Pushing the Original Xbox to its Absolute Limit!

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The original Xbox was famous for fantastic graphics, and infamous for being gigantic when it came out. Even the original 'Duke' controllers were massive. It suited me just fine because I have big hands, but no lie, there was an actual warning in the manual not to accidentally drop the controller on your pet as it could injure them due to the weight.

Why was it so big? What all did they pack in there? A PC basically, with a Celeron 700mhz CPU and an Nvidia GeForce 3 derived GPU. That was the first of the GeForce line to support shaders, per pixel lighting and various other fancy features most people first encountered in Doom 3.

This put it a generation ahead of every other game console out at the time, able to produce visuals of a kind not seen anywhere outside of high end gaming PCs. The Xbox brand is of course still around, but it's changed a great deal since the first Xbox, which had a sort of rough charm to it.

It was all very clunky, very American, very PC-ish. Naturally you might say, since Microsoft made it. It was also the first console to come with a built in hard drive. Just 8 gigs, paltry by today's standards, but it meant no need for memory cards and that you could download new content for your games. The birth of console DLC.

I like to compare it to the Jaguar. Both had a similar aesthetic with the ridged vents and black plastic. Both were mocked for their huge unwieldy controllers. Both were distinctly American machines which boasted advanced graphical capabilities, and both had loads of PC ports (first person shooters in particular).

The modern Xboxes are very much nondescript media machines, like the modern Playstations. Not much to grow attached to there. But the original Xbox had character to it. Unsurprising then, that it has some well made scene demos like "Doomsday" by Complex:

The other side of it is that the Xbox is basically a PC, so porting PC scene demos was a cinch. It had loads of polygon pushing power, so there was little to prove by making it render high poly scenes.

Instead many demo coders went in a different direction, attempting unconventional graphics (like real time fractal zoomers) which took advantage of the Xbox's power in an unusual way.

As a funny side note, there exist demo groups named Doomsday and Complex. So when Complex put out a demo named after Doomsday, they responded by putting out their own demo named 'Complex':

Lots of that kind of thing went on, with groups forming friendly rivalries and poking fun at each other in their demos. Bi-Won by Limp Ninja is a more conventional polygon heavy demo, pardon the poor video quality. Keep in mind the Xbox only displayed at 640*480 to begin with:

Farbrausch is another demo named for a famous demo group, also made by Limp Ninja. Fair warning, it's a neon saturated assault on the senses. You may want to wear sunglasses for this and keep the dramamine close at hand:

What about the games, though? As mentioned, Doom 3 was one of the first big titles to actually fully utilized the new features of the GeForce 3. So it was possible, but difficult, to port Doom 3 to the Xbox. Right on the edge of what it could manage, and it shows:

Ninja Gaiden Black was another stunner for the system back in the day, but that's to be expected from Team Ninja, which has always placed high importance on flashy graphics in all their games:

Otogi 1 and 2 were also both technically and artistically brilliant, though I fear much of the cultural stuff went straight over my head. From my perspective it was just an astonishingly pretty hack n' slash:

Rare is another company famous for achieving state of the art graphics that seem to exceed the capabilities of whatever machine they develop for. Conker: Live and Reloaded was their last game as "classic Rare" before disbanding and reforming as Playtonic. Their usual degree of artistry is on full display here:

Halflife 2 was also on original Xbox, which may come as a surprise. It was a late release and like Doom 3, struggled to run...but just barely managed. It's right at the limits of what the Xbox can do:

The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay was the first movie license game I could truly call great. Starbreeze Studios, better known today for their work on the StarVR high fov VR headset, really knocked it out of the park with this one:

Even FarCry received an Xbox port which, unbelievably, looks a great deal prettier than the Wii port despite the Wii being a more powerful machine on paper. The ease of porting to a consolized PC must surely explain that outcome to some degree:

Rallisport Challenge 2 was among the most beautiful racing games on the system, boasting realistic, lush foliage as well as gargantuan draw distances usually not seen outside of open world adventure games:

Panzer Dragoon Orta is another uncommonly gorgeous Xbox game, courtesy of Sega this time. I imagine it began life on the Dreamcast, as did many Sega titles for the original Xbox:

There's plenty of others that didn't quite make the list because of small but serious problems with their visuals, like Halo 2, the Xbox port of Morrowind and a few others I could name.

In terms of fun gameplay there's no end to excellent titles, even exclusives, on this machine. Microsoft really went all out in order to force their way into the console industry and it worked, the Xbox brand is still alive today (if flagging somewhat).

That's all for this time! Stay tuned for the next installment where I'll showcase the best visuals ever achieved on some other outdated platform!

^{Stay Cozy!}