well you know, half life 2?😗

And now look at assassins creed valhalla with its proprietary next gen ps2 animation physics writing and gameplay.

@@bestledisthe Far Cry came out months before Half Life 2, I'm talking about playing Far Cry in March 2004 in comparison to games that had come out before. Of course Half Life 2 then surpassed it in some ways. 2004 was one of best years in gaming and game engine technology.

@@bestledisthe farcry was sandbox, half life 2 was not so no comparison imo. Farcry started fps open world and was the first game that didn't feel like running through a tunnel and had a sense of freedom.

All these n00bs thinking HL2 came out before FarCry 1.

@SKEKMAL I do get impressed though when a body break twigs or bends leaves - it's like playing an FPS and looking down and seeing you have a body for your character - it's a little thing but the care and attention still pleases me regardless.

@SKEKMAL gotta say forest in rdr2 looks pretty dense and bad at the same time and it reduce a lot of fps

@SKEKMAL Yeah even realtively "new" games like the last few Dark Souls games got some horrid puke inducing "forests"

@SKEKMAL It does if you can remember a time - before plants were impressive... Why am I suddenly thinking of Tryffids.

@SKEKMAL especially when u turn on TAA

San Andreas?😗

@@bestledisthe Didn't play that on PC, played on PS2

@@bestledisthe Ps2 version is better

Deus Ex belongs up there too!

@@awave1 that was 2000 though, still a great game 😀

they not only can see you through tents, but through walls and any surfaces in general, and they can shoot through walls too

@@doltBmB don't you worry, it's the latest one and steam has it, with no way to downgrade. So if you're going to buy it on steam, search for fixes first

@@RussianZOmBieATTACK yep that's the very thing that ended up keeping me from playing Half-Life 2 for 17 years.. just one fateful night I even had it steam in offline mode LOL, I connected accidentally I didn't even mean to.. I had no idea that something was going to happen, so I didn't think too hard about it but.. I connected once and I was never able to play my mods that I've been working on for a year again.. not even the base game LOL.. finally got around to trying to get back what I lost and play those episodes.. the first one was good, not so much on the second one.. and now I can't go back to playing modern games cuz LOL I went too far, I crisis ed gave myself too many things to do too many cool ways to do things.. shit, most games don't even let you lean anymore.

​@@RussianZOmBieATTACK you don't buy, buy gog version has fix included

Wave Race on the N64 had impressive water effects with rendered waves at a distance which was impressive in gaming. FarCry took it to another level

@@Ryuujin1078 I looked at it and its impressive for n64!

Watch the X-Isle demo.

You forgot one more title. Colin McRae Rally 2005.

Yea, it was crazy. So glad I played this game, back in the day.

@@MrX-rk9or Me too man.

Half Life 2 looked better back then

@@BazinGarrey Nope, even though it was a much later game, that year. In 2005 (or maybe 2006) HL2 got HDR'd. That changed things up a bit, though.

i played this on celeron 2ghz and gforce mx 440 4gb of ram...and this was the best lookign game of that time. Graphics were beautiful. And i really liked the story and gameplay. It is one of my favorite shooters to this day..

​@LonersPath I think pc gaming is in a better space than it ever was, early 2000s where good too, id say around the 360/ps3 times pc gaming dwindled

@LonersPath A big factor at that time (2007) was I could still buy physical used PC games without them being locked to some digital distribution service. I see Goodwills and yard sales try and re-sell stuff like WoW and Steam-based games all the time and it sucks that they are all (likely) paperweights now.

@@ahoyrobi used PC games? That has never been a thing due to cd-keys. Unless you wanna use a crack for the used game you bought that is.

@@SilverSai It was. It just depended on the game and IF you were playing Multiplayer. Every developer was different for keys/activation (if any). If a key didn't touch a server, you can have your friends all play the same copy. Unheard of now - but the used PC game market was once as robust as the used console game market.

All those were great games and great memories

Runs well on windows 10? I bit the bullet and made a new build with W10.

