Today it's time for a slight change in programming.
For the past quite a while, I've been working on a bezel art collection for Retroarch. I was really impressed with the realistic bezel art available for arcade games on MAME, and I really wanted to have something like that for console games. So I decided to make my own, since there wasn't anything quite like that at the time. So let's take a look after the break.
Stop it! Don't open that door! It's time to give a Resident Evil game the 240p treatment. And I know you would think it would be RE7 or RE2REmake, but we're doing 6 instead because I'm a terrible person.
But that having been said, just look at it. It feels like the followup to RE3 that we never got. The gameplay certainly doesn't, nor does the camera, but it really does feel like a classic Resident Evil at times, particularly the running around in the streets times. It also helps make the game a lot more tolerable to play.
It also makes all the visual effects look way cooler, since you can't really see all the visual blemishes in the game. Bad PS3 game textures just look like regular textures at 240p. But let's go ahead and take a look at the pictures after the break.
So we're back for some more Final Fantasy XIII-2. I'll be honest, The XIII games aged very poorly in the graphics department, and that kind of game is very well suited to the 240p treatment. Just as something like Shadow of the Tomb Raider is poorly suited to low resolutions, games like this one work really well.
It also helps when it's a series that's from the generation of consoles you're imitating. It's honestly kind of shocking how much the XIII games resemble their PSX counterparts visually. It makes it seem like the problem wasn't that the series changed, so much that the transition to PS2 and eventually PS3 didn't appeal to fans in the same way.
I suppose there's also the fact that Square Enix has never had traditionally good voice acting. Honestly, I think that as bad as the writing might be in these games, if they'd had less bizarre voice acting, people wouldn't have complained nearly as much.
I've got to go back to this game again though. I didn't even get to my favorite level, the Archylte Steppe. Some of the cooler areas are farther into the game than I got. But for now, we've got what we've got, so let's take a look at the pictures after the break.
[Also, I'd like to give an extra big shoutout to Yuzoboy for the awesome music up top. I don't know what the chances were of me finding a SNES remix of a Final fantasy XIII-2 song, but they had to have been like, powerball odds. So extra thanks to him for having such great tastes. His channel has lots more great arrangements. So definitely give it a look.]
So I'm just going to make one big post to dump a bunch of the stuff that I don't have enough of to make single posts out of.
There isn't too much to say about this one. We've got some good stuff in here. We've got some Street Fighter, some Ikaruga, some Persona, some Monster Hunter, some Metal Gear, Gravity Rush, SNK, Ridge racer, just a bunch of different stuff. So anyway, please enjoy.
Welcome back to another thrilling episode of video game wallpapers. Today we're going to be doing The Evil Within. You know, it still looks pretty good, even though it's a bit old by now. It's just a shame that the game itself wasn't better. Leave it to Bethesda to make a Shinji Mikami game this bad. But they did it somehow.
At any rate, there's a lot of good to this game to go along with the bad. The visuals were definitely one of them. I guess that's why the performance wasn't one of them. But all these years later, it's a bit easier to get the performance and the visuals up to snuff.
But anyway, let's take a look at the pictures. I've got everything at least half way through the dlc. I can't remember how much of which ones I have. I didn't do the safe man dlc at all though. I don't know if there's anything cool in that one that I'm missing. But anyway, let's get to it then.
This game is a pain to do anything with on PC. If, for whatever reason, you wanted to do this on your own, you're probably going to want to get windowed borderless gaming or some equivalent like SRWE or something. I used windowed borderless gaming. And the reason you want to use this is that Automata doesn't let your mouse go over the entire screen when you pull reshade up. This may only be a 4k thing. But that was the first problem Automata had.
The next problem is related. You don't have a borderless option in the game. You also don't have resolution scale options. Those problems combined mean you basically have to run the game at the resolution you want to take screenshots at, despite the fact that you really don't need that fidelity when you're going to be downscaling it in post.
And Automata isn't the best running game ever released for PC. I don't know what they did wrong, but no amount of messing with settings will give you good performance above 1080p. You know, if you are running some overpowered setup, this probably isn't an issue, and framerate isn't really a key factor in screenshotting. But it's still too bad that we have a game that barely looks like a PS4 game running so poorly. I've done more with bigger games before. Let's just say that.
Then once you do get the game going, there's the camera settings that you can mess around with. I ended up pulling the camera out just enough so that it looks closer to how I remember those old 3d JRPGs looking. Pulling the camera in kind of detracts from that effect.
Other than that, it's a great game, and it takes beautiful screenshots. Automata is kind of like the opposite case from Tekken 7. Unlike Tekken 7, these characters weren't in a game back then. But whereas Tekken 7 doesn't quite have that art style to support the effect, Automata absolutely does. It looks like a bizarre fusion of all the classic 3d JRPGs on the PlayStation. And, as long as it's a repeat playthrough, is fairly playable like this as well.
But let's go ahead and take a look at the pictures.
So I'm no expert on shmups. I admire them from afar like fighting games. Any genre that is hard like that just never really clicks with me. But I always like the games even if I can't be good at them or get into the groove of the gameplay. But I hear that Sine Mora wasn't exactly the best. Which is a shame, because I do know that they had some big words for what this game was supposed to be. I know the name Ikaruga was thrown around a bit pre-release.
But everyone I've ever heard talk about it seems to think it had the right idea but fumbled the execution. But then there was the EX version that came out later on. I don't know if that fixed everything or what. But all of that doesn't mean too much to someone like me who can't play these games for shit either way. That is to say I had a good time with this one. The art style is great. It's somehow 1943 meets Panzer Dragoon Orta meets Star Fox meets Metal Slug meets Sin and Punishment at the same time. I'm not sure how one pulls that off, but I'm glad they did.
Yamaoka's soundtrack certainly doesn't hurt anything either. Soundtracks these days, as much as I love so many of them, don't have that 90s sound that games used to have. But this one somehow has that sound, and sounds futuristic too. Throw in the weird vibe of the cartoon animal people all speaking Hungarian, and you at least have a game that you won't forget about easily. But let's just go ahead and look at the pictures now, shall we?
