This game right here in 2006 on X360 is really the last time I remember being blown away by what a new console could pull off. It really felt "next-gen".
Booting up GRAW for the first time after the midnight launch of the 360 here was one of those moments I’ll never forget. Also that e3 demo of GRAW was when Ubisoft was starting to show things that didn’t fully line up to the press event demos. I remember walking towards the US embassy in Mexico in the game. It Looked amazing but nothing like what was shown to be “gameplay” that year and the year prior at E3. Still it did look amazing, just different/a slight downgrade technically but not something a “regular” player would perhaps even notice.
@@duxnihilo yes it was amazing. I miss those days of true “leaps” between generations instead of these days. Sure technically the hurdles being jumped over are at times amazing but the progression is just less big ticket items and more iterative/granular. Also; let’s not forget the, “oh it’s available now” stealth drop of the Fight Night Round 3 demo! The KOs in that game were amazing. Also was it ever confirmed that when Fight Night Round 3 debuted at the PS3 conference that it was actually running on 360 devkits? That was the scuttlebutt that came out after the fact at least.
Same. The graphics were unbelievable at the time, especially as someone who didn't have a gaming PC back then. Sadly, it would also be the last time I was blown away by the graphical leap of a new console generation.
There's GRAW 1 AND 2. And the multiple versions of them by system. It's same thing with GRAW 2, I'm pretty sure, multiple versions. Then there's Future Soldier which is still on Steam and U-Play. That's pretty good, more of the same. You have your old school GR games too, but they're tough. Would be nice to get a new GRAW game though, for sure. I agree. Not that I necessarily have the confidence modern Ubisoft could pull it off.
The 360 version is backwards compatible on the Xbox Series X and actually runs at 60fps, its amazing. Definitive way to play the game. Same with GRAW 2 as well. Future Soldier(closest we ever got to GRAW 3) is also back compat but still runs at 30fps I think.
Technically not FPS Boost - which specifically refers to doubling the framerate cap - as the game always allowed 60 fps, though rarely hit it on the 360. The Xbox One X and the Series X/S can hold it at 60 fps no problem, like you said (and was mentioned in the video too).
This game felt like the future, specially the 360 version indeed. It was so immersive. The sound design was also superb. When you run you can actually hear your different gear rattling.
GRAW on the Xbox 360 was the first time I'd experienced a game where you could shoot through walls with a sufficiently powerful rifle. Dunno why but that blew my socks off at the time.
The 360 versions of G.R.A.W. 1 and 2 are some of my favorite games. I still enjoy playing them and fondly remember originally going through them. I bought G.R.A.W. 2 on PC, and it's interesting, but I wasn't quite as into it and never got too far. But a big issue was how it ran with a stuttery frame rate for me, which is probably the main reason I didn't stick with it. As much as I love The Division, I don't see it as much of a Tom Clancy game in the same vein as classic Ghost Recon, Rainbow Six, and Splinter Cell games, and did everything in Wildlands and played a lot of Breakpoint, but those games do not compare to the games that came before. When they canceled Patriots and announced Rainbow Six Siege and how it was an online multiplayer game, to me it was all downhill. I love The Division, I loved Splinter Cell: Conviction, and liked Blacklist and Future Soldier, but after those Ubisoft went in the wrong direction. I just wish we got campaigns again without as much focus on online play as they go too big and rely on mindless fun which you'll notice if you explore Auroa and even Wildlands, with its repetition and silly, superfluous side quests. I hope the remake of Splinter Cell is getting taken care of because all signs point to trouble right now.
The 360 versions of the GRAW games definitely needs a remaster for modern platforms. One of the best militarty shooter campaigns ever, the multiplayer was also a lot of fun.
Legendary game. It truly looked amazing for the time and it's probably the last time I was truly blown away. Thank you for doing these videos; they're very special.
Then I must step in. Subnautica base building blew me away LoU1 seamless transitions blew me away The UE5 city demo blew me away and star citizen seamless indoors to outdoors transitions blew me away
There's also an OG Xbox version which isn't that terrible lol. It actually got animations and some physics, and your teammates bodycam. Clearly the PS2 version was a cutdown port of the Xbox version.
This was my first game on the Xbox 360 and on the back of the box it said, "a masterclass in what the 360 can do." They weren't wrong, and I absolutely loved that quote. My second game was PGR 3 and then I got Condemned: Criminal Origins. Which to this day is still one of my all time favourite games. The next game I got after that was the legendary Gears of War. And I ran that game through a surround sound home cinema kit. It was absolutely nuts. From what I can remember you can dive and slide in this game, which was pretty cool.
The thing about GR:AW on PC, it was not only pretty much unsurpassed graphically until Crysis came around; and unlike Crysis, it ran smooth as Irish butter even on a midrange gaming PC/ It was also one of the last games to rely more on actual polygons rather than texture mapping techniques.
There is a distinct and special joy in listening to two specialists in their element breaking things down, regardless of my own familiarity. Never even heard of this game but I will forever be here for these comparisons and conversations. In today's squalid sea of content, DF/DF Retro are islands of pure Good.
