Final Fantasy XIII-2 PSX

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.]

Assorted

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.

The Evil Within

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.

Nier Automata PSX

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.

Sine Mora EX

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?

Tekken 7 PSX

I'm back with another modern game in 240p. The settings I used here are pretty much the exact same as the ones I listed in The Division post. I think I had the shadow mask turned too dark on the CRT shader on this one. But otherwise, the settings are all pretty much the same.

As far as the game goes, the art style definitely wasn't designed for this nonsense I'm trying to do on it, but it also just isn't following too closely in the shoes of the first three games. Even though I'm showing the same characters, it still looks so different. The costumes probably have a lot to do with it.

The game gives you a lot to work with, visuals wise, though. The stages remind me a bit of old SNK stages. And the hit sparks are fun to see too, when you get the weird ripple effect going.

But I don't have too much else to say about this one. I managed to avoid writing eight paragraphs about how Tekken 7 might have the best menu theme ever. So let's just jump right in to the pictures after the break.

The Division PSX

So this time I'm going to be doing something a little bit different. I've got a bunch of screenshots of The Division, but I used reshade to make it look like a PSX game.

Ever since Matsilagi ported the retroarch crt shaders to reshade, I've been interested in using them on 3d games. But while they looked great on 2d games with a little measuring and trial and error, I could never get 3d games to work in a way that I liked.

But eventually I found a set of settings that worked for me. The graphics adapter pro shader was the one that really made the difference. I used that to make the games only show at 384 by 216 while actually running at 3840 by 2160, so it's the native resolution divided by 10. That way I get integer scaling and it's fairly close to what the PSX would output. Before I'd been scaling the resolution by 8, getting a vertical resolution of 270, which I thought would be close enough to the PlayStation's 240p, but 216p looks much closer.

Another great feature of graphics adapter pro is that it let's you modify the color depth and add dithering. You can see it in the screenshots here, and it's probably the most important part to approximating the visual signature of the original PlayStation. Between those two things, you can make most games look like they came out in some bizarre alternate 1999.

Then after all that, the retroarch shaders are really just extra. Just set the resolution to match what you typed into graphics adapter pro, get the scanlines how you like them and find a mask type that you prefer and you're pretty much done. I mostly use either crteasymode or crtgeom myself, and I usually change shadow masks all the time cause I can never decide which one looks best.

But on the subject of the game, this one is definitely one of my favorites to have done this technique with. I was getting the most serious Parasite Eve flashbacks playing the game with these settings. I put the soundtrack on in the background and just wandered around for a few hours. It really does make me sad that the Parasite Eve franchise died the way it did, especially when something like this is what we could have gotten from the series if Squeenix still had an interest in it.

But I think I've probably gone on for long enough. So please enjoy the pictures after the jump.

Final Fantasy XIII

It's time to return to the Fabula Nova Crystallis universe, everyone's favorite six years of Square Enix's definitely not troubled existence. Like Motomu Toryama, Final Fantasy XIII is my favorite Final Fantasy game. Because, as he himself said, "...I can confront any powerful enemy if I'm with Lightning, the strongest heroine."

He's right that Lightning "Worst birthday ever." Farron truly is the strongest heroine. Destiny is destiny...

...Meow-meow choco-chow...

You know, sometimes I really am embarrassed to like the XIII trilogy as much as I do, and believe me, I really do. But it's not as though any main-line game since VI has had a better story, and I didn't play the older games back in the day, so I don't have the nostalgia for them.

But Lightning Returns could quite easily be one of the worst games in the series. Which sucks, because it's so obvious that Tri-Ace was attempting to fuse Chrono Trigger and Valkyrie Profile with this game, which under normal circumstances would be the best game ever. But I guess they just weren't able to keep Hope alive. The results were arguably worse than the last two times someone tried recreating the success of Chrono Trigger.

XIII wasn't much better with it's gibberish in media res opening that kept the actually good aspects of the story from making enough sense on first playing. Not to mention the extremely limited gameplay. But at least it had that soundtrack to try and save it. I still have fond memories of people on neogaf arguing over whether XIII or Nier was the soundtrack of the generation. Hamauzu really did a great job with these games. They couldn't have done much better of a job at following up Uematsu's departure from the company.

But XIII-2, now that's a game you could set your watch to. I'll actually be posting about XIII-2 again later though. So we can save the talk about that till then. So I'll stop babbling and we can get to the pictures. Enjoy.

Nioh

I wish I'd liked Nioh more than I did. It feels like all of these souls style games just aren't for me. But gameplay aside, I really like Nioh, as dumb as that sounds. The story isn't really that great, but the characters are really good, and the cutscenes look gorgeous. Plus, there just aren't that many big budget games set in Japanese antiquity.

There's Sekiro, which had it's moments, but I feel like even being a newer game, it didn't look as good as Nioh most of the time. I think that has more to do with different approaches though. They're both dark themed and set pretty close to each other time wise. But Nioh seems like it was more interested in showing beautiful nature, whereas Sekiro more often than not was trying to convey war and decay. I mean you can just look at the two main characters to see this difference.

But ultimately Nioh's more beautiful art direction is much more appealing to me. I could not deal with all the awesome armor sets you get in that game. I was constantly changing into different outfits just to see how they look. Also, the guardian spirits are the cutest fucking things ever.

I don't think I got through all of the dlc in these pictures, but I'm pretty sure I got most of it at least. But anyway. Let's take a look at the pictures.

