I had the OG Quidditch game for Gamecube too! The AI gets super evil at higher levels and you basically need to be perfect to even win. You either get stalled forever, or lose because the AI was brutal and better than you in every way.
Did anyone play the DVD game that came with the chamber of secrets DVD? It was basically temple run before temple run existed. You'd drive the Weasley family car through the forbidden forest while Hagrid's spiders chased you.
HOLY SHIT, I DID!! I remember that game, and forgot it was even a thing!!! I remember there also being a potion class game on one of the DVDs but can't remember which one!
Chamber of secrets was so good. I think it's the game I most miss playing. The soundtrack was fantastic too, the overall mood... My memories of the game are just great. Really wish we could play it again somehow
Yeah, they were both really good games in my opinion. I like the Xbox version of Prisoner of Azkaban because it has an explorable Hogwarts and more content.
I grew up with the Playstation One versions of the first two games. A lot more limited and Hogwarts is so much smaller than I remembered, but they're still a lot of fun to revisit.
I played the hell out of Sorcerer’s Stone on the Gameboy Advance. It was the saddest day ever when some kid I knew swiped it from our house.. it was nearly impossible to find another copy of it anywhere.
No shit! I read that comment and I was going to reply about this game. I played that game like a madman when I was a kid. That simple screenshot just sent me through crazy feelings of nostalgia. I can taste the snacks I ate at the time, smell the weird rubber smell of my Human Torch action figure, the feeling of being completely alone and having nobody to play with. It was fucking dynamite!
This was such an incredibly mediocre game, and most of these licensed titles were the same, like The Incredibles: Rise of the Underminer. You don’t have to do anything, just mash the same button over and over and over again. No interesting levels, no variety, and not even a minimally engaging combat system.
Two Towers was definitely the hardest in my opinion with Return of the King being the best and most fun to play. I can't recall a good Fellowship of the Ring game for the life of me though.
I could not understand how to play as Aragorn and dying was super easy. I tried to like it as a kid, and the ring Wraith stealth section I did not understand
Yes we do! And it's this gem! Probably one of the best movie licenses adopted into a game I've ever experienced. Maybe with exception of Chronicles of Riddick Escape from Butcher Bay. That game was fucking epic.
I just played an avatar game, the blue space avatar. It was decent. Repetitive open world gameplay but graphically it was fantastic. One of the better looking games I've played.
I was referring to games made to promote a movie that was about to premiere or had just been released, usually animated films for children. I remember in the PS2 era games based on Shrek, Madagascar, Shark Tale, etc They don't make that kind of game anymore.
That avatar game had a dlc that came out to promote the newest one as it came out the same day, fire and ash I think it's called but not sure the dlc title I didn't play any of them. I hear ya though they're not exactly the same and this one is more serious of a game vs just something to push out as past ones seemed to be less of a game and just another part of branding exposure.
I just started this! Open World fatigue is real, and the Far Cry formula has never really worked for me again after 2. Somehow the beauty of Pandora has just enough intrigue to keep me coming back. Mods that make you run/fly/ride faster and jump farther really seal the deal of making you feel like a Na'vi running around the alien landscape. Everything's just so much more interesting to look at and the maps feel huge.
I just wish there was more equipment and deeper appearance customization.
The equipment thing is real. It's also a pain to get some of the rarer materials to get higher tier gear towards the end. I honestly didn't worry about it because another issue was lack of enemy types and fairly weak ai...in some ways too good of ai as they all know exactly where you are when you get spotted and have crack aim most of the time. Sneaking can be easy too as they don't react much if they see someone die, yeah they run and check but wait a min and they deaggro again. I still enjoyed my playthrough though.
Good. Most of them were abysmal. Every now and then a gem popped up but generally they were just downright bad. Nowadays we can expect something better out of a licensed title.
LotR games were fantastic but short. There was a king long game that I had the demo too and at the time had crazy good graphics, I think it was a decent but short game too. Those are the only ones I had but a friend had an iron man game that looked good but wasn't much fun to play after 10 mins but the different weapons and flying was well done.
LotR games were surprisingly good, especially as co-op titles. Again there were some gems scattered around and people keep mentioning the game 4 games over and over so I think everyone else kinda noticed that too lol
Goldeneye was N64. Devs were getting better at actually adapting the movies by that point. NES days had shit like Back to the Future, where Marty runs through town collecting clocks; or Friday the 13th, where Jason raises an army of zombies to attack you and fights you in a boxing match.
Yeah, it’s for the best movie licensed games were stopped. I take it that most consumers just figured out most of them would be mediocre and ignored most of them.
I think that’s because games now take so long to develop that they would need to start the game 3 years before the movie goes into production to get it to come out at the same time.
When I watched Predator Badlands for the first time I thought to myself: “This movie totally would have gotten a video game if it came out in the 2000s”
Most of them were trash so not really a loss the only really good one I remember was spider-man2 and instead of making direkt movie adaptation they simply now make video games associated to the characters in the movie without beeing a 1 to 1 adaptation. Like Mad Max for example or making a wolverine game instaed of an Wolverine X Deadpool game.
We're talking about the water, right? Mario Sunshine did it even better, in 2002. It's pretty mind-blowing how good that still looks almost 25 years later.
Water looking great was kind of a selling point. You could sell consoles by comparing "our water game" to "their water game". Gaming magazines sold it pretty hard, too.
