Let's take a look at all the FPS games for a system that shouldn't have FPS games on it Consider supporting on Patreon: / minimme Check out my website and discord server! www.minimme.com/
MrsRental is correct, BSP isn't mutually exclusive from raycasting. Raycasting is a method of generating the pixels, BSP is a method of sorting and working with the level geometry so that not so many surfaces need to be considered when doing rendering (whether raycasting or some other method). Earlier, grid-based raycasters (like Wolf-3D [id-tech1) didn't need BSP because their grid-based layout inherently has the kind of properties that BSP attains for more free-form geometry; some later ray-caster-esque games (like Duke 3D [Build Engine]) used Sectors/portals instead of BSP -- A sector was a small section of a map, and a portal was basically an invisible 'surface' where one section joined through with another section (say entering a hallway); you'd render the current sector worrying only about its geometry, and if any portals were in view you'd then render the sectors that they lead through to. Wall's also had height in Build Engine games like Duke 3D, and that combined with Portals are how Build does things like overhangs, countertops, the theater seats.
Binary space partitioning is not a rendering technique, so it would still be incorrect to say "they didn't use ray-casting, they used binary space partitioning". Some of these games probably don't even use binary-space partitioning, they may be portal-based rendering similar to Duke Nukem 3D or Bungie's Marathon. There isn't a solid name for the Doom-style technique as it isn't actually closer to traditional 3D rendering than people realise (some real projection is happening, albeit it is on a 2D plane with depth as meta-information). The best phrase to describe the "Doom-style" rendering (which captures Duke 3D and more) would probably be "span-rendering" - as the rendering is purely about stretching 1D textured-spans.
No this is incorrect. BSP is a culling technique, ray-casting is a visibility technique (with rendering tacked on for efficiency). There is no ray-casting happening in the Doom engine or other engines of that era (Duke 3D), etc. There is a definite difference between what Doom/Duke/Marathon/DarkForces is doing and what Wolfenstein 3D is doing. There is zero shared code or logic between these two rendering techniques. BSP is not a rendering technique, it is a data partitioning scheme that makes it very quick to locate the position of an entity in the world, the actual rendering done by Doom (and similar engines) is based on projecting 2D points onto a 1D plane and then rastering 1D textured-spans based on their distance from the camera plane and height of the wall. To prove that BSP is not a rendering technique; look at the early alpha versions of Doom - these versions of Doom do NOT have a BSP, they are based on a slow search algorithm of all the visible walls on the map, Doom's BSP optimisation was written late on in its development, well after the rendering engine was completed. This may seem complicated to read and understand, my apologies, it is a very complex piece of computer science and one can't describe it in a RU-vid comment.
This description is very much correct, however MrsRental is still incorrect in saying "BSP still uses ray-casting". BSP does not use ray-casting, its nature is exactly as Michael Thompson describes. Wolfenstein 3D uses ray-casting as a visibility algorithm and slaps the rendering of pixels inside the ray-casting as an optimisation. It is interesting to suggest that grid-based maps do not need ray-casting. It very much depends on the target hardware - Wolfenstein 3D on the SNES is famous for not using ray-casting at all but uses a BSP and span-rastering system similar to Doom as that is generally more performant for lower-clock processors (it is weird to think that ray-casting wasn't the most optimised technique for Wolfenstein 3D in 1992, but John Carmack stands by saying despite this, it was the best choice at the time).
I had the misfortune of buying Medal of Honor: Underground. I think my thought process at the time as a kid was "Oh, I played the PS2 games and they were cool. Let's get this one too!" It pretty much immediately struck me that it was nearly impossible to see what the hell was going on and I gave up on it after not too long. I didn't even remember that the framerate was that terrible and how completely unfitting the background music was.
that must be the worst graphics I've ever seen in an FPS game. Reality itself warps when you turn the camera, walls keep sliding, game can't decide which pixel to render, etc etc
Dark Arena is quite literally a Doom clone - the company hired Doom map makers to make actual Doom maps, which were then directly converted into the Dark Arena format.
most of those games hurt my eyes just by looking at them.... i would be surprised if there is 1 person that has finished medal of honor in GBA tho.....
Oh, there's always someone who has an attachment to a game. Some poor sap prob got it for Christmas from his late Grandma, it was his only game, he beat it a dozen times, and only sees it through nostalgic glasses.
I'm so glad you included Ice Nine. I love that game and am so impressed with how much texture and detail they included. And its fun to play. I'm trying to program my own raycaster game on the GBA and i can only get 5 fps with flat colors so I am even more impressed with what they made.
I ported the legit DOS versions of Doom 1 and 2 .WADS to my DS using a special cart/harddrive/Homebrew for the system....it could run them amazingly well...perfectly smooth and the controls worked great. So it shows that the system could do, at least Doom-style FPS's, very well. The only drawback was the homebrew software that ran the game DID NOT run the music....soo it was Doom without the soundtrack :( It is a shame they did not officially port them over, the DS was a better chance to do those titles than the GBA was.
