PC gaming 2002-2006

[Obiwanshinobi]

I think NOLF2 marks the point when PC was the boss again. First game known to me taking a real advantage of hardware DX8 support.

[speedlolita]

It's an amazing game. Looks good today too IMHO!

[Ed Oscuro]

This thread is littered with mediocre to passable games, and Starforce. An important note: At least The Suffering and Splinter Cell 2 both use Starforce in their disc PC releases, so beware. Some of these games were available on GameTap in pretty reasonable versions. More usefully, at least a couple were released free in partnership with the US Air Force (or some other groups), though those installers are hard or impossible to find now. If memory serves Area 51 and The Suffering were released this way. Most of the games marked "mediocre" were relatively easy for GameTap to pick up rights for, so appeared there, but so also did many gems.

I can think of just a few games that I would add to the topic as being asked for - many games simply weren't good enough that I'd care to mention them.

However, I feel a special mention ought to be made of Myst IV: Revelation, which is slow on Xbox - but still playable (as far as I went - I was playing it out of sequence so I quit before I got too far). Of course, there is no reason not to play this title on PC now (unless it has some kind of aspect ratio problems, but lag shouldn't be any problem so use whatever methods you can to fix this).

Obiwanshinobi: Just a heads-up, your intentions aren't very clear from the post, and it seems like you want us to agree about a number of pretty controversial statements. Stating that Ghost Recon is not "mechanically similar" to the original seems quite strange because everything I have seen points to it being exactly the same game, just in a different resolution - and it's obviously closer across platforms than Advanced Warfighter's (GRAW's) PC version would end up being some years later (still a good game, but obviously cobbled together - and hobbled by that reliance on existing assets).

My thoughts on the games I have (mostly) played from this list.
Freedom Fighters - Ah, too bad; I keep getting this one confused with Freedom Force.
Rogue Trooper - played this on GameTap way back, though didn't have time to play it through. Mediocre to good, it seemed.
Psychonauts - quite good but do you really expect me to collect all those cards? ...maybe I did. Not really a setting I care to revisit, however. Feces.
Second Sight - played at least a little and don't remember being engaged
Psi-Ops - mediocre, too much emphasis on unengaging story; no replay value
Cold Fear - some good moments and not too reliant on storyline moments (as far as I remember getting on Xbox) but felt a bit repetitive
Area 51 - mediocre and (again) puts too much emphasis on its unengaging story; no replay value
PoP trilogy - good to great, though PoP1 kept crashing on me, on multiple systems. Could try it again. Second game is of course a dramatic turn in tone, probably not for the better.
BG&E - what the fuck, air hockey game. OK. There is a recent Good Old Games release which allows the game to play with correct widescreen on my 16:10 display.
Splinter Cell 1-3 - think I've played them all. Beware of SC3 on PC - Starforce.
Enclave - I haven't played this but I wanted to point out that this game is little known, yet well regarded by those who do, so probably a hidden gem.
Thief: Deadly Shadows - great but an uneasy fit in the franchise; hyperbole about "that scary level" led to a minor letdown on my part
Hitman: Contracts/Blood Money - haven't played Contracts; Blood Money is great (though not exactly my cup of tea)
Silent Hill 2-4 (hey, I was lucky to find only one glitch in 2) - I felt SH4 on Xbox was great, though I never actually completed it
Serious Sam - great, if simplistic; later installments are much better
SW Jedi Knight II - okay (though personally didn't enjoy as much as the original and some other SW franchise games, even like Shadows of the Empire, one of the early multiplatform games)
THotD3 - quite good (though not to the standard of HotD2)
Dead to Rights 1&2 - only played the original (GameCube); mediocre to good
Darkened Skye - extremely uneven but with some great moments in the PC version
The Suffering 1&2 - mediocre, beware of Starforce. There was a sponsored free version of one of these (the original? by the US Air Force?)

H-L2, Doom 3 - these games need no introduction
Far Cry - limited replay value but a worthy play
Painkiller - great
Jedi Knight 2 was a good title (with a somewhat weak final stretch) - played on PC, at least; I also have no data points about the other versions. Yet I didn't enjoy it as much as the original or even Shadows of the Empire, which is really one of the granddaddies (1996) of high-profile multiplatform releases, as opposed to backports of console games to available systems.

Deus Ex - Invisible War - haha! Pretty much sums up my feeling about the games from this list that I've played - mostly miserable and awkward third-person games with vexed plots. Part of it is that there needed to be more shake-ups in the industry, with Midway finally falling by the wayside (and judging only by its multiplatform output from the era, its time had come). However, there are still games here that I have not yet played which may still be awesome, like Project Snowblind, which was (ironically) meant as a Deus Ex sequel.

[Obiwanshinobi]

I read in a console games mag back when that Ghost Recon multiplayer was not exactly the same on PS2 and Xbox, which would mean at least one version was different from the original.

Pretty sure Psi-Ops and I-Ninja use Starfroce (the copies I have here), which I have never had any problems with and am rather tired of conspiracy theories at this point. I mean, the sun goes up and down as usual, no matter how many times I install these.

On a side note, didn't Soldiers: Heroes of World War II use a copy protection scheme uncracked to this day? Which I've not had a problem with either.