Does the GOG version include the fov patch?

@@DimitriosChannel most things oddly enough run more stable on Windows 10 than they ever did on Vista or Windows 7.. don't ask me why, and that's you know certainly no reason for why Windows 10 functions the way it does cuz it does a lot of things that are problematic.. but for what it's worth a lot of older titles are surprisingly, where you wouldn't be able to even get to try and like you can usually figure out a way to make it work. just make sure you download the user mods that fix all the broken things that Ubisoft did with the updates that most of the current versions of the game ship with.. and also if you're going to fix the fov.. make sure you fix the view model fov because as you expand the fov.. the weapon model fov is not on the same layer, and has to be expanded as well otherwise it cuts it off and it looks really bad. Those are a lot easier to fix though, but you just have to make sure that you're addressing both at the same time.. the widescreen fov patch which is really cool and rescales the HUD and everything does not change the view model fob which needs to be done separately but it's not hard to do and I think it can be done in the console.. as far as the AI goes, like there's a couple of things that say they address it I just don't know how well.. I would look into it though and make sure that you address it before playing like these guys did and then coming out all bitter and whiny.

@@jakedill1304 I built the rig by the way, I have a Ryzen 5 3600, RX580, 16GB of 3200mhz, W10, Sandisk SSD & Western SSD as well. Let me tell you it runs flawlessly. W10 has a POWER SAVER MODE specifically for Ryzen's and locks it at a low 0.944 voltage perfectly.

​@@DimitriosChannel man you pretty much have my buddy's computer spec for spec.. I will say I wouldn't use windows power regulation for CPU stepping especially with older games.. I don't think it's as much of an issue anymore, but speaking of 32-bit applications I know there was a bunch of issues, causing things like stuttering.. CPU parking excuse me.. Also, fun fact about Windows 10 it wants to be a cell phone.. so take your paging file make sure it's on a separate drive from your OS.. this is just as simple as making a paging file on a different nvme drive you want it to be a fast drive.. then making sure that the paging file for yours your OS hard drive is non-existent if not as small as minimally possible... Microsoft will get mad at you but it's going to help you out in the long run and the short run and all the runs LOL. Then you want to look up the registry directory for memory so that Windows is not compressing your memory.. if you have enough RAM no need to compress it and it just eats up CPU cycles, cuz it's constantly throwing things from your paging file into RAM to your hard drive back into RAM back to your hard drive because it thinks it's being sneaky LOL and it wants to run everything all at once like a cell phone. From there you want to turn off in the services, well you want to turn off a lot of things LOL definitely things regarding any of the Xbox anything that says Xbox you want to disable that, unless you absolutely need it.. the one in particular is the DVR one, that's Xbox live recording BS that has no business being anywhere, and has a habit of cutting your performance in half when there's no reason it should be running at all LOL. Most importantly though aside from you know just disabling telemetry which is, more symbolic of course.. there's a function called SYSMAIN... You want to disable that entirely.. What it does is it tries to anticipate the programs that you're going to run.. so, even if you're not worried about telemetry right there.. more importantly it's trying to assume that it knows what you want it to do, it's going to basically try to get things ready based on your usage patterns which is just creepy in general but more importantly.. your computer's notably fast enough that you don't actually need to do this in any way cuz it's a desktop not a cell phone. And then, next thing after that would be to make sure that you have nothing touching your paging file that doesn't need to be touched you want everything to go into your RAM.. absolutely no reason it should have to touch your paging file but you do have to have a paging file otherwise a lot of programs just won't run or will crash, that's not because they need the paging file it's because they think they might need the paging file and they freak out.. but once Windows stops constantly shifting things from the hard drive to the ram to the paging file back and forth wasting CPU cycles etc.. it's basically a glorified condom, and a novelty one at Best LOL. From there, you want to go into applications, which are different from programs I guess because they're they're run exclusively through Microsoft's system so again cell phone technology LOL.. these want to run at all times you want to disable all of them that you're not actually using, and go into each one individually and tell it not to run in the background.. cuz they all run in the background at all times lol.. these are different from services, some of them are useful most of them are not a lot of them come preloaded because they pay to be preloaded.. it's like somehow Dell reaching out from beyond the warp to make sure that you know that.. Candy crush is here, don't you want to crush it? LOL. Just go through that whole list uninstall anything that looks stupid, but turn everything off more importantly, and tell everything not to run in the background unless it looks like something that you want to run in the background.. there's about 25 or 50 of them.. I'd say about 25 of them can just be a uninstall uninstall uninstall, it changes dynamically because Microsoft is constantly dynamically being paid by different things and it will reinstall them on certain updates.. Next and you probably already know this one cuz you've already been in the power settings.. this one threw me for a loop as well, apparently Microsoft does not allow you to have full power for your video card or graphics unless you tell it to have high performance mode, you can't even make your own custom high performance mode it has to be the labeled high performance mode.. literally cut my GPU power in half and I couldn't figure out what was going on, cuz I had just come from Windows 7 with the same GPU..

