Best Resident Evil ports?

[Beanovsky Durst]

Here are my two cents:

RE 0: Wii. I hate disk swapping... Plus multiple controller options is nice to have.
RE Original: I'll have to choose the NDS version.
REmake: Same as RE0.
RE2: PC. The gallery, all the extra scenarios and nice graphics. Shame GC's version didn't have all the extras from all the other RE2's, it would be epic.
RE3: Gamecube. PC was a chore to play properly. Haven't played it on Dreamcast.
RE CV(X): Dreamcast. I loved the VMU display.
RE4: I'll have to say Wii. PC might have mods, but all the extras were on Wii's version, plus Wiimote controls were amazing, and you have the option to use your GC controller either.
RE5: X360. Played it on PS3. Couldn't get used to PS3's controller. Still it's pretty much the same, except for the "slight" (at least to me) graphical differences that you can see on a feature here on THIA.

This is from someone who's not into extreme technical aspects of the ports, there are more qualified people than me, but I wanted to contribute.

[leftshoe18]

DS port of the original is the best because of the additional modes and junk.
Wii ports of 0 and remake are cool cuz you don't have to switch any discs!
I like the N64 port of 2 because of the added features.
Wii port of 4 is the best because it has everything in it.

[MeanBob]

Just updated the list a little bit. We need more opinions! It's best to do it so that we can all hunt down those versions of the games that we want!

Anyway...

C:VX is best on GameCube: It has the highest quality movie encodes and it doesn't have the graphical shortcomings of the PlayStation 2 port.

That's the first I've heard of that honestly. I've had the Dreamcast version a LONG time ago, when it came out and didn't get the PS2 version til much later. What are its graphical flaws?

[Pikminister]

That explains why I noticed the backgrounds seem to look a little bit messy when I came home with it and tried it out.

It's because the backgrounds are actually small and low-res. It's like when you take a small .jpg image and you resize it to look bigger than it originally was. You lose some quality in the process. That's basically what's going on with those blurry bg's in the Cube version of RE2.

[MeanBob]

The Cube version of RE2 does have the best in-game character models but the GCN's low res backgrounds look blurry compared to other versions. IMO the DC version has the best of both worlds in that department.

That explains why I noticed the backgrounds seem to look a little bit messy when I came home with it and tried it out.

[Branden_Lucero]

Resident Evil 4 for Gamecube was the best version of RE4 in my opinion. it was fine the way it was when it first came out: didn't get downgraded in a port, despite it having more shit to it. and motion only made that game so much easier. it completely defeated the difficulty even more with motion control. and i don't like RE being easy.

pretty much every version of the game i played first, is the one i prefer, like the code: veronica on DC and RE2 on N64. i don't necessarily care if one version did have more content than the other, i just know i never had that much of an exciting experience when say if i was playing code veronica x on PS2. yes, more scenes, but countless times i already played it before on DC.

Well either way the game does bump up the resolution when no enemies present, which is what I was looking at.

Yes, I think that could still be true. I might look at the game sometime to see if there actually is a resolution change with the amount of models in a room (you can easily judge from the presence of severer jaggies).

Also, it seems the music in the N64 version is of the highest quality. This is an excerpt from an old Chris Hülsbeck interview (German magazine TOTAL! 8/99, page 62-64):

TOTAL!: Is there a loss in sound quality when porting Resident Evil 2 over from the PlayStation or can we expect new features?

Chris Hülsbeck: On the contrary, in my opinion, the sound got better than on the PSX because we reworked the instrument set from the ground up. As the samples for a track or a level do not have to fit into 512 KByte but instead are played directly from the ROM, we could make them longer and include them with a higher sample rate. And the loop points inside the samples can be chosen freely in our system, in contrast to the PSX where everything has to be within the limits of 28 sample values. That's why our samples don't sound so "wobbly".

The GameCube version was based on the PlayStation Dual Shock Version and has prerecorded music, so I guess the samples have the same quality as both PlayStation versions (just that the additional encoding as a prerecorded track results in a slight loss of quality).

[Carnivol]

^The fault is probably within how things are ripped when you use the DX3D grabber (or any other tool that rips stuff from a system's video memory). A lot of games, on several platforms, applies various effects to graphical data before putting it into memory. Color palettes, scaling/rotation, filtering, etc., which means that the assets you grab with those tools are not necessarily the original 1:1 assets from the game itself, but rather the post-processed ones.

