and i cannot be more happier. the quake 2 intro holds a very special place in my heart, and it still gives me shivers watching it. this remake is fucking near-perfect in terms of replicating that extremely crunchy intro. only critique is that i wish Stroggos had a smidge more definition detail and was a little brighter.
the quake 2 intro to me is a fucking masterclass in setting tone and ambiance with limited rendering capacity. it's almost like a radio play with how much of a focus there is on audio (and even attempts at world-building in the news reports in the beginning!) and it does it so well despite there never being a single visible humanoid. it's all just military space ships (thank you Paul Steed) and a city with a BIG GUN in it! because id and blur knew that human-looking rendering was DOG SHIT bad back then! and by doing that, this intro feels ageless to me.
and hey, how about that fucking amazing sounding Rob Zombie quake 2 theme that never gets used again?
y'all got any favorite intro movies to games?
between the music (memorably performed by band KHAN) and the CG it's hype af. as one commenter said, most unskippable intro ever. i thought this still looked great for a number of years afterward and that it was Namco's best such effort on PSX.
this copy has interlacing artifacts but it was hard to find a YT upload that wasn't total JPEG potato salad or 60FPS HD REMASTERED!!! this one looks close-ish to how it does on an actual PlayStation. (turns out a good trick is to search not for "[game title] intro" but "[game title] longplay" as longplays tend to include the intro and be recorded to a more true-to-real-hardware standard.)
a later Namco CG i really like is Tekken 5's 2005 PS2 intro. beautifully composed action, wild music genre oscillation, and a great showcase of character personalities. 5/5DR was the last Tekken game that i would describe as "charming sometimes" or "more aesthetically enjoyable than not."
P.S. i recently made a friend in the special effects business and set him off on a solid rant when i called computer graphics "CGI" rather than "CG". the "I" is completely superfluous he said, an unhappy innovation of the press, etc. i duly apologized and pledged to Do Better.