Holy crap... I'll never forget the day I actually recommended my friend to buy Medal of Honor on GBA, not knowing that there were two of them. I had Infiltrator, which is pretty great honestly. I remember asking if he'd played it yet and he pretty much immediately said that it just sucks. Later on I found the box for the game in his room and saw that it was the wrong game. It's only since people have been talking about this on YT that I've seen just how bad it is and started feeling guilty for not explicitly mentioning the right subtitle.
I've always been intrigued by portable FPS games. Killzone on the Vita is the best I've played. The Dementium games on the DS were actually really enjoyable as well.
I remember beating Doom 2 on what was considered Nightmare difficulty on the GBASP over a long drive once when I was younger. I had already played a lot of vanilla and different source ports by that point but it was really surprising that they managed to make it work on the system.
It might not be the best version, but Doom on GBA was magical back in the day. Mainly because it meant you were able to play Doom on a handheld for what I think was the first time ever, at least in an official capacity. And everybody needs to be able to play Doom wherever they are in the world. Great vid, as always!
Jesus Christ, that Medal of Honor game. As soon as I saw the title I said "No, no way." ...And then I thought about it and realized that made total sense for all the wrong reasons.
MoH Underground is like if you filmed mud and grass and then rendered it into a 100 pixel video. It's unbelievable that it exists. And yeah these games are such a product of their time haha. They shouldn't exist, but they do.
The Ecks vs Sever movie sucked awful hard. I actually played the first game and got excited for the film... d'oh. Also it looks like the revolver in Serious Sam animates better on the GBA than on the PC.
Same! I'd worked all summer on the farm saving my money for my first Pc game. My grandma took me to Walmart where I picked this up then later on picked up Morrowind and Sega smash pack vol.2
Wait, someone ported DOOM to a car! How? How does that work? Do you move by driving and shot by honking the horn? How many accidents and speeding ticks does it cause?
I borrowed Dark Arena from my friend in middle school. It's pretty fun. I... never returned it to him. Hey Matt, if you and your like dozen ginger siblings are still out there, I've still got your Bomberman Tournament, too. I don't know if you even still have a GBA to play them, and I think there's a third one that I both lost and forgot about since, but I've kept them all this time. Sorry I never gave them back. Time hasn't been kind to my memory but I think we just started going to different classes on opposite sides of the school, then next year you were at a different school. Can't remember for sure though. It's been like 20 years.
Back in the early 2000s, my ma and I didn't have much money. Our PC was shite and about the only significant games system I had was the GBA. I'm a shooter fan as well. So I got Ecks vs Sever, Doom 2, and Wolfenstein and played the absolute shit out of them. I recently picked up an emulation device and am enjoying these games as much as I did back then. It's weird how I can literally play Doom on anything, and here I am happy as pie with the GBA port that I played as a kid.
its a very retro system, heck early fps didn't even use a mouse. doom couldn't aim up or down, it was like the enemies where a giant pillar so you could hit them no matter how high or low you or your enemies where.
Duke Nukem Advance was good. Good framerate, good gameplay, fun levels. Medal of Honor Underground is the worst game ive ever played And I quite liked Ecks vs Sever 2
I remember back then there was even a challenge on a German TV games show called GIGA Games where they had a bet with someone if Duke Nukem Forever will be released before Duke Nukem Advance. :D A bet that was impossible to win of course.
played fps, tps on psx without analog believe me it does work retro games are not that fast paced compared to the modern fps nowadays d-pads are very much effective for those classics.
Doesn't it defeat the purpose to not play them on a game boy? Most of what makes me interested in it as a topic is how the controller layout impacts the playing. Great video though.
I played most of these, starting with Dark Arena. I enjoy collecting many of these GBA games because they're visually different from the sidescrolling games that dominated the system, not to mention games like Driver 2, Spy Hunter, Max Payne, Killswitch and Tekken Advanced.
Okay, for your idea, Medal of Honor infiltrater has it's own FP view. Sure that doesn't sound like much, though I am saying that it's much more respectful to that it try to reinitiate the classic rail shoot-em-ups (not sure of the term), which works for this portable nature. It also has some impressive FMV scenes albeit a little compressed.
I regularly play the gba port of doom just because its sooo stunning to see it run soo good and look amazing on such a underpowered old handheld. the gba is hands down my fav handheld ever and doom just makes it EVEN better💙
The homebrew port of Wolfenstein 3D for the Genesis is so much better than the GBA version. It's almost 100% as good as the DOS port. The music and sound effects are very good, the controls are good, the graphics don't tear, and the framerate is good.
The GBA port of wolfenstein 3d looked accurate to me. In the day, on a PC, you'd resize the screen to smaller to get better frame rate, disable sound, screw with RAM refresh rates, and have several copies of CONFIG.SYS, whatever to play! My early experience on the computer at home, best frame rate was a 5x4 inch screen shrink(14" monitor) and internal sound speaker on a 286 clone. no music on internal speaker, as with wth GBA port. Thanks for the video, brings back memories of computer shows filled with everone playing demos of Wolf3d on PCs for sale!