I remember that I knew about this game after watching the movie Disturbia, in which Shia Labeuf's character, Kale, plays it online on Xbox Live. Purchased it myself a couple of weeks later, it was amazing!
Takes me back to times when next-gen was a thing. I wanted to play X360 version so bad bacause PC version looked cheap in comparison (same with NFSMW) and I couldn't run it properly on my outdated Radeon 9600 128mb.
Co-op was incredible in this game with the camera of your pals streaming in real time. Always having positional awareness of your team made triangulating opponents on the map so easy and fun. Made my sessions feal more like couch co-op than online play.
Fun fact, the devs for the PC version started Overkill Software when GRIN was shutdown and led to making Payday The Heist and Payday 2. It's kind of annoying knowing that both Payday games and GRAW PC used the same Diesel engine, yet GRAW seemingly handled large maps better than Payday 2 ever could.
Played a lot of this on co-op on PC. So goddamn hard, you die of only few hits and no respawn in the middle of a mission, just stare a blank screen until others pass or fail the mission. It was very tense and frustrating and fun, but we never succeeded on the last missions and had to cheese a bit on others with rifle grenades. Found out much later the PC and 360 versions are completely different.
I never made it more than a few missions in on PC, it's just way too easy to get one-shotted and have to start the entire mission over, especially when you don't get a UAV and are effectively going in blind. You had to creep and inch around every corner, and then a mortar lands on your head from a thousand yards away.
I have never clicked on a video this fast. Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six are two of my most beloved franchises growing up. I’m presently playing through Breakpoint after picking it up on a Steam sale.
GRAW 360 doesn't look like an 18-year-old game. I miss the 7th generation when games were pushing more attention to detail, an emphasis on physics and destruction, etc.
Oh boy, the OG XBox and PS2 versions of this game were a trip back in the day! Truly the final glory days of ports being buckwild and different to their main platform counterparts. The PC was just a weird mishmash of GRAW 360 assets and silly tech gimmicks in a new engine. Weird stuff.
@@devostripes5964 eh? I didn’t say it was good mate, just said it was a “trip”. I only played the last-gen ports of GRAW as technical curiosities anyway so I have no idea if the last-gen versions of GRAW stand up.
One of the first games I played on my 360 back in 2006, along with Hitman Blood money. Will never forget how amazed I was at gaming. Will always be of of the pivotal moments of gaming for me
I would love to see more videos showing the cross-gen difference between the PS3/X360 and the PS2/GC/DC/Xbox, not only because the generational leap in this generation was huge but because the PS2 managed to live for a long time receiving games until 2014. Some games like Call of Duty 3, Tomb Raider: Underworld and Need for Speed: ProStreet really show how the PS2 hardware was already quite dated back in 2009 and was starting to struggle to run the same games as the PS3/X360/Wii (which justifies some late games being ports of PSP instead of PS3/X360 or even Wii version like SpiderMan: Web of Shadows and Toy Story 3 ), I really think it was an interesting time in the transition between generations.
Amen to all of this. And I really need to check out those ProStreet console games; the DS port was a showcase for what you can achieve with Nintendo's bizzaro version of the Sega Saturn. (512kb textures, quad rendering possible, and similar geometry counts as compared to the Saturn's best engines. But, the DS has true transparency, even if it suffers in resolution.) I can only imagine what two generations of progress beyond that modest target were able to achieve.
I remember as a kid, I played Advanced Warfighter 1 on PC and loved the game, then when AW2 came out, I decided to get it on the xbox 360, because I finally got my hands on one. All I remember was being angry at how AW2 was not like AW1 at all, just completely unaware that each console were just different versions lol. I was a dumb kid.
Holy cow you guys are hitting on all my favorite games recently, Mercenaries, GRAW, NFS: MW. This was the era right here, so many solid games launching together.
Not even gonna lie, seeing "Pee-Pee Filter" on the back of the box is what really convinced me to buy the game. The game made me GRAW all over the place, especially that one surprise explosion in Surround Sound the first time it happened.
Ubisoft was doing some weird stuff during this time. Splinter Cell: Double Agent also had a release where the PS2 version and Xbox 360 version were completely different games.
Ye I heard the 6th console gen version if Double Agent was much better game than the 7th gen Xbox 360/PS3 version. I guess back then it was still counted to be profitable to make even entirely different versions for last gen consoles because they still had big playerbase. But when you look at marketing from that time, Ubisoft clearly prioritized Xbox 360 version of GRAW in their advertising and it was the same thing with Xbox 360/PS3 version of Double Agent, I dont remember seeing them advertize last gen versions of those gamea at all back then
I didn't even know there was a console version of the game until the 360 version became backwards compatible on Xbox One. I only played the PC version that I got bundled with Geforce 8800GTS. There was like 2-3 games with PhysX support bundled with that card :D Oh btw there was ads in PC version too. I vividly remember an Axe ad on the first level.