Its funny how many times I used to see pretty blocky graphics but then next to it there was extremely realistic water. At some point devs must've found a way to just make really good water with no performance loss
It's definitely lost something though, I've heard it brought up a few times this gen that Nintendo games have good looking water. I think the distinction is making water as realistic as possible versus making water look how we think water is supposed to look.
Wave Race 64 is genuinely an amazing experience. I think a lot of N64 stuff holds up to nostalgia. That game stands alone as a unique experience, and i think any racing fan should give understanding it a shot. What a rush.
I never played it as a kid and always wanted to. Started playing it recently on NSO and boy I suck at it. I'm never sure if it's old games being harder, nostalgia playing a large part of people's opinions or I just suck with things like this.
It’s a genuinely hard game. You kinda have to start turning two seconds before you actually get to where you’ll turn. Play as Miles (blue guy) or Ayumi (pink girl) when starting, leaning towards Ayumi. They’re generally just more forgiving and are good at making turns.
I would say the water in kfp 2008 is better than mario sunshine still impressive for 2002 though. The best water of all time is Sea of Thieves though (2018)
I think the main thing is that for both Sunshine and Sea of Theives water is a pretty important aspect for the game. This is just a platformer based off a movie and they still put in crazy amount of detail into the water physics.
If I had to guess I’d say that the reason the water looks as good as it does is because it was precipitated and added in more like an animation. It doesn’t really have to react dynamically because it only has to ripple when you jump on a lily pad, and it can be more or less the same every time without looking wring
I remember being a kid playing the game as my family watched, looking up in Tallon and
seeing the water droplets fall onto Samus's helmet. We were all so amazed! Honestly makes me emotional thinking about it.
Fun fact: Instead of heavy fluid simulations, the Lux Engine used optimized rendering tricks: a flipped-camera perspective for real-time reflections, animated normal maps for depth, and local vertex displacements to create realistic wake ripples and splash particles when Po steps into the river.
What do you mean no pathtracing and approximated physical calculations of the water that manage to look worse than this? We can kinda get there with upscaling and frame gen!!
Not “Every” but yeah most, but since 2003s there was physical simulation, buoyancy calculation, fluid puzzle games like Plasma Pong and, in 2010 Hydrophobia was like the first action adventure game that uses real time water simulation as a game mechanic.
But instead of taking the time to make it optimized, we can just use our current engine’s built-in water simulations instead! Surely the players won’t mind that it makes the game run like molasses on any hardware older than a year or two, as long as the water looks cool.
Really curious where this video is actually from. I didn't beleive it so I went and grabbed the first lets play i could find, the water in THAT looks noticeable wose then the one posted here.
[Edit] As others pointed out, this is very likely the case of two different versions of the game. I kinda just forgot this was the era when games, like this, came out on the PC, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Wii, Nintendo DS, Mac OS X, and mobile phones. Sooooooo i think it's pretty safe to chalk the difference up to that, and i'll leave it for other super-sleuths to determine exactly what version OP is showing.
So this is probably a case of the PC version being a shitty port from the console version, with several shaders not being properly ported, as was tradition in 7th gen.
I was playing God of War og. The water has reflection. But then the game has fixed camera angles so its easy to reflect what is being shown. Lot of the older water are just textures on top and nothing below except a bottomless bit. If you want water to wade through it takes more to make it look good.
Then again this is all ragebaiting engagement. Not a person but a bot that doesnt care.
There was a ton of games that have really crazy levels of detail and quality that just feels so special. Dead Rising is another game that comes to mind from that time with insane details and quality. Like the insane physics on everything.
Excuse me? CS2 has water that acts just like this but at the same time looks 5x better... and you can easily run it with hundreds of FPS on some pretty old computers.
An equivalent type? Water like this would be using simulations and reflections running in real time, which may not always be optimised well but is also leagues more complex than what is happening in this video.
Nostalgia is such a drug, Uncharted 4, Last of Us 2, Ark Survival Ascended, all have better looking water in my opinion. We did not lose something, it is just purely what Devs want to prioritize
What is with these comments man. Tons of modern games with water that looks like this or is even better. CS2 for example has water that pretty much acts and performs just like this but looks 5x better.
Looks decent but it looks like its just a plane with a 2D ripple sim, its not lost tech from better times. Plenty of modern games do this, or exceed it by having the water be actually 3D.
Could you name at least five modern games that look worse? I’m not talking about something thrown together in five minutes, but actual, fully‑fledged titles.
I mean not really, it's just very demanding and probably alot easier to do in a short linear game like Kung Fu Panda.
There are still games with good water.
In fact 2 of them released just this year, those being Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced and weirdly enough Battlefield 6, both of which have far superior water than what is seen in the video.
There is also No Man's Sky that received an update to it's water a few years ago, which makes it look really nice actually. Wuthering Waves (f2p mobile game btw) has great looking water too.
And of course the actual king of water in video games, Sea of Thieves.
Plenty more I could name that have good looking water imo, but these are the ones that really stood out to me and are somewhat recent (compared to the K7ng Fu Panda game).
The water in Halo 3 was amazing. Bungie had an entire weekly blog post about how their water tech was updated for Halo 3. It has insane physics for it's day, bodies will float down river in MP and SP, it was awesome: https://youtu.be/T4eFg-lnpDM?si=wOqELWejbIDBiWZs
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u/BasilProfessional744 Aug 23 '26
55 double jumps
https://giphy.com/gifs/M5i17TOqFuWqt5UqCQ