RE2 N64 probably runs in hi-res when there aren't many objects on screen (I've never actually bothered with checking this myself), it probably also pre-scales/enlarges the backgrounds when it does this as a means for ensuring further crispyness of the background (as using the regular texture handling on the N64 to upscale the background render would've probably ended up as blurry ass, compared to how things look when it either operates with a 1:1 input or a downscale)

[Enrico Marini]

Okay, I think that seals the deal: The dumping utility of your Project64 graphics plug-in rips textures to faulty sizes (at least for Resident Evil 2). The prerendered backgrounds are all stored on the cartridge as 320x224 JPEG images, no 1024x512 or 512x512 versions are present (which would of course be insanity as they would never waste space for multiple encodes, not to mention the 1024x512 one is complete nonsense as the resolution with the Expansion Pak is 640x480). Here's the original background from the N64 ROM:

I stand corrected but I didn't use the texture dumper plugin for the N64, used 3d ripper DX instead. Even 3d Ripper dumps the textures at the same resolution as the texture dumper plugin. So either both programs are dumping incorrectly or the character texture resolutions are that size. I've not known 3d Ripper to dump inaccurate texture resolutions before. But splitting up the texture into smaller squares would reduce wasted pixel space in resolution. Also the textures which are dumped are actually rearranged in a way that RE2's texture is not, e.g. The emblem on leons arm is with the top half of his white sleeve where its on a seperate page in the PSX/PC. Also note that loading claire with the magnum, she'll gain Leon's hand and it will be textured accordingly though in the PSX/PC versions the hand would be textured incorrectly which essentially points to the character textures being split. Thinking about it, maybe 3d ripper had a hissy fit with the BG texture as it wasn't a power of 2(2,4,8,16,32,64,128, 256, 512), which game textues need to be.

Well either way the game does bump up the resolution when no enemies present, which is what I was looking at. I know nothing of exploring Rom files so I went for the only tool I knew. Sorry for the misinformation.

Decided to test that and in part it is true.

Spoiler:

show spoiler

When there are no enemies it uses a 1024x512 bg image rather than the 512x512.

However the quality of the background is not better than the playstations 320x240. If you look at the images, they were just rescaled and compressed versions as evidenced by the unsightly blurring and graining.

Just to be fair, here is the original PSX 320x240 image scaled to 1024x512 and 512x512. First two are pixel resize, last one is a smart resize.

Spoiler:

show spoiler

The N64 version could have been better than it was if N64 didn't use cartridges but then again it might have ended up being a lazy port.

Okay, I think that seals the deal: The dumping utility of your Project64 graphics plug-in rips textures to faulty sizes (at least for Resident Evil 2). The prerendered backgrounds are all stored on the cartridge as 320x224 JPEG images, no 1024x512 or 512x512 versions are present (which would of course be insanity as they would never waste space for multiple encodes, not to mention the 1024x512 one is complete nonsense as the resolution with the Expansion Pak is 640x480). Here's the original background from the N64 ROM:



I think this also explains why the other textures were different in size despite looking the same in the game.

[Enrico Marini]

Where you playing it with an expansion pak? I heard if you kill all the enemies within a room and go back into that room it'll bump up the background images to a higher res one.

Decided to test that and in part it is true.

Spoiler:

show spoiler

When there are no enemies it uses a 1024x512 bg image rather than the 512x512.

However the quality of the background is not better than the playstations 320x240. If you look at the images, they were just rescaled and compressed versions as evidenced by the unsightly blurring and graining.

Just to be fair, here is the original PSX 320x240 image scaled to 1024x512 and 512x512. First two are pixel resize, last one is a smart resize.

Spoiler:

show spoiler

The N64 version could have been better than it was if N64 didn't use cartridges but then again it might have ended up being a lazy port.

[BLSR1]

Where you playing it with an expansion pak? I heard if you kill all the enemies within a room and go back into that room it'll bump up the background images to a higher res one.

I did have the expansion pack. A part of the problem might be my large TV and the low resolution of the n64, but Leon's final fmv was almost too blurred to watch.

[kevstah2004]

Where you playing it with an expansion pak? I heard if you kill all the enemies within a room and go back into that room it'll bump up the background images to a higher res one.

[BLSR1]

I just played through the N64 version of RE2 and the graphics are really bad. The randomizer and extras make up for it.

[Zombie_X]

I wish that RE2 for gamecube could have had quick reloads and quick turns added in though. It couldn't be that hard to add those in...