Yeah it's weird hey, I'm going through a surge of views so that's pretty awesome. I just wish people would tell me why they dislike, I wanna improve! Haha
When I saw the halved horizontal resolution, the first thing I thought of was the Atari Jaguar port. I wasn't surprised when he said that the levels were also taken from that version.
Even now, it's really tough to find good FPS on hendhelds in general. As a Vita owner, I have 2 that I can claim as the best. Star Wars Battlefront 2 and Resistance Burning Skies. There are others, but those are my 2 favorite.
I couldn't stand FPSs on GBA. They were so horrible to me back then. I even tried recently playing them on my Raspberry Pi 4 with a controller but still not enjoyable by any means. 😑👎
The red faction engine was the tits. In Versus mode you could use rocket launchers and I think mines to destroy the enviorment. You could destroy the opponents cover or dig a fucking deep hole with a rocket launcher. It was awesome. Like mincraft with rocket launchers.
>Back Track being a "Doom-esque shooter" It's a Wolfenstein clone. It doesn't have varied elevation, variable lighting, or walls with holes in them. Those might seem like silly distinctions... I mean, walls with holes? What? But in Wolfenstein and Wolf clones, there were no windows you could shoot through. There were in Doom, though. Doom also introduced floors that could be set to a different elevation than the rest of the stage - allowing for platforms that could rise and fall - and different light levels throughout the stage and lighting settings, such as strobing and flickering. Dark Arena, which you mention later, utilizes all of these things, so you are correct in naming it a Doom clone. (Obviously, not all holes in walls are windows... thus walls with holes in them.)
Medal of Honor II: Underground is one of my favorite FPS games ever (On the PS1 of course) so I've always been aware of that atrocious GBA port, I'm glad it's finally getting the infamous attention it deserves, it's just too shit to be forgotten.
i dont know if i would call it a con that the door opening button is the same as the shoot button, thats how metroid works pretty much. its understandable on a gba.
Another great video! Well structured, fair and thorough. I own both Dooms and Duke Nukem Advance, and it is great being able to play them on the go. I will probably give the rest a miss, especially with your synopses.
I remember seeing a tech-demo video for a GBA engine port of Quake once, back in 2002. It looked pretty impressive but to be honest i doubt it would have made much sense on the GBA, who really was barely capable of handling 2,5D Games (3D games that are still using 2D technology to create a 3D effect). So games like Dark Arena and Doom were great but Duke Nukem Advance already showed that it really wasn't a good 3D platform. That being said, Doom was my first GBA game :P Simply because it was the first time Doom could be legally bought in Germany since the uncut version was still banned back then and the GBA version was censored. It was still tons of fun to play on the GBA. Thou not so much on the dark original GBA display.
That's a really interesting fact about GBA Doom being the first legal Doom release in Germany, maybe that's why it was censored? (But then why did the whole world get a censored version hm)
Well German censors never really liked violence in videogames against humans and / or human-like creatures. A lot of things have changed since then. For the better part i must say. However Zombies are still a huge problem. The censorship of Doom for the GBA was probably a request by Nintendo. It also resulted in a lower age rating of the GBA version in Germany (USK16) while the uncut version was rated USK18. That included the PC version as well as the console ports for the Jaguar, the 32X, the Saturn and the Playstation and even the SNES version. All of which were banned in Germany (including Doom II) since 1994 till 2011 when it was successfully de-banned and newly rated. This time uncut as USK16 which means teenagers at the age of 16 are legally allowed to buy the uncut version of Doom now, in every version. Even original releases can be obtained now as used copies. Before that selling these on ebay for example was not allowed for German citizens, unless you imported them.
Gotta disagree on the Doom ports, I found them to be severely disappointing. It may be because I had been such a huge fan of the original, but the GBA version's simplified level geometry, censored graphics (green blood for all!), removed features/items, dramatically simplified texture variety, low framerates (particularly in open busy areas), and low resolution was particularly and made it an all around terrible experience as somebody who wanted to enjoy one of his favourite games on the go. The subject of low resolution is worth going a bit deeper. PC users of the era were used to playing the game at 640x480 or higher, although the DOS version had run at 320x200. The GBA resolution, you might think, wouldn't be that much worse off than the DOS version, except it was. The GBA screen itself is 240x160, but when you subtract the HUD and account for the fact that the GBA port runs at half resolution, you're actually looking at a resolution of only 120x128 pixels, practically a postage stamp. To make matters worse, the game would sometimes dynamically reduce the resolution of parts of the screen even more for long distances (although I can't remember if this was limited to Doom 2). Overall, I'd consider the GBA port to be one of the poorer console ports, and that's saying something considering the SNES port didn't even feature floor/ceiling textures.
yeah it wasn't the greatest game on the GBA, though despite that i always found it technically impressive, since playable 3d wasn't common on the platform.
They have better graphics on the gb itself+ runs faster with more fps! Controls are not the best, but still, i remember when i played 007 ! god damn, it was a fucking masterpiece !
