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Games Known To Have "Maxed Out" A Console

dragonelite said:
Most games max out a system to that teams capabilities.
Only one team gets more out of it then the other.
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Your avatar reminds me that Rare ran out of memory during the development of Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts and they had to cut a good chunk from Showdown Town.

I think Resident Evil 4 pretty much maxed out the GameCube.
 
Not sure if "maxed out" but Black for the PS2 was really really good imo.

r92uf.jpg
 
NBtoaster said:
It is but you can't say it "maxed out" the PS2.
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i see dynamic loading , lots of polygons and effects and i still don't see another game that did better .

I can be wrong but seeing as "maxed" here is subjective .. how am i wrong about GOW 2 ?
Who did better ? did i miss a HIT in the PS2 library?
 
R_thanatos said:
i see dynamic loading , lots of polygons and effects and i still don't see another game that did better .

I can be wrong but seeing as "maxed" here is subjective .. how am i wrong about GOW 2 ?
Who did better ? did i miss a HIT in the PS2 library?
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I could be wrong but I think that Valkyrie Profile 2 has more stuff going on and looks better than GOW2 in every possible way. 60fps too.
 
Star Ocean massacred the SNES. It was a glitchy, unfinished mess. But holy crap was it amazing technically.

Star Ocean: Blue Sphere pushed the GBC to its limits as well.

Valkyrie Profile 2 is the best looking PS2 game, and ran amazingly.

Must be a tri-Ace thing.
 
The Mana Legend said:
Star Ocean massacred the SNES. It was a glitchy, unfinished mess. But holy crap was it amazing technically.

Star Ocean: Blue Sphere pushed the GBC to its limits as well.

Valkyrie Profile 2 is the best looking PS2 game, and ran amazingly.

Must be a tri-Ace thing.
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Funny because I was gonna say Tales of Phantasia. It was the 1st SNES game on a 48MBit cartridge, and the 1st SNES game to have streaming audio voices as well.
 
I'd say to this stage, the only games that have 'maxed out' consoles, are very late releases on SNES and MEgadrive.

Virtua Fighter 2? Virtua Racing?

Street Fighter Alpha for SNES?
 
jooey said:
Serious? Contra 3 has more going on.
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On one hand I never understood why people consider technical advanced games that used pre-rendered graphic on SNES.
Sure developers had to compress the graphics ( sometime helped by a PPU like SMRPG ) and use tricks to max the color palette of the system but outside of that usually those have few if any parallax background or trick to distort the sprites/ background.

However in the case of RR2 the asteroids storm on level 3 ( without any slowdown ) is mighty impressive for the slow SNES CPU:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5a0VobeXLM

Batman and Robin on Genesis always impressed me for the insane scaling/rotating effects.

Also if we consider Wiiware as a platform I say that Fast by Shin'en pretty much maxed out it if we consider the 40MB file limit and the Wii limitation on shading effects.

EDIT:
Dreamwriter said:
Speaking as a game programmer, I'd say the only time a game has ever maxed out a console is in the Atari era. I worked on the last, possibly most advanced Gameboy Color game, and we really pushed the system, using all but a few bytes on the cartridge even with compression and code optimizations, using every trick in the book to get tons of colors per screen, full-screen effects, digitized sound samples, giant enemies, etc. But I'm sure even that system could have been pushed further if it had been given more time. These days nobody even comes close to "maxing out" game consoles, even the most advanced games aren't programmed in assembly language.
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What game was it ?
 
Brettison said:
Funny because I was gonna say Tales of Phantasia. It was the 1st SNES game on a 48MBit cartridge, and the 1st SNES game to have streaming audio voices as well.
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Star Ocean and Tales of Phantasia were brothers, really. It's just that Tales grew up to be relatively successful and got a position as an office manager, while Star Ocean went on unemployment after The Second Story and officially became a hobo as of The Last Hope.
 
akilshohen said:
did any game ever max out the OG XBOX?
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We'll never know. Maybe RalliSport Challenge 2 and Oddworld Stranger, along with the aforementioned Conker, Doom 3 and Riddick. Yager and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory were also very impressive.
 
Dizzy-4U said:
I could be wrong but I think that Valkyrie Profile 2 has more stuff going on and looks better than GOW2 in every possible way. 60fps too.
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i can agree with that ..in the sense that VP2 is indeed a very technical ( heavy ) game that pushed limits ... YES . this is another answer i can accept.