I have very fond memories of this from the 360 era. I just found my old disc and tried it in the Series X..... WOW. It looks super clean and plays so well. I think I am going to have to play through this again, not just for nostalgia, but because it's a genuinely good game still
Great timing. I was never into Ghost Recon and I only just recently got into them with Breakpoint and Wildlands. Last week I went back and bought all the older games and have been playing through Advanced Warfighter this week (XBox version as I prefer the third person setup).
4:14 There were OG Xbox games like Sudeki (2004) and Far Cry: Instincts (2005) that used real-time shadow mapping for the environment and characters well before GRAW, albeit with a more aggressive fade-in (with either no cascading or very limited cascading). Even Jurassic Park: Trespasser (1998) uses shadow mapping on the vast majority of objects populating the game world and in a way that suggests it isn’t all just baked-in (shadows cast from both dynamic/physicalized and static objects all perfectly blend into each other). That’s without mentioning that it’s all done in software rendering (CPU only) along with per-pixel grayscale bump mapping.
Fact check: Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter came out in 2006, the same year as the 8800GTX. The 8800GTX was much more advanced than the hardware on the 360. In fact, the 8800gtx I bought came bundled with GRAW.
@@dualpapayas well yes, the 360 came out in 2005. next gen for PC began with unified shader GPUS in late 2006 - thats what PC gamers were buying to play games like GRAW and oblivion.
This level of destruction is missing from modern games. I remember when physics were such a driving force in games. Around the time the half life 2 demos came to light all games were pushing for physics… then somewhere along the line the thirst for it disappeared. Far Cry 6 is a great looking game but the destructive environments are so limited..
I remember buying this for 360, when i still had a CRT. Part way through I upgraded to a hd TV using VGA, as I didn't want horrible ghosting that LCD had at the time through hdi, and man the resolution Jump and clarity was mind blowing, that it felt like a different game.
that brief era where the 360 was more powerful than almost all gaming pcs (at least in terms of gpu grunt) was really special. games like this, condemned criminal origins, call of duty 2 and gears of war 1 were all really outstanding next gen showcases. (obviously could play condemned or cod 2 on a pc but it took a pretty beefy rig to hit a steady 60 fps)
For this Game, i kicked my CRT in my Retro-Gaming Room and buyed a Toshiba HD-Ready Flat Screen for way to much Money. But the first time i fired up my 360 with this Blockbuster, i was blown away by this Graphic and Clearity-Boost. Amazing Game-Milestone for me.
For the 360 version, Ubisoft Paris worked on the Single Player campaign while Red Storm did the Coop/PvP Multiplayer. It would have been interesting to also take a look at the MP mode for the 360 since it was essentially a completely different game compared to the campaign in terms of graphics assets and even gameplay mechanics.
GRAW was the first game I played that completely blew me away. I remember sitting cross legged infront of my old TV playing the fuck out of the MP mode, talking to my teammates using the X360 "headset" lol. At the time we had a dail up connection, on top of that I stayed in a country with no local servers, so I had to connect to European servers to enjoy MP. I didn't care about latency etc. I was having a blast.
Interesting. I want to check out the PC version knowing Grin worked on it. I liked their Bionic Commando reboot that not many people seemed to like. Wanted: Weapons of Fate was also pretty decent. Their Terminator game, however, was pretty awful.
That can't be right. Starbreeze already existed back then (Riddick!) and Grin later made a Terminator game and maybe also Bionic Commando. Or do you mean the people working there swapped names?
@forasago Grin went bust and Overkill was created and they released Payday. Starbreeze released Syndicate and most of the team left for Machinegames. So Starbreeze then made Brothers with Josef Fares, you know the it takes two guy, but had financial issues. So they merge with Overkill which then almost finished Payday 2. So Overkill became the new Starbreeze and took their spot on the stock market.
I remembered GRAW and Need for Speed Most Wanted on Xbox 360 were a show piece next-gen looking launch/launch period titles for the console, I was drooling all over game magazine at how amazing their preview screenshots looked and still is minus the drooling to this day. PGR3 and Most Wanted were the most impressive looking launch titles though, nothing screams next-gen more than those two in late 2005.
I miss when making a big impact on the culture, filling the game with detail and nuance and pushing the industry with new features were what sold games. Now it's literally cosmetic skins for games that have half as much effort put into them that dominate most publishers minds. This sucks.
I do miss the OG GR games but GRAW was pretty great. 16 player coop against AI waves with splitscreen with a friend was some of the best and most impressive mutiplayer I’ve ever played.
Almost 20 years later, why don't we have this level of attention to detail and destruction physics like this anymore? It's like we went backwards in these regards.
I notice the same effect of animations without interpolation in various games of enmies far away, like Dying Light with the big guys that throw rocks at you
Please look at Morrowind on the original Xbox, or DOOM 3 on Xbox. You've done both PC versions, but the console version were much more impressive in terms of what they accomplished.
A video about the details, technology, techniques and attention to ps3/360 era games that hold up well vs modern games or even surpass would be interesting.
When graw on pc released, i had to run crossfire with x1950xtx to max out the settings at 19x12. I distinctly remember this game looking better on pc than what's presented here.
I love all of these types of major and minor details that developers put into their games. Especially the details that may never be discovered. It shows their love for the project.
