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XBox (Games)

Halo 1 and 2 On The 360 57

Posted by Zonk from the bungie-feels-the-love dept.
Next Generation is reporting on possible graphical improvements for Halo 1 and 2 on the 360. The source? The folks at Bungie mentioned some surprises in their most recent update. From the article: "Some better anti-aliasing would be a nice touch, though more computationally intensive. While we're asking for pie in the sky things, some up-rezzed textures for use in the now higher resolutions might also be a great addition, though this would require content resources (e.g. real money spent on games that aren't likely to continue selling to 360 owners) so this is even less probable than the previously mentioned upgrades. Also, those textures would either have to ship on the hard drives (very unlikely) or be downloaded via Live (more possible but still unlikely)."
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Halo 1 and 2 On The 360 More

Halo 1 and 2 On The 360

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  • It might be news for the Bungie website, but for front page /.? Heck, I'd even settle for some other FPS, but Halo? And it's not even Halo 3? Gimme a break. Of course it looks better on 360, and I'll bet it plays better, too. Especially for all those people who don't have Live accounts and might get to play the multi for free with the 360's free Live feature. That's worth a LOT more to me as a player than a texture pack.
  • Ok, so I don't think this really passes as news... but I'll throw in my $0.02 anyway.
    Theoretically some new textures would be great, I mean, they upgrade the system, they upgrade the resolution, they upgrade the controllers, etc... But honestly, if they upped the textures in 1 & 2, they couldn't put "New Highres Textures" in version 3... (Unless they re-released 1 & 2 for the 360 and charged for the upgrades.) I mean, it doesn't really make sense for them, but it would be nice
    But thinking about t
    • Just as an FYI, a high resolution SMB 3 did come out for the Game Boy Advance, and it sold like hotcakes. And being for the GBA, it did keep the same game play. It even added the ability to save your game, at any point. To me, that added a lot of value.

      I know, I know, not your point. Just thought you'd like to know there's a REALLY kick ass version of Super Mario 3 out there that you should check out.
      • Actually, the Gameboy Advance (240x160) is lower resolution than the NES (256x240[1]). It has a higher colour depth than the original though, and they can use a few more effects etc. but so did the SNES Super Mario All Stars version (which runs at the exact same resolution as the NES version). The All Stars version does have saving as well (can't be bothered to check if the NES version has), but you can't save in levels IIRC, that was probably added becuase the GBA is portable.

        Of course Nintendo are probabl
        • You are forgetting the most important thing about SMB3 on GBA. It has new levels.

          But you need the E-Reader AND special cards to get them. Good luck with that one (maybe the levels are in the cartridge already, and the cards just unlock them. So a game shark may do the trick).

  • Umm... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Guspaz ( 556486 ) on Wednesday October 26, 2005 @04:25PM (#13883837)
    Better anti-aliasing isn't pie-in-the-sky for the XBOX-360. It's a given.

    First of all, it's not a matter of "better", Halo 1/2 didn't have ANY. As for it being a pie-in-the-sky idea, the 360 was designed from the ground up to run FSAA on every single game. The GPU has specific on-chip cache to accelerate anti-aliasing. So turning on AA in the backwards-compatibility patch is a no-brainer.

    As for higher-res textures, it's not such a crazy idea. As I understand it developers often produce media at higher resolution than the final in-game res, and then scale it down. So the media probably already exists, meaning it's not a major monetary investment to produce it. The problem is of course, as mentioned, distribution. Selling a high-def content pack isn't out of the question. Throwing it online could work, but we are talking about a fair chunk of data here. A few gigs most likely. Certainly possible, Valve has proven that by pushing multi-gigabyte games through STEAM, but it might not be practical on a console like it is on a PC.

    Something else to keep in mind is that the 360 ships with an overpriced 20GB drive, so there isn't exactly a lot of room there. Before you point out that it is a notebook drive, you must understand that it is overpriced even for a notebook drive. For $100 US, I expect an 60GB 4200RPM notebook drive, considering that such drives cost about $90 US at marked-up retail. Anyhow, if you throw a few gigs onto that drive, right off the bat you're eating up a pretty hefty chunk of the drive for one single game.
    • So turning on AA in the backwards-compatibility patch is a no-brainer.

