclude keywords like certain modded gametypes.
At least then you could run your own server with whatever settings you wanted. Now instead you are left with unplayable games because the developer or publisher decided to shut down the servers.
Don't forget the post-game carnage report, which, while first present in Marathon, was refined and provided the best post-multiplayer-game stats of any game I've seen, even years later.
The telemetry bungie used to popular stats on their website is better than pretty much any modern game today outside of like CS2. I will caveat that by saying modern practices require you put things behind an api with a paywall of some sort, but they had freaking action heatmaps in 2004.
One thing that halo and some other games do is let you thumb through the last matchs stats while the next map loads. Valve games just throw you a map loading screen you’ve seen a thousand times.
I had interpreted the parent comment to be about gameplay, but those are all fantastic points about matchmaking and the related QoL improvements. It absolutely is taken for granted because I forgot Halo 2 was the first to do _all_ of that well, and in one complete package.
(not to be demeaning, but) Why? Halo 2 is playable, with first party support, via The Master Chief Collection today. They've even kept the button combinations (BXR, RRX, etc)
I think this ignores the fact that technology will continue to march on and that the tinkering at the cutting edge will always allow for fun stuff.
In the time period you talk about modding consoles and games was hacking on the cutting edge. Before that you had the phone phreakers and even before that you had people who were seriously into radios.
I think its already happening with the current crop of LLMs, generative AI, and just all the various ML models that have been developed that and another generation has already started doing the same. Right now they are attempting to keep that locked behind corporate doors but we already have Llama locally thanks to a leak. Thats to say nothing of the budding AR that is also coming.
The idea of putting goggles on my head with a computer that makes up the story, graphics and projects them onto the real world would have sounded crazy to me when I was knocking people out of AOL chat rooms with a concon.
It's worth pointing out that what you are fondly remembering from a consumer standpoint was an absolute nightmare from the publishers', and not just for pure greed, though that definitely plays a role.
Game consoles were (and still are to a some degree), by and large, toys. Toys that parents buy for their children with the expectation that they can be mostly left to their own devices with them. The ESRB/PEGI/etc. ratings system was put in place so that parents would be able to trust that they know what's in the toy without having to sit over the kids' shoulders every single minute they are playing. In a sense it's not unlike Mattel spending a lot of energy making sure their dolls and action figures don't pose any choking hazards.
Allowing modding breaks that system, and by extension the accompanying trust. This is a big deal for a toy manufacturer. It's also why Hot Coffee was such a mess despite the content not being normally accessible. Parents don't want to have to care about technicalities.
People like to think of this situation as a "think of the children"-type of hand-wringing, but it's actually more of a "think of the parents", who happen to be the ones with money.
Again, not discounting the greed and DRM aspects of this, and it definitely sucks pretty hard for adult users of the systems, but it's far from all there is to it.
I've never heard of a parent being concerned about console mods, of all things, and I (as a parent) don't really buy this angle. The original Xbox's weak parental controls could be bypassed by pressing X Y Left Trigger X, a tidbit that was quickly distributed throughout my middle school to let everyone launch M-rated Halo discs. Presumably if publishers were actually pressuring Microsoft to make a child-safe device, they'd have come up with a more advanced protection mechanism than that.
Modifiability/vulnerability would not affect my game console buying decision as a parent at all, provided the console had some form of cursory parental controls. I'd probably choose a console that didn't have such a simple bypass as the original Xbox, placed head to head with another console, but if my kid has to go online (!), learn about exploit development, and run some advanced tool to bypass parental controls, that's a valuable learning experience, and they were already on the Internet somehow, a much more dangerous place than an M-rated game anyway.
DRM and cheating are the drivers for game console secure boot. Cheating is getting even more important than DRM, really, IMO - it's one of the places where consoles have a huge edge over PC gaming.
> Presumably if publishers were actually pressuring Microsoft to make a child-safe device, they'd have come up with a more advanced protection mechanism than that.
They did. For the next generation. They updated their model of "child safe".
Hot Coffee was in GTA: San Andreas, a game that a “Mature” rating in the US i.e. only for people of ages 17+. They cut Hot Coffee to get to Mature from Adults Only (18+). Kids shouldn’t have been anywhere near these games if parents cared about what they were looking at.
You'll note that the existence of a site dedicated to censorship in video games means this was a big thing in Germany. No longer the case as much.
Manhunt for example was forbidden to be advertised in any way (put on the "Index"), but you could sell it under the counter. Some depictions triggered rules that meant games (or videos, music) could not even present to their corresponding regulatory body, which is USK for games (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unterhaltungssoftware_Selbstko...) to be rated 18+.
I used to know much more about this topic, but it's 15 years in the past now... Needless to say there were a million ways to circumvent this including specialised shops, uncut patches and more.
Some more: For a brief time ragdolls in Counter Strike: Source were disallowed (defeated enemies lay down instead), blood could not be red in Halo (alien blood was okay), gibs were disabled in TF2 (corpses exploded into toys).
Germany had problems with gore whereas the US had problems with sexuality (Hot Coffee mode removal).
Maybe they could just set mods behind parental controls. The mod community is a good incubator for what you should maybe add to the game in the next release.