Love GRAW on my 360, replayed it not that long ago. Still a great game. I had no idea that the PC version was this different, will have to check that out.
I think what bothers me most about what was shown of the PS2 version is that one of the objective messages says "Reach the President's last know position" instead of "Reach the President's last *known* position."
I love how recent this video is. I just finished building a triple SLI 8800GTX rig with the GRAW ASUS cards. The pee-pee filter seems to set the tone for this drab Mexican environment. Perhaps a little bit of pollution. It's like how The Matrix used somewhat of a green filter like the code.
Game budgets kept increasing, necessitating larger audiences. This kinda game was always gonna be too niche for the larger budgets of more modern games. Hopefully that changes one of these days (in either direction, lower budget AAA games or broader acceptance of nerdier shooters). GRAW was one of the earliest "next gen" games I played on the 360 and still have fond memories of single player and co-op.
The crazy part about all of this, is that they actually predicted the camp pattern the Us army would use in the future. At the time I thing they had the digital camp pattern, and in modern times they have the pattern they wear in the game.
GRAW was the reason I got an Xbox 360. It blew everything on PC away for its time. Also, GRAW came out after Everything or Nothing, as well, which also had a cover system. So, funny thing with the PS2 and Xbox versions of GRAW. Ubisoft didn't record any unique dialogue for those ports, so during missions, characters will refer to objectives and places that aren't in the actual level. Kind of wild.
My brother was the first person I knew that had a 360 and he had this and Fight Night. He also picked up a 42 inch plasma with the console and... I was blown away by everything that I was seeing. Both games felt like a massive step up from the previous generation consoles.
This game right here in 2006 on X360 is really the last time I remember being blown away by what a new console could pull off. It really felt "next-gen".
Booting up GRAW for the first time after the midnight launch of the 360 here was one of those moments I’ll never forget. Also that e3 demo of GRAW was when Ubisoft was starting to show things that didn’t fully line up to the press event demos. I remember walking towards the US embassy in Mexico in the game. It Looked amazing but nothing like what was shown to be “gameplay” that year and the year prior at E3. Still it did look amazing, just different/a slight downgrade technically but not something a “regular” player would perhaps even notice.
Gears of War was released the same year and it blew me away, though.
@@duxnihilo yes it was amazing. I miss those days of true “leaps” between generations instead of these days. Sure technically the hurdles being jumped over are at times amazing but the progression is just less big ticket items and more iterative/granular.
Also; let’s not forget the, “oh it’s available now” stealth drop of the Fight Night Round 3 demo! The KOs in that game were amazing.
Also was it ever confirmed that when Fight Night Round 3 debuted at the PS3 conference that it was actually running on 360 devkits?
That was the scuttlebutt that came out after the fact at least.
@@gokhan7482 Yup
Gears of War 3 looked insane
Same. In fact I bought the 360 for this game.
My first ever Xbox 360 game. I'll never forget how cool it felt controlling the UAV. Wish we could get another single player focused Ghost Recon.
Same. The graphics were unbelievable at the time, especially as someone who didn't have a gaming PC back then. Sadly, it would also be the last time I was blown away by the graphical leap of a new console generation.
Multiplayer was great tho. Terrorist mode as well in coop
I agree with you totally. The leap from xbox to this game on the 360 was mind blowing unlike the 360 to the xbox one and so on.@CaptainKenway
There's GRAW 1 AND 2. And the multiple versions of them by system. It's same thing with GRAW 2, I'm pretty sure, multiple versions. Then there's Future Soldier which is still on Steam and U-Play. That's pretty good, more of the same. You have your old school GR games too, but they're tough. Would be nice to get a new GRAW game though, for sure. I agree. Not that I necessarily have the confidence modern Ubisoft could pull it off.
We had a great group of guys online for this on 360. We used to marvel at our American buddy's 10mb Internet connection 😅
The 360 version is backwards compatible on the Xbox Series X and actually runs at 60fps, its amazing. Definitive way to play the game. Same with GRAW 2 as well. Future Soldier(closest we ever got to GRAW 3) is also back compat but still runs at 30fps I think.
Technically not FPS Boost - which specifically refers to doubling the framerate cap - as the game always allowed 60 fps, though rarely hit it on the 360. The Xbox One X and the Series X/S can hold it at 60 fps no problem, like you said (and was mentioned in the video too).
Think its 720p though?
Yeah it’s fantastic
If only there was an online community to play with
It's a damn shame the Xenia Canary emulator team has damned this game to be forgotten for some bizarre reason.
This game felt like the future, specially the 360 version indeed. It was so immersive. The sound design was also superb. When you run you can actually hear your different gear rattling.
GRAW on the Xbox 360 was the first time I'd experienced a game where you could shoot through walls with a sufficiently powerful rifle. Dunno why but that blew my socks off at the time.
Perfect Dark did that on n64 believe it or not.
