Games That Push System Limits 107
Retro Gaming with racketboy has a look at games that pushed the limits of gaming systems. At the end of every console's life, the last few games released for the system are (generally) the shiniest examples the hardware has to offer. The article's author starts with the Atari. From the piece: "I'm by no means a 2600 expert, but Solaris is definitely one game that comes up quite frequently in terms of innovative 2600 games. Considering the 2600 wasn't originally intended to do much more than play Pong variants, Solaris is a technical masterpiece with its sophisticated gameplay and relatively high resolution graphics. Although the game played much like a first-person space shooter, you can always see your ship at the bottom of the screen. The graphics for Solaris were first-rate as the multi-colored aliens are flicker-free and glide along smoothly, even when attacking in groups."
Game that pushed the System Limits ... (Score:4, Funny)
My Windows 95 machine could barely handle it
So that's when I upgraded to Windows 98.
Let's see... (Score:3, Funny)
Tradewars - upgrade from 1200bps modem to 9600bps modem
alt.binaries.pictures.erotica - upgrade from 14" SVGA to 17" SVGA (Mag DX17F, I still have the damned thing), and to 4MB ET4000 video card so I could use truecolor at 1280x1024 and look at the pretty pictures at full size.
Quake - I saw it on a 486/100 and decided I needed a better computer. I ended up with a dual Pentium-133 with an unheard-of 128MB RAM. Yup, Quake ran pretty well on that guy.
glQuake - Orchid Farhenheit.
Unreal - Voodoo 3 3000 + Celeron @450MHz, another 128MB RAM
Quake 3 - I first tried a Geforce2 GTS, which was a POS and soured me on nvidia forever. I think I went to an original Radeon after that.
Since then, the pace of my upgrades have exceeded that of any game that's come out.