      Man, now that you mention it I hope Sony is doing this again with the PS3. Playing PS1 games with less jaggies was definitely a plus, but having to set the option manually every boot wasn't. :(
      • The PS2 would smooth the textures out, but that's it....there were still jaggies, hell most of the PS2 games had jaggies. Still, think about, playing FF9 at a higher resolution with 4, or even 8x FSAA... Hell, think about playing FFX with Higher res/FSAA.....that would be awesome!
        • Hell, think about playing FFX with Higher res/FSAA

          Yeah, that's what I was hoping for. I guess I didn't really have much experience with the smoothing function of the PS2, seeing as I only have Castlevania SotN for it :D.
    • As for higher-res textures, it's not such a crazy idea. As I understand it developers often produce media at higher resolution than the final in-game res, and then scale it down. So the media probably already exists, meaning it's not a major monetary investment to produce it.

      The original Halo's a bit weird regarding world textures - there's an interesting design decision which, while ideal for the memory-poor, GPU-power-rich Xbox, kind of knackered things for the PC port of the game (a memory-rich, fairly G
      • It could be argued that by the time the PC port of Halo rolled around (What was it, a year later? More) GPUs had surpassed the XBOX. Halo PC came out 2 years after Halo XBOX. It came out in 2003 for PC. IIRC the XBOX's GPU was somewhere between a GeForce 3 and a GeForce 4. DirectX 8 in any event.

        The Radeon 9700 came out a year before Halo PC came out. By the time Halo PC was out, the Radeon 9800 series was on the market. Either way, the 9700/9800 are a lot more powerful in every respect than the XBOX's GPU.
        • Think the issue was that Halo PC targetted lower-end GeForce 1 & 2-era cards for marketing reasons.
          • So because the game was targetted at DX7 cards, they only did the minimum effort to port the shaders for DX8 cards? Considering Halo's heavy use of shaders and the fact that DX8+ cards controlled the market by 2003 that seems like a pretty stupid thing to do.

            I would have thought they'd target DX8+ cards and THEN worry about running without shaders.
            • Probably was a stupid decision in retrospect if they shipped much later than expected. But they aren't the only one -- Doom3 was originally targeted towards a GeForce3-level card and still has a special path for really old GeForces.
              • Well, it was ORIGINALLY targetted at GeForce (Original) cards, I guess you mean targetted at GeForce 3 cards when it was released?

                The DX7-capability (not that he used DX, but it gives a good measuring stick) paths were actually needed. Remember that the GeForce 4 MX cards were still DX7 like the original GeForce. They had no pixel/vertex shaders. So that DX7 path was needed for cards that were very popular when D3 actually came OUT.

                See, D3 was very scalable. It ran well on DX7 cards and still looked good. I
  • This probably wouldn't be the same leap on Xbox -> Xbox360, but anyone who has played a PSOne game on an actual PSOne, and then played the same game through ePSXe noticed the much improved polygon & texturing capablitiies of today's hardware versus the old PSOne GPU.
  • ignorance.

    Backwards compatibility is the ability to play the last gen games on the current gen systems, NOT to upgrade performance. You start adding little tweaks and stuff you start risking problems with the game. It's entirely possible that when everyone puts in their precious halo they will crash the compatibility engine, what a fine way to start the launch of a new system.

    Sadly the fact is that Microsoft is trying to get people into the Xbox 360 for all the wrong reasons. They want people to play jus
    • Just so you know, in case you are a closet Nintendo lover, the Nintendo Revolution is confirmed to be backwards compatible with Gamecube games right out of the box, so CAN SOMEONE ON /. BASH NINTENDO ONCE IN A WHILE???

      Here Microsoft, Intel, and to some extent Sony get automatically bashed in a totally biased attack, while Apple and Nintendo get automatically praised in a totally biased love-fest

      • Re:Ha, congradulations Microsoft you've proven you (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Blakey Rat ( 99501 ) on Wednesday October 26, 2005 @07:04PM (#13885058)
        Amen. The anti-Microsoft arguments would actually be more persuasive if the posters here at least gave the illusion of being non-biased. Right now, that ain't happening, and you can practically guarantee that the top 3-5 comments are going to be:

        1) Microsoft-bashing, like the one you've just read. As a bonus, this one contains gems like:

        "It's entirely possible that when everyone puts in their precious halo they will crash the compatibility engine, what a fine way to start the launch of a new system."

        Yeah, and it's entirely possible that a giant space chicken will descend on us from the Vega start system and peck Europe to utter destruction. And both events are about equally likely... do you honestly think Microsoft wouldn't, you know, *test* their code before shipping it?

        2) Diatribes about how gameplay is always better than graphics which sometimes go as far as saying that games with poor graphics have better gameplay. (Players of ET on the Atari 2600 might want to dispute this one.) Of course, you have to mention that Nintendo is the *only* company out there that understands this and releases games with good gameplay.

        These posts always get modded to +5 regardless of how off-topic they are, or how repetitive it is reading the same goddamned arguments in every single game thread which is, more than anything, proof that the moderation system doesn't work.