The 360 versions of G.R.A.W. 1 and 2 are some of my favorite games. I still enjoy playing them and fondly remember originally going through them. I bought G.R.A.W. 2 on PC, and it's interesting, but I wasn't quite as into it and never got too far. But a big issue was how it ran with a stuttery frame rate for me, which is probably the main reason I didn't stick with it. As much as I love The Division, I don't see it as much of a Tom Clancy game in the same vein as classic Ghost Recon, Rainbow Six, and Splinter Cell games, and did everything in Wildlands and played a lot of Breakpoint, but those games do not compare to the games that came before.
When they canceled Patriots and announced Rainbow Six Siege and how it was an online multiplayer game, to me it was all downhill. I love The Division, I loved Splinter Cell: Conviction, and liked Blacklist and Future Soldier, but after those Ubisoft went in the wrong direction. I just wish we got campaigns again without as much focus on online play as they go too big and rely on mindless fun which you'll notice if you explore Auroa and even Wildlands, with its repetition and silly, superfluous side quests.
I hope the remake of Splinter Cell is getting taken care of because all signs point to trouble right now.
I feel you brother
You can never go wrong with Digital Foundry Time Capsule and DF Retro, the best series on the channel, keep them coming John
The 360 versions of the GRAW games definitely needs a remaster for modern platforms. One of the best militarty shooter campaigns ever, the multiplayer was also a lot of fun.
They should have done a remaster last generation, Ubisoft today would create a online only game that you don’t own
I would say Ghost Recon Summit Strike had a better campaign. But who cares both games are amazing.
@@PegLegManlet Indeed the Xbox version Ghost Recon 2 and its expansion is also being lost to time and more should experience it
why? its already 4K60fps, no?
@@MrVoland44 the campaign is, multiplayer is still 30.
Legendary game. It truly looked amazing for the time and it's probably the last time I was truly blown away. Thank you for doing these videos; they're very special.
Then I must step in. Subnautica base building blew me away LoU1 seamless transitions blew me away The UE5 city demo blew me away and star citizen seamless indoors to outdoors transitions blew me away
There's also an OG Xbox version which isn't that terrible lol. It actually got animations and some physics, and your teammates bodycam. Clearly the PS2 version was a cutdown port of the Xbox version.
This was my first game on the Xbox 360 and on the back of the box it said, "a masterclass in what the 360 can do." They weren't wrong, and I absolutely loved that quote. My second game was PGR 3 and then I got Condemned: Criminal Origins. Which to this day is still one of my all time favourite games. The next game I got after that was the legendary Gears of War. And I ran that game through a surround sound home cinema kit. It was absolutely nuts. From what I can remember you can dive and slide in this game, which was pretty cool.
The thing about GR:AW on PC, it was not only pretty much unsurpassed graphically until Crysis came around; and unlike Crysis, it ran smooth as Irish butter even on a midrange gaming PC/
It was also one of the last games to rely more on actual polygons rather than texture mapping techniques.
Ehhhhh GR:AW didn't run great on PC at the time. This video shows this. It was OK at best
Oh fuck, I'm old now.
The dinosaur of the last millennium.
That's a good thing
Played this when I was 16 years old. Now, I’m 31 😅
There are adults who are younger than this game. Let that sink in. :)
I was 26 when I played this on 360 in 2006😮
There is a distinct and special joy in listening to two specialists in their element breaking things down, regardless of my own familiarity. Never even heard of this game but I will forever be here for these comparisons and conversations. In today's squalid sea of content, DF/DF Retro are islands of pure Good.
I remember that I knew about this game after watching the movie Disturbia, in which Shia Labeuf's character, Kale, plays it online on Xbox Live.
Purchased it myself a couple of weeks later, it was amazing!
Takes me back to times when next-gen was a thing. I wanted to play X360 version so bad bacause PC version looked cheap in comparison (same with NFSMW) and I couldn't run it properly on my outdated Radeon 9600 128mb.
This brings back so many memories! Great video as always! Cheers from Brasil
Co-op was incredible in this game with the camera of your pals streaming in real time. Always having positional awareness of your team made triangulating opponents on the map so easy and fun. Made my sessions feal more like couch co-op than online play.
Fun fact, the devs for the PC version started Overkill Software when GRIN was shutdown and led to making Payday The Heist and Payday 2. It's kind of annoying knowing that both Payday games and GRAW PC used the same Diesel engine, yet GRAW seemingly handled large maps better than Payday 2 ever could.
Played a lot of this on co-op on PC. So goddamn hard, you die of only few hits and no respawn in the middle of a mission, just stare a blank screen until others pass or fail the mission. It was very tense and frustrating and fun, but we never succeeded on the last missions and had to cheese a bit on others with rifle grenades.
Found out much later the PC and 360 versions are completely different.
I never made it more than a few missions in on PC, it's just way too easy to get one-shotted and have to start the entire mission over, especially when you don't get a UAV and are effectively going in blind. You had to creep and inch around every corner, and then a mortar lands on your head from a thousand yards away.
@@moosemaimer yeah gotta spam that quick save.
I have never clicked on a video this fast. Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six are two of my most beloved franchises growing up. I’m presently playing through Breakpoint after picking it up on a Steam sale.