mutant monkeys says "hi"

I ended up receiving a puffy shirt in the mail the first time I listened to one of Alex's early narrations.

Basically understand every mechanic and exploit(I'm talking about you foliage) and execute with better than average reflex, in the absence of the latter with large number repetitions to overcome the low probability of success, that in my opinion is the definition "difficult".

> Sprays full auto at an enemy sniper on the tower while the sniper is also firing. "How do all the enemies know where I am?" C'mon, Digital Foundry. I expected a lot better of you.

Before you get the first sniper, I used to use the bino to zoom to farther enemies, exit bino, and shoot M4 without moving the mouse. Took a couple more ammos, but worked like a charm.

As a veteran Far Cry player I just... thank you.

None of this actually means anything if the game doesn't convey it properly, and Far Cry is the polar opposite of games like Mega Man and Contra when it comes to conveyance.

kungmat Chaos Theory came out a full year after the first Far Cry, Pandora Tomorrow actually launched the same day as Far Cry on PC.

Totally! Chaos Theory vid from DF would be amazing!

I miss the time before you started talking. Good times.

The end of that game with the kid as an adult airline pilot is hilarious.

@@Astrophizz , yeah, I had a good laugh; man was that game fun; it was so much more dynamic and interactive than anything at that time... so sad it's such an unknown gem... DF could help shed some light on it.

Yes, that would be awesome. I remember getting the demo for Toy Commander back in the day on the Dreamcast Magazine disc and I played the demo for weeks, because I enjoyed playing around with all the physics in the game. You could also set things on fire! Months later there was another demo on another discs with christmas levels and I played that for weeks aswell :D Good memories! The game hasn't aged well though :P

You always ask for that game don't you?

@@DigitalDesires87 , ahahah, same here! I personally don't think that it really aged, it's just that, not only is it a product of it's time, modern tech has evolved way past it; graphically it certainly wasn't a looker, but... but the phisiscs engine in the other hand, I think that for a game this old, they're still very respectful and hold their own somewhat. Gameplay... Can be a bit hit or miss I'd say, but it could also be that I replayed the thing so many times over back on its day, that I got burned out. I still enjoy going back to the game, every now and then.

This and Goldeneye on the 64 are the best old school fps as you said ;)

haha this often was said of games with graphics tech that was new. It's always "Oooh look at this one new effect, now graphics are basically indistinguishable from real life!"

@@waveplay3978 now we really are at that point

@@elijah4168 hmm definitely getting close but there's still a significant gap

@@waveplay3978 In terms of detail were getting close, but physics and lighting could still use a lot of work. Ray tracing and the vastly increased CPU performance of next gen consoles could bring solid improvements though.

@@elijah4168 nope, we are not. Though we can can make photo-realistic graphics, but just not in real-time.

Ubisoft games feel so incredibly lackluster and lifeless nowadays. No proper physics, world interaction or grounded/ weighted gameplay. It's all fluff now. Oh well, saves me money :)

@@yup9451 watch dogs 2 are actually still holds up today,but i agree the physics are suckdick

It was streets ahead, definitely.

always has been.

