What's the best coded game you've ever played.

Nah, I don't agree with that at all. It was built to cover the spectrum. The key was that it could run on such a wide range of gfx cards. Voodoo 2 perhaps, not the original. The key was I could play it on such a low spec machine and still have the lighting on was what made it impressive. If you like you games with AA etc then good for you, but to me, even at 640x480, the game was stunning to look at and better than anything else at the time.

Besides, when you say struggling, I see benchmarks of 60fps with a decent res and set to high quality.
 
Max Payne 2 is one of the best coded games i have played for a long time, it would run at very high settings and a swift framerate on quite old hardware.
 
Caustic said:
Nah, I don't agree with that at all. It was built to cover the spectrum. The key was that it could run on such a wide range of gfx cards. Voodoo 2 perhaps, not the original. The key was I could play it on such a low spec machine and still have the lighting on was what made it impressive. If you like you games with AA etc then good for you, but to me, even at 640x480, the game was stunning to look at and better than anything else at the time.

Besides, when you say struggling, I see benchmarks of 60fps with a decent res and set to high quality.
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with no AA! doom3 suffered from horrific jaggies. how can you not remember this? :eek:
 
for me i would say the UT engine was amazing.

it ran on almost anything. CPU rendering for the win :P ran perfectly on my voodoo 3 2000 PCI.

and i still to this day play that game. it can be configured for playing any res, easy to mod for and make maps. etc... it has everything that could still make it a very good game today.
 
I can't believe people are nominating Deus Ex and HL2, among others. The fact that Deus Ex is the best game I've ever played is irrelevant, it was still buggy :p

I'd say Far Cry, personally.
 
I was impressed with how the original Unreal Tournament and Jedi Knight performed online when using a modem. The games ran very smoothly when it was very common to have bad lag when playing online.
 
AWPC said:
Grand Prix4
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If "well coded" has suddenly been changed to mean "pretty graphics engine nailed down over the top of base code that was outdated in 1995" then yeah, GP4 is well coded :p There is a reason why it runs pretty well even on lower spec machines....it's still Grand Prix 2 underneath all the flashy stuff. Besides which, it's also chock full of bugs.

Going to throw Grand Prix Legends into the mix. Physics engine that is still damned good even +8 years after release, graphics engine that can be made to look very good indeed (GPLEA or the various mod team cars - 1965F1, 1969F1, upcoming 1966F1 and Cortinas - plus some of the best addon tracks and retextures), netcode that works well even on dial-up.
 
HL2, because I managed to run it at a steady framerate on a GF2, P3 800mhz and 512mb of ram. And it still looked brilliant.

UT2004 as well, looked good and played excellently even on my ancient old comp.

Flatout 2 as well, not only does is look absolutely stunning, it also had a fully destructible environment. And it got 60fps all the time, bar absolutely nothing, even with 8 people on screen destroying each other.
 
The original Quake simply for the fact that if you ran it on a 486 it would work fine, but you had to endure the ignominy of having the tortoise in the corner to remind you how slooooooow your machine was! :D
 
cavemanoc said:
The original Quake simply for the fact that if you ran it on a 486 it would work fine, but you had to endure the ignominy of having the tortoise in the corner to remind you how slooooooow your machine was! :D
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hehe agreed.

or just about any amiga flight sim by DID. given the kit they had to program for their work was amazing.

ID get a special mention too. :)

recently the best coded would go to maybe any of the 'themes' like theme hospital etc as they ran well on poor systems.
 
Prisoner Of War, by far. Because on the sys req's it said it needed these specs (minimum):
500MHz Processor
128MB RAM
16MB Video Card
My PC at the time had a 250MHz PIII, 64MB of RAM, and a 4 MB Integrated Graphics Card. The game worked 100% perfectly, with no lag. Back then, I had no idea about my system, and everything like that. Looking back I am extremely shocked that it worked so well!
 
Seems to me that the topic and what you are actually asking are two slightly different things - what you are really after is games with a good graphics:performance ratio, and not all such games are well coded.

KKrieger is what I would call pretty well coded, a FPS game with acceptable graphics jammed into <100k. Quake3 is also very good on the rendering front because it scales so well with a wide range of hardware. It doesn't plateau nearly as much on modern hardware as other games. Carmageddon deserves a mention too, not the best looking game by a long shot but coped very well with very open-ended environments.

As for games with excellent performance considering how good they look(ed), I'd suggest the following:

Flatout 2
Moto GP URT 3
Unreal Tournament
Painkiller
Max Payne 2
Screamer Rally (DOS glide baby!)
Forsaken (a real PSX beater)
 
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