I never player Halo 2 multiplayer, but both me and my brother loved Halo: Combat Evolved multiplayer. Was awesome back in the day (I played it on a Mac, by brother probably on a PC).
In my opinion it was the best FPS that I played, I'd put it above Unreal Tournament, Quake 3, Doom & Marathon.
However, at some point it seems there were many aimbots in the game, which ruined the gameplay for me.
Most D2 players flat out don't trust Bungie anymore. Not only have they been mailing in their seasonal content for years now, but their last campaign was abysmal. Taking an extra 6 months on development won't change things. I've got a group of 12 friends who all have been playing since alpha. One has purchased the next expansion, and nobody else is even considering it. I'm relieved to finally be done with it, personally.
As someone who watched their friend play through Destiny 1 for hundreds of hours, I don't know what anyone was expecting? That game clearly did not respect it's players and their time or money, yet still made insanely good profits, so why would they do anything different?
Remember how much they paid Peter Dinklage for his voice acting, and his character sounded absolutely phoned in, and lazy, to the point that they eventually had to replace it with much better voice acting by someone else who was cheaper
It was about availability for future recordings, not price. If cost was a concern they wouldn't have had Nolan North rerecord all of Dinklage's existing dialogue, just replace him going forward.
Yeah this is an incredible engineering feat, but I don't think I could do it knowing I could just go out and spend $500 on an xbox series X to play the remastered version in 120fps at 4k instead. I admire this level of dedication.
This is going to come off as overly cynical - it's a very cool project. But are you really pushing the original Xbox to the limit when you replace and overclock the CPU, increase RAM, add solid state storage, and overclock the GPU?
Whether it's an Xbox is arguable, but for the purposes of the topic and the post, you're mostly arguing semantics.
If one were to "push a Honda Civic to the limits" with an array of engine and suspension modifications, for purposes of discussion you're going to sound like you're just splitting hairs by asking "Is it really still a Civic, tho??", even if you could be technically correct.
The author has the right to title their content as they desire and you can just rewrite it as "Modding the OG Xbox to within an inch of its life" in your head...
> But are you really pushing the original Xbox to the limit
This is in the context of XBox modding, where “original Xbox” should be interpreted to mean “not an XBox 360”. Halo 2 can run at higher resolutions on a 360, so clarifying that this was a modding project on the original Xbox is helpful.
You have to read it in context. It’s not literally about an unmodded Xbox, it’s a modding project and the target for the mods was an original Xbox.
>You do not need a CPU upgraded console to use this patch and having one does not provide any additional performance gains that I've been able to measure during testing.
And this:
>This provided a 10% increase in transfer speeds for consoles running the stock IDE cable and up to a 300% increase (theoretically, the actual transfer speeds depend greatly on the size of data being transferred) for consoles with an upgraded IDE cable.
And this (again from the GitHub repo):
>If your console has 128MB of RAM this patch will utilize the extra RAM available which will enable use of 720p and 1080i video modes as well as increase the size of in-memory caches for textures and geometry. The size increase for the texture and geometry caches will significantly reduce pop-in issues to the point of being almost non-existent.
For just 480p you can overclock the GPU on a stock console and use a different IDE cable. I think the remark about the SSD was unintentionally misleading -- perhaps he did mean the combo of 80pin + SSD though.
It does not require an overclocked CPU (he states that the CPU was not the bottleneck), and the increased RAM is only required if you want resolutions of 720p or higher.
I relayed the feedback though, he might update the blog post to make these points more explicit.
Getting the most out of existing hardware is a pursuit in itself. See the retro computer scene. Car "nodding" is similar to that. Some want a factory perfect Corvette. Some want a model A with a engine 50 years newer. Taking something known and familiar and twisting it to your will is awesome.
What's wrong with overclocking the CPU and GPU? People overclock the CPU and GPU of their nintendo switch and it doesn't become another console. I have CFW to overclock the 3DS.
Yeah, that was my thought as well. They aren't "pushing the original Xbox to the limit", they are pushing custom hardware to the limit. The title is super misleading.
Even worse, it's a commodity desktop CPU! They aren't running "Halo 2" on an "Xbox" in HD, they are running a heavily modified build of Halo 2 on a somewhat custom PC.
We had that already, it's called "Halo 2 for Windows Vista!", and now we have MCC.
Granted, Halo 2 on Vista had way higher hardware requirements to run at 30fps in 720p I think, though most of that was just Vista overhead.
Actually it's worse again, they modified the Xbox kernel too!
This is really impressive work but it's also way more niche than the title wants you to believe.
Not that it's our place to take speculation seriously, or speculate at all – but I _plausibly_ imagine working in an industry where I'd think twice before connecting my real-world identity to XBox reverse-engineering, just to be on the safe side.
The site was terrible. Reader view didn't work for me it just turned it into a blank page. I had to open up inspector and change the css rules to read it.
The video includes side-by-side comparison between the original upscaled 480p and 720p. Around 7:00 you hear about what it takes to get 720p and maintain around 30fps gameplay. Not only a great article, but also a great video to summarize the changes needed get the higher resolution.
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