Always was

Yeah I remember being totally blown away by the moving shadows from the lights and the self shadowing on jack in that first animation when he picks up the radio.

Back in the day rigs with the specs to play this game would be insanely expensive.

You surely must have been really happy with that upgrade ! On a 7800 GT, Far Cry 1 surely was maxed out and well over 30 fps as average. I waited a couple years, until my father bought a core 2 duo and the 7950 GT. The game was astonishing for me as a teenager. One of the best game I had played since Goldeneye on the nintendo 64. Great times 😁

@@yan3066 It was a hefty upgrade. Then, in 2007, I upgraded to an Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 and NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS. Another good speed boost and ran Windows Vista like a dream. Such speed boosts do not seem to happen as much, these days.

@@ebridgewater in 2007 you upgraded again ? Was it for Crysis ? ;) There will be a good upgrade coming soon. Early benchmark of the RTX 3080 shows it will outperform the RTX 2080 Ti by 20%. It means that the RTX 3080 Ti will be around 30-40% faster. Not bad in my opinion. Take care mate !

I sought out the quicksave hack by the time I was about halfway through, and ended up enabling god mode for the last area in the volcano. The particular god hack I used showed the total damage you were taking, and by the time I had sprinted across the level I had been "killed" something like 17 times over. It makes you wonder if that was something that slipped through in testing, like the Hades level in God of War, where QA didn't focus on that particular section.

I remember watching my friend play through the end of it. A big area he had to make it across with tons of enemies, killing him over and over. Eventually he just decided to run instead of fighting. Ran down to a dock and then... cut scene, end of the game. No boss fight or anything. What a letdown.

LOOL same here - with the cursing.

in the tunnel I almost broke my keyboard... my gosh!

The game is bugged on latest patch, you need mod to fix A.I.

And then there's me playing on realistic while messing around and tryna confuse the enemies, lol.

Dude, the screenshots! You totally brought up a memory I didn’t know I had lol. I made like dozens of wallpapers of different jungle shots!

All this and half life 2. played all those games on my first own gaming pc. Edit: and unreal tournament 2004. I loved this game

Surely any 16 year old game will run great on a 2019 laptop?

@@aeris2001 I bought the laptop in 2003 which is a year before Far Cry (2004) came out. See where I said "I remember" and "had bought"? Am I going crazy here? I don't see where I wrote anywhere that would make you think that I was talking about last year.

@@kingjoe3rd 'a year previously', is vague. Without further clarification, English fluent people will assume you are talking about the year previous to the year you are writing in. You are writing in 2020 so the assumption is 2019. So the flaw is your grammar, not my interpretation. Grammar is sometimes important in the English language.

@@aeris2001 non-native speaker here and I understood that he was writing about 2004 since he wrote "I remember".

@@aeris2001 Nope, he was pretty clear.

Well, maybe he's referring to 1st person shooters? Which Doom 3 is, and Max Payne isn't.

Max Payne 1 has much more limited character model animation than Max Payne 2. The first Max Payne game had animation issues with a "flotaing arms" glitch, and textured character faces. The developers at Remedy were really impressed by the animation systems in Metal Gear Solid 2 for the PS2, and they studied that game for Max Payne 2. Max Payne 2 added facial animation, uses cinematic models for in-game cinematics, and model swaping for very specific situations. Also Max Payne 2's engine (Max-FX 2) added Havok physics.

@@schtive81 Also, MGS2 had some damn impresssive physics. Glass objects breaking realistically, watermelons exploding and so on. Probably the first game where I was impressed by physics. Next one was Max Payne 2, so it makes sense Remedy were inspired by MGS2.

@@aweigh1010 Nope.

@@aweigh1010 Eh, Far Cry Instincts Predator, 2, 3, and Blood Dragon were great. 4 was adequate.

@@orijimi Nah. Pretty lame to me.