Please consider comparing Splinter Cell Chaos Theory on PS2 and PC. They're very different, most people don't know.
For some reason it blows my mind that Graw released on the same console as gta 5.
that fucking intro music hit me like a brick wall. God damn Jet Force Gemini
GRAW 360 doesn't look like an 18-year-old game. I miss the 7th generation when games were pushing more attention to detail, an emphasis on physics and destruction, etc.
sad physics and destruction are gone in most modern games. a step backwards. looking at you battlefield.
Oh boy, the OG XBox and PS2 versions of this game were a trip back in the day! Truly the final glory days of ports being buckwild and different to their main platform counterparts. The PC was just a weird mishmash of GRAW 360 assets and silly tech gimmicks in a new engine. Weird stuff.
Sonic Unleashed came out in 2008 with a really different PS2/Wii version, so GRAW in 2006 wasn't quite the end of the trend yet
I don't know what you're talking about, The PS2 version was easily the worst, the PC version is flawed but infinitely superior to the PS2 version
@@devostripes5964 eh? I didn’t say it was good mate, just said it was a “trip”. I only played the last-gen ports of GRAW as technical curiosities anyway so I have no idea if the last-gen versions of GRAW stand up.
Eh? The PC version is much more like the og GR and R6 games.
@@Spr1ggan87 better? Dude (I’m assuming) it’s basically a different game.
This is peak digital foundry
Disagree. John's actual DF retro videos complete with the historical archive footage are peak DF. They actually require effort.
@@jez49647Word, always John’s long form DF Retro videos
@@jez49647johns legendary DF retros are how I stumbled upon this channel
I still remember the first time I played GRAW and being blown away by how good it looked.
One of the first games I played on my 360 back in 2006, along with Hitman Blood money. Will never forget how amazed I was at gaming. Will always be of of the pivotal moments of gaming for me
I would love to see more videos showing the cross-gen difference between the PS3/X360 and the PS2/GC/DC/Xbox, not only because the generational leap in this generation was huge but because the PS2 managed to live for a long time receiving games until 2014.
Some games like Call of Duty 3, Tomb Raider: Underworld and Need for Speed: ProStreet really show how the PS2 hardware was already quite dated back in 2009 and was starting to struggle to run the same games as the PS3/X360/Wii (which justifies some late games being ports of PSP instead of PS3/X360 or even Wii version like SpiderMan: Web of Shadows and Toy Story 3 ), I really think it was an interesting time in the transition between generations.
Amen to all of this.
And I really need to check out those ProStreet console games; the DS port was a showcase for what you can achieve with Nintendo's bizzaro version of the Sega Saturn. (512kb textures, quad rendering possible, and similar geometry counts as compared to the Saturn's best engines. But, the DS has true transparency, even if it suffers in resolution.)
I can only imagine what two generations of progress beyond that modest target were able to achieve.
@@juststatedtheobvious9633I actually think NFS Carboon looks way better than any other Need for Speed game on the Nintendo DS.
Damn watching this made me realise that I really miss those early Xbox 360 years
Best years in gaming for a lot of people including myself.
I remember as a kid, I played Advanced Warfighter 1 on PC and loved the game, then when AW2 came out, I decided to get it on the xbox 360, because I finally got my hands on one. All I remember was being angry at how AW2 was not like AW1 at all, just completely unaware that each console were just different versions lol. I was a dumb kid.
0:54 Man. That Matrix demo looked awesome even back then
Holy cow you guys are hitting on all my favorite games recently, Mercenaries, GRAW, NFS: MW. This was the era right here, so many solid games launching together.
Not even gonna lie, seeing "Pee-Pee Filter" on the back of the box is what really convinced me to buy the game. The game made me GRAW all over the place, especially that one surprise explosion in Surround Sound the first time it happened.
Ubisoft was doing some weird stuff during this time. Splinter Cell: Double Agent also had a release where the PS2 version and Xbox 360 version were completely different games.
Ye I heard the 6th console gen version if Double Agent was much better game than the 7th gen Xbox 360/PS3 version.
I guess back then it was still counted to be profitable to make even entirely different versions for last gen consoles because they still had big playerbase.
But when you look at marketing from that time, Ubisoft clearly prioritized Xbox 360 version of GRAW in their advertising and it was the same thing with Xbox 360/PS3 version of Double Agent, I dont remember seeing them advertize last gen versions of those gamea at all back then
Thanking you kindly for the tunes @ the beginning from jet force Gemini.👍
I didn't even know there was a console version of the game until the 360 version became backwards compatible on Xbox One. I only played the PC version that I got bundled with Geforce 8800GTS. There was like 2-3 games with PhysX support bundled with that card :D Oh btw there was ads in PC version too. I vividly remember an Axe ad on the first level.
I have very fond memories of this from the 360 era. I just found my old disc and tried it in the Series X..... WOW. It looks super clean and plays so well. I think I am going to have to play through this again, not just for nostalgia, but because it's a genuinely good game still
like many here this was my first game on the 360. I remember plugging it into my 32" Sony CRT and being like wow! Good times
Great timing. I was never into Ghost Recon and I only just recently got into them with Breakpoint and Wildlands. Last week I went back and bought all the older games and have been playing through Advanced Warfighter this week (XBox version as I prefer the third person setup).