        3) Completely off-topic rants about how good Nintendo is, sometimes from people who admit that they don't even own any other consoles to compare their experience to. Despite being posted in topics like "Xbox Live to carry mini-games" and "Splinter Cell Next Gen to be PS3 Exclusive", these posts will never be moderated as Off-Topic, but will instead get +5 Interesting.
        • Indeed! The slavish devotion to Nintendo is strong here.

          While 'we' hated them when they were being fined millions for uncompetative price fixing, 'we' like them now they are the underdog, and any deviation from the official party line is not tolerated. In the same vein, posters are apparently expected to remember at all times that Microsoft are inherently evil and there is no way they can make a superior console (and that even Sony are better than Microsoft).

          For your amusement, you might want to check out t
      • Backwards compatibility isn't the Issue, I respect Sony, I respect Nintendo (though wish they got a little more attention), Intel I find over priced but at least they are getting their act together.

        However Microsoft isn't offering backwards compatibility. They are offering upgrades or such. It's a false compatibility. Backwards compatibility is great, and it should now be a standard, but doing this type of move isn't what it's about.

    • Re:Ha, congradulations Microsoft you've proven you (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      A PSX game on the PS3 should play the same as it did on the PS2 and the PSX, If there's a way to avoid crashes or faster loading, great, but it should be essentially the same experience, this is the way it always is.

      Um, perhaps you never noticed the hardware acceleration toggles in the PS2 configuration menu that allows for smoother texture processing, as well as a few other nifty features, when playing PSOne games? This is the standard. Do you know why? Because, prior to Sony, nobody else did backwards
      • Sony weren't first with backwards compatability. The Atari 7800 was backwards compatible with Atari 2600 cartridges. The Megadrive (Genesis) had an adaptor that let you play Master System (Mark III) games on it, and all the relavant hardware is on the Megadrive side. I don't think either of these have any enhancements though (the Master System mode on the Megadrive cartainly doesn't)

        The Gameboy Color is kinda backwards compatible as well, but it's not that different hardware-wise to the original Gameboy, th
    • And you've just shown yours. The 360 has no backwards compatibility whatsoever. However they are porting the executables (not the data) of some of the more popular games to give the illusion of limited backwards compatibility. So it's not like they're patching up the existing executables to add new functionatlity, they're just new executables loading the data from the XBOX 1 discs.
    • Dear lord this post is utterly full of crap.

      First point. Backwards compatibility is to play old games on your new system. Thats as far as the definition goes just cause youve invented some more precise definition that excludes any upgrades to the old games means nothing.

      Compatibility engine? You clearly dont have a clue how this is working the xbe's are being updated to function on the 360 even if they werent the upgrades there discussing are simple file changes (For textures) and effects added to the outpu
  • Halo is the XBOX killer-app. If they can't do what they want through emulation, I wouldn't be supprised if they recompiled the xbe and ran that off the HDD.
  • Here's what I'm expecting as far as upgrades go...

    Halo 1:
    -Higher Resolution
    -Better Antialiasing
    -Anisotropic Filtering on the Textures
    -Better Framerates

    Halo 2:
    -Higher Resolution
    -Better Antialiasing
    -Anisotropic Filtering on the Textures
    -Better Framerates
    -The cinematics don't do that pop-in crap anymore!
  • What is the number one complaint about Halo 2? The way the movies are dynamically generated and increase detail as the movie progresses, adding refined polygons and textures. This makes people look like blobs for the first few seconds of the game.
    The XBox 360's tripple core PPC 970 processor and revlutionary GPU means that the 360 will "catch up" with the movie much faster if not instantly and I won't cry as much when halo 2 reaches a cut scene.
    • No the number one complaint against Halo is the ending. The less detailed characters for the first second of the cinema never bothered me or anyone else I know.
  • The high res textures already exist - the PC shipped with many textures that were 4x or even 8x the resolution of those used on the xbox (most notably on the shipboard computer displays and weapon-in-hand skins)
  • I suspect that when they said things were "looking good" they meant that the games were running properly on the system.
  • It may actually be playable this time around.

    I hope they do a better job than the PC port; even with the framerate increased the models still animated at 30 FPS. This made them very unnatural looking.
  • It's a sad, sad day for the games industry when one of the biggest titles coming out for a brand new system is an emulation of an older console title.

    Would a little innovation really hurt that much?
  • Basically, this is like what Vavle did with Half Life. They re-released it as Half Life: Source which just gave it a graphical update. While I'm excited about the return of Halo 1 and 2, I'm hoping for a bit more in my updates

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