@@aweigh1010 I don't understand this opinion. Far Cry 1 has aged horribly in pretty much every way imaginable. It doesn't feel great to play, the "story" is garbage. How is it better than the sequels? This seems like a case of nostalgia overruling rationality

Far cry 3 is the best. Still looks good on pc today and had a lot of influence on the game industry even today. Too bad Ubisoft juste copy past the gameplay for every single games they make nowadays. Oh yes and the story of far cry 3 is actually pretty good !

Chronicles of Riddick: escape from butchers bay on Xbox was a damn good looker. Loved that game

Bro so many awesome custom games and maps the jump maps were fun

I actually played it with that mod, and I still found it bad. And that's despite playing it when it originally when it came out. It just hasn't aged well.

Exactly lol, wtf. AI is fine they are just bad players.

@@blueorange9067 actually in the 1.4 update which is on most storefronts, the AI can shoot you through literally everything, even tents and that's what they mean. The AI shouldn't be able to instantly figure out that he's on the tower and not anywhere else

@@elijah4168 nah I played it few days ago, and one of the modders I know fixed it. It's canvas only that they can shoot through.

Im not sure on the terms of sale but i believe Ubisoft now holds the rights to the Far Cry name so Crytek could not release this as a Far Cry game. If at all.

@@Raivo_K that's a bummer. I knew the Crytek still have the right of the OG Far Cry because they mentioned it somewhere (twitter i believe). But with knowing what you said, i agree its hard for Crytek to release a remake with new cryengine without an arrangement with Ubisoft

Far Cry 2 is the best game in the series.

do you have a source for this ? LOL

Interesting. It was probably because the studio didn't really get the appeal of a sandbox-type game at that time. I was replaying this and HL2 recently, and initially I thought the game design was so much better in HL2. But it's really a completely different game. HL2 is completely 'staged' in the sense of being effectively a long linear obstacle course. Whereas Far Cry has this open world, open plan design that can be frustrating but has so much more depth. I think of Far Cry a bit like GTA, an amazing revolutionary game engine with a badly-designed, annoying linear mission-objective game bolted on top, which it doesn't really need.

SSJ Finally someone who believes this! I’m tired of most people thinking “Far Cry 3” is the “best”. Trash game. Far Cry 1 was way better. I’m so freaking tired of people overlooking the gem that is Far Cry 1!

techno-babble bullshit, only to display their own ignorance

That's your fault for being dumb.

uh

oof, what about RAGE engine?😂

its so complex compared to engines like Epic games unreal engine

@BlindBison y'all missed the joke, lol. Well while RAGE is proprietary to R* game, modding on RAGE is difficult, which is much more complicated than let's say Bethesda's Creation engine

@@bestledisthe Joke??? No

😆🤣

Yeah. It's not that bad. You can even stealth past a lot of the enemies. I remember even sneaking past that one mutant with a rocket launcher that was indoors in a room filled with water by throwing stones. I was so proud of that I remember it to this day lol

@Rob Yagenmyer They have done more for gaming with DF than you will do in your life.

@Rob Yagenmyer Rob, this game is only 16 years old, quit simping for her you weirdo

Definitely impressive but id's development of Quake to Quake 3 from 1996-1999 is truly insane, and definitely a momentous paradigm shift in games history. In 1995 the Playstation was super impressive with its arcade-level graphics, like Wipeout would be running in shop windows to bring kids into the shop, but by 1999 all the consoles looked like crappy toys because of what had happened on PC with 3D accelerator cards and Quake. And id were the first to license their 3D game engine, Unreal and UE came in the wake of Quake and its engine.

@SYSTEM ERROR I agree with those. That is why I said 'one of the biggest leaps'. It's definitely up there with the best and has aged really well in every aspect. While Id games and early Playstation titles said "we can go full 3D now", Crytek said "we can start going photorealistic". Landmark moments in gaming industry - as I light incense sticks around my Crysis shrine near my bedside.