4:14 There were OG Xbox games like Sudeki (2004) and Far Cry: Instincts (2005) that used real-time shadow mapping for the environment and characters well before GRAW, albeit with a more aggressive fade-in (with either no cascading or very limited cascading).
Even Jurassic Park: Trespasser (1998) uses shadow mapping on the vast majority of objects populating the game world and in a way that suggests it isn’t all just baked-in (shadows cast from both dynamic/physicalized and static objects all perfectly blend into each other). That’s without mentioning that it’s all done in software rendering (CPU only) along with per-pixel grayscale bump mapping.
Fact check: Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter came out in 2006, the same year as the 8800GTX. The 8800GTX was much more advanced than the hardware on the 360.
In fact, the 8800gtx I bought came bundled with GRAW.
@@dualpapayas well yes, the 360 came out in 2005. next gen for PC began with unified shader GPUS in late 2006 - thats what PC gamers were buying to play games like GRAW and oblivion.
Graw came Out on PC about half a year before the 8800 GTX came out
@@DigitalFoundry yes. and we waited to play the game on the new gtx cards, those of us who followed hardware news.
This level of destruction is missing from modern games. I remember when physics were such a driving force in games. Around the time the half life 2 demos came to light all games were pushing for physics… then somewhere along the line the thirst for it disappeared. Far Cry 6 is a great looking game but the destructive environments are so limited..
Every so often I revisit this game on the Xbox! Still such a good game
My 1st experience with ghost recon was advanced warfighter on pc, thought it was a technical showpiece back in the day. Multiplayer was mad back then
I just played this game on the Series X for the first time yesterday. still very good
28:48 the commander keen 4 soundtrack tho 😭💜
I remember buying this for 360, when i still had a CRT. Part way through I upgraded to a hd TV using VGA, as I didn't want horrible ghosting that LCD had at the time through hdi, and man the resolution Jump and clarity was mind blowing, that it felt like a different game.
funny you should post this. steam just added it to my account after a support ticket because it was somehow deleted. love the game.
that brief era where the 360 was more powerful than almost all gaming pcs (at least in terms of gpu grunt) was really special. games like this, condemned criminal origins, call of duty 2 and gears of war 1 were all really outstanding next gen showcases. (obviously could play condemned or cod 2 on a pc but it took a pretty beefy rig to hit a steady 60 fps)
For this Game, i kicked my CRT in my Retro-Gaming Room and buyed a Toshiba HD-Ready Flat Screen for way to much Money.
But the first time i fired up my 360 with this Blockbuster, i was blown away by this Graphic and Clearity-Boost. Amazing Game-Milestone for me.
For the 360 version, Ubisoft Paris worked on the Single Player campaign while Red Storm did the Coop/PvP Multiplayer. It would have been interesting to also take a look at the MP mode for the 360 since it was essentially a completely different game compared to the campaign in terms of graphics assets and even gameplay mechanics.
GRAW was the first game I played that completely blew me away. I remember sitting cross legged infront of my old TV playing the fuck out of the MP mode, talking to my teammates using the X360 "headset" lol. At the time we had a dail up connection, on top of that I stayed in a country with no local servers, so I had to connect to European servers to enjoy MP. I didn't care about latency etc. I was having a blast.
Grin and their engine is what became Starbreeze/Overkill with Payday and Payday 2.
Interesting. I want to check out the PC version knowing Grin worked on it. I liked their Bionic Commando reboot that not many people seemed to like. Wanted: Weapons of Fate was also pretty decent. Their Terminator game, however, was pretty awful.
That can't be right. Starbreeze already existed back then (Riddick!) and Grin later made a Terminator game and maybe also Bionic Commando. Or do you mean the people working there swapped names?
@forasago Grin went bust and Overkill was created and they released Payday. Starbreeze released Syndicate and most of the team left for Machinegames. So Starbreeze then made Brothers with Josef Fares, you know the it takes two guy, but had financial issues. So they merge with Overkill which then almost finished Payday 2. So Overkill became the new Starbreeze and took their spot on the stock market.
I remembered GRAW and Need for Speed Most Wanted on Xbox 360 were a show piece next-gen looking launch/launch period titles for the console, I was drooling all over game magazine at how amazing their preview screenshots looked and still is minus the drooling to this day.
PGR3 and Most Wanted were the most impressive looking launch titles though, nothing screams next-gen more than those two in late 2005.
I miss when making a big impact on the culture, filling the game with detail and nuance and pushing the industry with new features were what sold games. Now it's literally cosmetic skins for games that have half as much effort put into them that dominate most publishers minds. This sucks.
I do miss the OG GR games but GRAW was pretty great. 16 player coop against AI waves with splitscreen with a friend was some of the best and most impressive mutiplayer I’ve ever played.
I'd love this to be remastered.
Man. I played this game (and GRAW2) on PC more than it deserves. To me, it looked decidedly "next-gen", and it was crazy difficult.