[Ed Oscuro]

I read in a console games mag back when that Ghost Recon multiplayer was not exactly the same on PS2 and Xbox, which would mean at least one version was different from the original.

Quite a watered-down version of your original statement. Screenshots I looked at before my comment showed the games looked essentially the same. Not a big deal.

Pretty sure Psi-Ops and I-Ninja use Starfroce (the copies I have here), which I have never had any problems with and am rather tired of conspiracy theories at this point. I mean, the sun goes up and down as usual, no matter how many times I install these.

No conspiracies here, as usual, just a sense of being tired with Starforce (and Adobe, for that matter) fucking with my hard drives (i.e., creating folders with garbage names that can't be deleted from within Windows) and disc emulation software. (I am not sure if messing with your disc emulation software is a thing in the post-XP world, It's not the end of the world but I never cared for it. I guess that the "elegant" solution for companies has been to use the cloud and trusted computing technology in desktop CPUs. However reading your comment and looking at Wikipedia on Starforce again did remind me that some of the dire claims about Starforce (hard drive thrashing and the OS being weakened) weren't substantiated - however the software itself is quite terrible and certainly has no place anymore. Thankfully, there should be Starforce-free versions of many formerly-protected games out there, available either on sites like Good Old Games or as DIY downloads (for owners of original copies of the games).

[ZellSF]

Wait I thought he wanted games that were developed cross-platform? That would disqualify both Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 which were both PC focused and later ported to consoles by different studios.

And obviously he can't list many good games, the good games were either:

A: Made specifically for consoles
B: Made specifically for PCs

Same is true today, I think...

[Ed Oscuro]

It gets fiddly to deal with "crossplatform developed" versus "ported to," so I would just ignore that.

I scraped up some more games that made it to PC from the Xbox:

The Thing (Konami)
Unreal Championship 2 (not on PC, but worth mentioning again)
The Warriors (not on PC, but on most everything else)
XGRA: Extreme G Racing Association
Scaler (not on PC)
ObsCure
Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath (man, I loved the way it looks inside the store when I first saw it - it really felt next-gen at the time. Didn't care for the endgame too much, and I felt like it could've done something more with its systems and with replayability.)
Indigo Prophecy / Fahrenheit
Ghost Master (kind of an Evil Genius type game)
Far Cry Instincts
Counter-Strike ("ported from PC" doesn't really describe this interesting effort - though with this game's maps and single-player modes now available offline on the PC in fifty other formats, and with the original Xbox Live no longer working, this would be a choice for nostalgia only)
Bionicle: The Game (WHO'S STOKED NOW?)

As with the previous list not all of these are guaranteed to be good games, but some of them are!

[Obiwanshinobi]

Aye, Unreal Championship looks (on paper) like "poor man's UT", but yay, split-screen. The reason why I'm gonna get Sniper Elite for the Wii is the split-screen co-op mode. In Sniper Elite. Oh boy.

And obviously he can't list many good games, the good games were either:

A: Made specifically for consoles
B: Made specifically for PCs

Same is true today, I think...

Well, if this doesn't sound dogmatic. You come back once you've played Mashed (any version on anything at all, really), preferably multiplayer (the more, the merrier), if only to tell me how it was not very good.
To me, it reinvigorates the spirit of... Team Buddies? Complete with the insult button.
Even singleplayer is of note, dare I say. The A.I. (at least in Fully Loaded) is the most playful I've met in a vehicular game since the first Burnout.

[Ed Oscuro]

I don't think it's controversial to say that most of the games that were multiplatform were average to good at best.

But that many of them weren't good obviously doesn't mean they're all bad, as you rightly point out - and I also don't think there is anything about a multiplatform release in that era which forces something to be bad. Certainly we've had lots of great multiplatform releases from the last generation (PS3, 360, PC, and even some on Wii and Wii U).

Incidentally I have to ask about the dating: By 2001 all the consoles of that era - Dreamcast and PS2, to Xbox and GameCube - were released, so why the cutoff at the next year? I know there aren't many multiplatform releases from before that time but perhaps there is one or two at least. If you really stretch things back to the very dawn of that generation, you can get the rather awesome Re-Volt, which made appearances on all the PlayStation era consoles as well as DreamCast and PC, where it can still be played with great looks to this day (thanks to community patching).

Unreal Champsionship games do require a special note: That first multiplatform game seems obviously best played on the PC, but the second one is apparently a totally unique game worth looking into for series fans. I plan to get a copy sooner or later.

[Obiwanshinobi]

I think in 2002 tools like RenderWare and Glacier made for a reshreshing alternative to UE and Q3. Even then we still had some time to wait for Jade and Dark Alliance engines to appear on PC. Something about the look and feel of games where those were the lowest common denominator pleases me.
Reading some of the PC gaming press at the time, you could think everything that wasn't Far Cry was just a waste of resources. Meanwhile, Cold Fear was the first game since MGS2 where I saw bad weather effects done that well. Rogue Trooper looked like carved from 2000 AD cheese. Isn't Judge Dredd: Dredd Vs. Death the only PC FPS to this day sporting Timesplitters-like arcade challenges?

Sure, the first multiplatform, RenderWare-powered game would be TrickStyle (1999, PC, DC), but Criterion made RenderWare and I read they were the first (!) devs working with PS2 devikt, so they were a bit ahead of their time.