VP2 still looks good on my BC PS3
 
Wasn't FFVI(III US) the first Super Nintendo/Famicom game to utilize/render the entire available color pallette(256 colors!) on screen at once for the system? Not the most taxing game on the system, but I recall this being a touted feature.
 
Orayn said:
Star Ocean and Tales of Phantasia were brothers, really. It's just that Tales grew up to be relatively successful and got a position as an office manager, while Star Ocean went on unemployment after The Second Story and officially became a hobo as of The Last Hope.
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Nope. The only misstep of Star Ocean was The Last Hope, and that was only for story/character reasons. Star Ocean (the series) has always been far superior to Tales games in every single way outside of the story/characters in 4.
 
No games apply since "the max" is directly tied to how much effort you're willing to spend.

Take any game anybody suggested in this thread, apply 1000 more manhours to it and you'll probably find that it reaches a different "max" than it did previously.

The max is unknown, and unknowable.
 
Which game maxed out the Wii?
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Super Mario Galaxy and Xenoblade. Those two games are the ones about which I can say: 'Damn, that looks impressive"

SMG graphics are so warm and "soft". On SD tv this game has nothing to be ashamed of when compared to PS3/360 titles. Also, that water.

Xenoblade on the other hand maxes out Wii when it comes to enormous world. Serously, the game is huge, some of the places are simply jaw dropping and there are practically no load times.
 
Dreamwriter said:
I worked on the last[...] Gameboy Color game
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So you've worked on Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets? That was the last GameBoy Color game ever released (outside of Japan).
 
NBtoaster said:
Not really, it's 60fps and they could have done more with the console by targetting 30.
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Do you not value 60fps as contributing to "maxing out" a console? Because I certainly do, especially in the genres where 60fps is most appreciated.
 
The Mana Legend said:
Nope. The only misstep of Star Ocean was The Last Hope, and that was only for story/character reasons. Star Ocean (the series) has always been far superior to Tales games in every single way outside of the story/characters in 4.
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I agree. Don't get me wrong I like the Tales series, but I enjoy the SO series so much more. Can't believe I'm going to say this, but I'd even pick SO4 to ToV simply for the awesome battle system, all the extra stuff and the IC.
 
I remember when Miyamoto said that Mario 64 only used about 60% of the N64's power, and Ocarina used around 90%. So if that's true they intentionally withheld pushing polys, textures and more advanced techniques in Mario 64.
 
Using every ounce of power is unfortunately very different than completely optimizing every line of code while using every ounce of power.

You can look at shitty games that lag like crazy and that is pushing a console to a limit. This does not mean that it is pushed to the absolute perfect usage of a console limit.

@papersleeves: SO: TtEoT... Never touched the game again after the end game plot twist. One of the worst that I have ever seen.
 
Brettison said:
Funny because I was gonna say Tales of Phantasia. It was the 1st SNES game on a 48MBit cartridge, and the 1st SNES game to have streaming audio voices as well.
Click to expand...
Phantasia was a great technical achievement, but Star Ocean outdid it in every possible way. I was shocked there was no special music chip in it.

As for summer carnival recca... You go yo the expense of an extra music chip, and THAT'S the music you compose with it? Just don't bother.
 
What about Metal Gear Solid 3 on the PS2. Pushed the system to the limits, forced the media format to its knees, and still looks great today.
 
The code that 'maxes out' a console is probably going to be the ugliest, most boring program you've ever seen. It will probably just allocate a few big arrays, and textures, then shuffle data around, displaying nothing of any importance to anyone.

The extent to which a game 'maxes out' any hardware is completely unrelated to the level of realism, art, or graphical fidelity in the final output.
 
Hmm...hard to tell what games qualify for "maxing out" a given console, but I'll take a whack at it. This is more of a list of games that pushed the limits, but not necessarily maxing them out.

NES
Kirby
Battletoads
Batman: Return of the Joker


SNES
Star Ocean
Tales of Phantasia
SFA3
Dragon View (3D Overworld without Super FX or Mode 7)
Far East of Eden
Super Mario RPG
(There's quite a few games that actually push the limit on certain things.)

N64
Conker
Perfect Dark
Majora's Mask
Turok 2

PSX
MGS
Chrono Cross
FFIX

GBC
Shantae
DQIII
Mario Tennis

GBA
Golden Sun 2

DS
Golden Sun: Dark Dawn
 
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