Killer is Dead

It's time to look at Killer is Dead. I really don't know what to say about Killer is Dead. The story has grown on me with repeat visits, but I guess it just doesn't match up to the stories that Suda wrote back in the day. It's far better than the likes of Lollipop Chainsaw and Shadows of the Damned though. Like, at least it has interesting stuff going on with it. Like, it at least halfway feels like a legitimate Suda game, unlike most of Grasshopper's recent output.

The music is great too. It's not like Akira Yamaoka is anything to scoff at when it comes to soundtracks. But Masafumi Takada had a really particular sound at Grasshopper. And it was really impressive to see Yamaoka manage a similar sort of weirdness here. Even if it had been a great soundtrack but didn't have that Grasshopper sound, I think the game would have been much worse off. So extra props to Yamaoka for half-saving this mixed bag of a game. I guess he had plenty of practice trying to save bad games back at Konami.

The gameplay looks amazing, but it doesn't quite improve on No More Heroes 1 and 2. The gameplay really does look amazing though. Going back through it in 4k was really eye opening for me. This has to be one of the best looking games I've seen to this day. I just wish the model rigging and animations were a lot better than they are. Luckily that doesn't really come across in pictures though.

And speaking of pictures. Let's just go ahead and get to those.

Falcoon

It's time to do something with that massive collection of Falcoon art that I collected from his twitter. I don't know if I have all of them here, but I have almost all of them. There's some really good stuff here for SNK fans and non-fans alike. So let's just get right into it after the break.

Echo

It's a real shame this studio shut down. I didn't particularly care for the gameplay in Echo, but I felt like everything was there for the game. I think if they'd had a second game it could have been really good. But I guess we'll never know now that they shut it down.

But the game sure was pretty though. I've never seen a game with quite this art design to it before. I would have really loved to see more where that came from. But what can you do? So let's go ahead and take a look at the pictures after the break. Enjoy.

Dark Souls III 1

Welcome back. Today we're going to be looking at Dark Souls 3. I got inspired to take pictures of this game after watching Maximilian Dood's boss rage video. Something about the Sister Friede battle set to Guilty Gear music just really got me going. So I decided I wanted to screenshot that boss fight and capture it at it's very best.

But then I got to looking at mods, just to make sure I wasn't missing out on some sort of visual improvements, when I saw someone who put together a reshade preset to make the game look like an ancient VHS tape. Evidently there was a TV commercial for the game that looked like some local family video rental store commercial.

And that inspired me to try and make my own reshade setup that wasn't so aggressive with the tape nose and whatnot. What I ended up with looks pretty cool I think. Something about the game itself makes the effect remind me of the old Harryhausen films which makes me think I should have taken a lot more pictures of the skele-ton warriors in the game. But maybe that's something to try in the future.

So anyway. Let's take a look at Dark Souls 3 with my own old film reshade setup. Check it out after the jump.

Sengoku Basara

Are you ready? Cause it's time to put your guns on. We're looking at Capcom's most successful franchise ever today. No not Justice Gakuen. We're talking about Sengoku Basara. We're going to be riding Hondams into Sekigahara battling leper mummies alongside the one eyed dragon of oshuu with our naked arms. So let's just get right to the chase shall we?

Asura's Wrath

So this is a preliminary attempt at taking screenshots of Asura's Wrath. These are from an old build of rpcs3. So that's why the effects aren't quite being rendered properly. But it does look pretty good despite the effects not all being right. I guess that's thanks to the genius artists who work at Cyber Connect. I'll always be ready for anything those guys come out with. They're still the best around at doing anime style graphics in my opinion.

But anyway, I thought I'd go ahead and put these up here, and maybe one of these days I'll go back to the game once rpcs3 runs it better and do a part 2 for this very flawed masterpiece.

Abzu

It's time for Abzu. It wasn't the best game in the world, but there's a lot to like there, like the cat-man looking diver you play as looking around at all the fishes like he wants to catch them or something, or the weird floating land masses in the sky when you go to the surface or just the amazing graphics.

Anyway, there's really not much to say about this one. So I guess we should just get started. So please enjoy the pictures after the jump.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider 1

Welcome back. This post is going to be all about the latest Tomb Raider. I have to say that I liked this one a lot more than pretty much any since three I guess. It's definitely not up to the standard of the first two, but I feel like it's the closest anyone has gotten since then. It seems like Nixxes was a lot better at approximating the feel of the old games than Crystal D ever was.

Then there's of course the fact that it's one of the best looking games around. As much as I don't care about the mess of a story this trilogy has been, it's at least pretty to look at the cutscenes. Also Lara isn't always either about to cry or obsessing over her father like in the past two games. She's just kinda doing explorer stuff.

So I kinda just stopped playing the game about half way in, which is a bad habit of mine. So there might be a part 2 for this game if I get around to finishing it off, which I probably should. This game takes really pretty pictures. Also, I'm sorry some of the pictures got mixed up a little bit. But anyway, let's get to the pictures after the jump.

Welcome to my blog

Hello and welcome to my first blog post. I used to have a tumblr where most of this stuff was, but I decided to move it over here.

So to describe what this blog is, like the description says, it's a collection of video game themed desktop wallpapers mostly. There will be some anime wallpapers as well, maybe some non-wallpaper related posts on occasion too.

Generally posts will be centered around one game, or series, and I do tend to err on the side of sharing too many pictures rather than not enough. So just kinda click through and save whatever ones you like the most I guess. But at any rate, this post's game will be Guilty Gear Xrd Revelator. So let's just go ahead and get started.

So I guess I don't really have too much to say about this game, or the screenshots. Xrd is one of the coolest looking games ever and it was a pure joy to take screenshots of it. I got the finishers, some intros, most reactions to Faust and Dizzy's unique moves, and I think that's about it for this post. So anyway, please enjoy.