Y'all unlocked some core memories today. I had the PC version first and then the PS3/360 version. Forgot all about the PC version
Almost 20 years later, why don't we have this level of attention to detail and destruction physics like this anymore? It's like we went backwards in these regards.
I notice the same effect of animations without interpolation in various games of enmies far away, like Dying Light with the big guys that throw rocks at you
I love these kinds of videos with Alex & John. Peak Vibes.
I absolutely loved you guys going through the damage of objects. I did not remember this at all playing it 18 years ago... Crazy to say that lol
I used to love Ghost Recon. I remember playing the first one over and over on PS2. Some missions I would finish only with a sniper in ghillie suit.
Please look at Morrowind on the original Xbox, or DOOM 3 on Xbox. You've done both PC versions, but the console version were much more impressive in terms of what they accomplished.
I loved this game so much when it first released!
Yo I recognize that place from the 2005 Demo! Its right in the heart of Mexico City, they even got a parody of a real bank building there wow
A video about the details, technology, techniques and attention to ps3/360 era games that hold up well vs modern games or even surpass would be interesting.
Oh man, i remember the first time i saw the trailer for this game back in the day for the brand new Xbox 360, it looked like "real life"... Dayum.
What a coincidence. I just started playing the360 version with a coupe of friends last week. Multiplayer coop campaign!! Still tense and fun!
When graw on pc released, i had to run crossfire with x1950xtx to max out the settings at 19x12. I distinctly remember this game looking better on pc than what's presented here.
Great memories of this on 360. Such a great game. I traded my PS2 for a 360 hard drive, extra controller, and this game.
Damn now my childhood is creeping into “retro”. This on the Xbox 360 back in the day was MIND BLOWING coming from PS2
IIRC Redstorm worked on the multiplayer portion - which btw, was amazing. 16 player co-op campaign is something that really needs to come back.
@20:16 Took me way too long to figure out the GRAW reference from the last DF Direct 😅🤣
I love all of these types of major and minor details that developers put into their games. Especially the details that may never be discovered. It shows their love for the project.
Physx on "High" on Assassin's Creed: Black Flag was an issue at launch and can still have issues years later.
“Most recent past” was 15 years ago for the closure of Grin.
I love this kind of videos, interesting and fun to watch can you guys do GTA IV comparison next?
Seeing that Ageia card in your Twitter post I instantly knew this video was coming.
The music on the PS2 clips hahaha.
We are Full Spectrum Dorks!
One of my fav games (360 version). GRAW2 as well. I knew the PS2 version was unique but not PC, wow
31:53 Rofl that soldier popping into existence. XD
I finished the PC version in co-op with a friend. It was amazing. A few years ago I finished the 360 version too. Both are excellent.
Love GRAW on my 360, replayed it not that long ago. Still a great game. I had no idea that the PC version was this different, will have to check that out.
This game when it launched on 360 was soooo good!
I think what bothers me most about what was shown of the PS2 version is that one of the objective messages says "Reach the President's last know position" instead of "Reach the President's last *known* position."
I love how recent this video is. I just finished building a triple SLI 8800GTX rig with the GRAW ASUS cards. The pee-pee filter seems to set the tone for this drab Mexican environment. Perhaps a little bit of pollution. It's like how The Matrix used somewhat of a green filter like the code.
Amazing - I also have a GRAW 8800 GTX. How did you find so many of them ?
@@DigitalFoundry eBay and shopgoodwill. It's taken some time for sure. There's a guy selling six on eBay right now I think.
Game budgets kept increasing, necessitating larger audiences. This kinda game was always gonna be too niche for the larger budgets of more modern games. Hopefully that changes one of these days (in either direction, lower budget AAA games or broader acceptance of nerdier shooters). GRAW was one of the earliest "next gen" games I played on the 360 and still have fond memories of single player and co-op.
11:18 - 11:34 I know it's just coincidence but the timing makes it seem like John is reeeally annoyed and exhausted by Alex's explanation.
"Okay..."
😂
The crazy part about all of this, is that they actually predicted the camp pattern the Us army would use in the future. At the time I thing they had the digital camp pattern, and in modern times they have the pattern they wear in the game.
man this was my game in the 360 I spend allot allot of hours playing online multiplayer , just amazing game it was
I owned the ATI x1950 pro AGPx8 version, such a good memories
GRAW was the reason I got an Xbox 360. It blew everything on PC away for its time. Also, GRAW came out after Everything or Nothing, as well, which also had a cover system.
So, funny thing with the PS2 and Xbox versions of GRAW. Ubisoft didn't record any unique dialogue for those ports, so during missions, characters will refer to objectives and places that aren't in the actual level. Kind of wild.
I got this game a few years after it came out on the 360 and was blown away had good it looked. Great game overall.
It's always a good time when John and Alex get together to talk about old school games.
The first game that impressed me on 360.
My brother was the first person I knew that had a 360 and he had this and Fight Night. He also picked up a 42 inch plasma with the console and... I was blown away by everything that I was seeing. Both games felt like a massive step up from the previous generation consoles.