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Half Life for 3DO?

Posted: Wed Apr 18, 2012 8:36 pm
by CJZEPP
Was there ever a half-life port to 3DO? There was going to be one for dreamcast.

Re: Half Life for 3DO?

Posted: Wed Apr 18, 2012 10:12 pm
by ArfredHitchcacku
CJZEPP wrote:Was there ever a half-life port to 3DO? There was going to be one for dreamcast.
OK I'm not the most hardcore expert ever on the topic but this one's easy to settle. Half-Life runs on a heavily modified version of the Quake 1 Engine known as GoldSrc. The game is intended to be played with filtered textures, that is 3D graphics that aren't comprised of blocky squares like all 3DO games but rather blurred and more realistic (we've gotten to quite an impressive point with modern games by now.) The game can be played with blocky textures which is known as Software Rendering, (as opposed to OpenGL) but even still it's an extremely demanding game. Quake 1 would be extremely demanding for the 3DO alone, and even Half-Life was demanding for the Dreamcast. (Lag, etc) Even if that could be ported with decent speed Half Life is a whole other story: the answer is no, it will never happen. Besides, it would need a homebrew developer, and there's just no point in going to the trouble given the systems capabilities, however powerful they might have been for the time.

I would like to see someone at least attempt Quake 1 though.

And I really hope you aren't trolling.

*EDIT* Seems more like a question of whether there WAS ever going to be one. No and no. The 3DO was long dead at that point.

Posted: Wed Apr 18, 2012 10:52 pm
by CJZEPP
Thanks for the info! No, I'm not trolling :( I am trying to get a 3do right now

Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2012 3:22 am
by T2KFreeker
Maybe it was a rumor, but I thought that there was supposed to originally going to be a port of Quake for the 3DO? I know Jaguar was supposed to get one, but I could have sworn I heard this somewhere . . .

Posted: Fri Apr 27, 2012 4:25 am
by ArfredHitchcacku
T2KFreeker wrote:Maybe it was a rumor, but I thought that there was supposed to originally going to be a port of Quake for the 3DO? I know Jaguar was supposed to get one, but I could have sworn I heard this somewhere . . .
Game companies constantly plan and consider things that know may never happen, so I'm sure it was at least brought up at id. The original game was released in 1996 so the 3DO wasn't QUITE dead at that point but despite the excellent royalty rates for developers it just wouldn't be very profitable. Although I still have no idea why the Playstation never saw it but the Sega Saturn and Nintendo 64 did.

Posted: Sat Apr 28, 2012 3:25 pm
by 3DO Experience
I would have liked to have seen Quake for 3DO, never heard any rumors of it though. I happen to have a copy of a pretty much finished Half-Life proto for Dreamcast but as I recall it has very long load times.

Posted: Sun May 13, 2012 3:08 pm
by Martin III
ArfredHitchcacku wrote:Game companies constantly plan and consider things that know may never happen, so I'm sure it was at least brought up at id. The original game was released in 1996 so the 3DO wasn't QUITE dead at that point but despite the excellent royalty rates for developers it just wouldn't be very profitable. Although I still have no idea why the Playstation never saw it but the Sega Saturn and Nintendo 64 did.
Apparently Lobotomy Software actually did start working on a PlayStation version after they were done with the Saturn version. I remember reading about it on Wikipedia's Sega Saturn article; if you check out the cited source you'll probably find an explanation for why it was canceled.

Personally I always thought Quake looked rather blah; I'd much rather see Powerslave / Exhumed on the 3DO. But of course, that game too arrived too late for our ill-fated, much beloved console.

Posted: Sun May 13, 2012 7:35 pm
by Austin
Yeah, Quake's main draw, asides from the then-new polygonal visuals, was the multiplayer. I didn't appreciate the single player campaign much at all until I honed in my skills on the multiplayer, and then taking that back to the solo game. It completely changed how I saw the single player experience (and I think it's great now), but I can see others not caring for it much.