only 90s kids remember when video game consoles were actually materially different and had different capabilities
this is kind of true too, because the ps2/gamecube/dreamcast/xbox era was the first one where games were frequently ported between all of the main systems
you didn't get games that came out on both playstation and n64, or both snes and genesis
@noiob there were a lot of games that were on both playstation and saturn because they did have similar specs
symphony of the night came out on saturn too, for instance
@Felthry I actually found an example for a PSX-to-N64 port, Resident Evil 2
@noiob what
that sounds like a massive pain
@Felthry yeah, they mostly had to develop good compression to cram all that sound and video onto a cart, but the backgrounds actually render at a higher resolution than on the PSX!
@Felthry it's also the first game with dynamic resolution
@Felthry there's also a Spiderman game that's on PS1, N64 and Dreamcast, though that one has big differences between the versions
@noiob one thing I always found a bit odd is that the N64 simply didn't have the power to do _2D_ games, where the PS1 did
they put all their effort towards 3d and as such there just isn't enough texture ram for spritesheets
@Felthry afaik there's one single 2D platformer on the N64
@noiob what is it?
@Felthry Mischief Makers! It's a cool game with a few unique twists! And while the gameplay is 2D it uses the 3D for backgrounds
@Felthry eh, you'd still see the rare port trying to put a game somewhere it was never designed to fit - e.g. the N64 version of Resident Evil 2
but in general a lot of completely different games with the same name
@Dex I kinda miss that completely-different-games-with-the-same-name thing really
like, the harry potter licensed games on both PC and GBC were both fantastic
I remember liking the hobbit PC game and later getting it on gamecube and then being incredibly disappointed it was the exact same game (this was back when the idea of a "port" was foreign to us)
@Felthry i would say that games came out on competing consoles in that generation -sometimes-, but often as a slightly (or very) different game
@coda Quite a few third-party games were available on both ps2 and gamecube, or ps2 and xbox, or all three. gamecube also got all the popular dreamcast titles ported to it after the dreamcast failed (except shenmue for some reason)
@coda I remember playing the harry potter video games on pc and gbc, and trying one of them on gba and gamecube, and they were all drastically different games
not long after that we played the hobbit on pc and then liked it and wanted to see what the gamecube one was like, expecting it to be similarly different
we were quite disappointed
this was before we knew what a port was
@Felthry nowadays usually the only different versions of a game for porting purposes that you’ll find will be things like... mobile versions, 3DS versions, etc where the console is so radically different that it wouldn’t make sense to release the same game, even if you could
@Felthry counterpoint: Tomb Raider was on the Saturn, Playstation and DOS though that certainly is an outlier