@@brunomiiguel yep and I agree, FC to Crysis is very comparable. I definitely remember FC as one of the most mind-blowing game demos I ever played, and that was on a not very powerful 2002 system, so another aspect of the achievement was how it ran so well on very standard systems. In that way it was more impressive than Quake 3 Arena's demo, which came out in 1999 and didn't run well on my 1998 system.

@@brunomiiguel you know I've got my own shrine going for Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay, it's such an awesome game, and incredible-looking for 2004. Arguably the best game of 2004 over HL2 and Far Cry even. I feel like you can see the influence of EFBB in the evolution of Far Cry to Crysis, where Far Cry in 2004 was very bright, like HL2, almost cartoony, but Crysis was styled as more cinematic and gritty/photoreal, like EFBB's dark sci-fi cinema aesthetic. And the COR games show just how fast things moved in those years, with the 2004 game being mind-blowing, but the 2009 game Assault on Dark Athena with the same engine having much less of an impact, because things had leapt ahead so much in those five years, and we had stuff like Crysis and Arkham Asylum by then. But I feel like those games definitely took some inspiration from EFBB! The sad thing is, the COR games are no longer available to buy because of some licensing issue. The 2-pack was on GOG, and I grabbed it, but they don't sell it any more.

Original and 3 are the best for me

Those where the days when they were about both

what are you talking about, far cry and crysis were literally a playable tech demo. google crytek x-isle.. gameplay was mediocre at best even tho i spent hours in both games. gameplay was an afterthought.

I remember drooling over the graphics in this and Doom 3 back in the day. The physics were cool and all but the new effects and shit were what I found most appealing. Physics were impressive in Max Payne 2 but after that I didn't find them that interesting. Not even in Half Life 2.

No, no it was not. Maybe for 800x600 lowest settings 30fps.

I really don't understand how I managed to play this back in the day. I had a Geforce Ti 4400 and a AMD Duron or Barton or something like that. I don't remember it running badly but I do remember getting something that looked like a 3 fps slideshow when trying to run Doom 3

@@malomkarom Yes, it was. 1024x768 on highest settings with high framerates. Even 1280x1024 was very playable. Athlon X2 was not even a thing back in 2004 when this game came out. Also, high framerates weren't that of a fetish like it's nowadays.

@@nomercy8989 I managed to play these games and also HL2 on Athlon1900+ 256Mb Radeon9000Pro64Mb quite nicely. It was nothing like my friend's Athlon2500+ 512Mb Radeon9600Pro but still it was enjoyable even on high settings. Radeon9000Pro didn't support PS2.0 though, so graphics weren't that good either.

@@nomercy8989 It was very well optimised, on lower settings a nokia 3310 could run it pretty much. I played it on an athlon 1100+ and a non pro radeon 9600. It wasn't exactly a beastly performance, but it was playable-ish, especially thanks to the good old crt-s being smooth as hell, and sharp on lower res.

It's cool to see how they run in their time in high quality, not on some 240p early youtube video or a simple text article. And usually there is advantages on running for hardware/software they were designed for, like this game water reflections that only works well on XP. Having to hack in future versions of Windows.

the one thing i can think of is to let ppl here who are younger or just didn't get the chance back then (because you know, some of us back then didn't have money nor have someone willing to shell out the money needed to ACTUALLY run the game) to see how the game looks and play like BACK then when it came out. I mean that's kinda half the point of seeing retro games... to see them as how they were played back then.

It's a way to show/remind people how games were running at the time on contemporary hardware. It's also a great way to show how Ultra/60+fps gaming wasn't a given back then because some games (like Crysis, Doom 3, Farcry, etc.) would push the boundaries even on high-end hardware. Today very few games try to push these boundaries on PC (I'm thinking of Star Citizen and maybe the upcoming Flight Simulator X, and of course games using raytracing).

I like seeing games running on old hardware. Feels like a more honest retrospective.

You can always bet on Nvidia cards dying. FX5900 leafblowers had fans die. 8800 series had solder issues causing dead cards. RTX had dead 2080 Ti's.

Thanks Hulk, you're a great doctor.