- According to Wikipedia,
There are 308 games for the Xbox series X,
and over 3000 titles to play.
If you count it's extensive backwards compatible library.
Wow, that's a lot.
And it's also less than half of the number of PC titles
released on Steam each year for the past four years.
And one of the best things about PC gaming
is that if you were to go back,
and re-explore some of those older games,
you might discover that some of them
are very different experiences from what you remember.
So that's what we're going to be doing today.
Sponsored by LG display,
who also provided what is arguably the best gaming display
on the market.
Their OLED Evo, G-one.
I'm going to be going back
and playing some of my favorite PC gaming titles
from years gone by.
Each with its own special twist.
And each of them showcasing one of the amazing ways
that the PC gaming community keeps these old gems alive.
(upbeat music)
We're going to start with a classic Grand Theft Auto Four,
and "Linus", you might say,
"GTA four, isn't that old,
how can you call it a classic?"
But it actually launched in April of 2008,
over 13 years ago.
And honestly speaking, it shows.
To be clear Nico and Liberty city
looked great for back then,
but time steals the beauty from all of us, doesn't it?
Thankfully there's cosmetic surgery.
The GTA 4 beautification projects
is a combination of mods that upgrades everything,
from textures to NPC and vehicle models
to even the graphics or lighting.
Yeah.
- [Plouffe] Like, I mean comparatively to GTA V.
I mean, for a game that, I mean, yeah.
I mean, obviously it's not GTA V,
but like those are some very substantial upgrades.
See you later bud.
I mean, there's nothing you can do
about the the ragdoll physics
that haven't aged particularly well,
but man this is the kind of thing
that's obviously not cutting edge AAA quality for today,
but what it is, is acceptable.
If a game came out and looked like this today,
you'd say, "Okay. Yeah, it's on a lower budget,
but it looks fine.
It's totally playable.
The clouds are a little broken.
Well that's okay.
We don't have to look at the clouds.
You know, when you catch the,
okay that, I was about to say,
when you catch it just right,
the light reflections off the water are actually not bad,
but this is not optimal (laughs).
What is this?
Looks like slow motion footage of someone
like shaking a tray of jello."
Weee, oh my goodness.
Oh my goodness.
So, okay mods can't fix everything about older games,
but still massive props to Boris Vorontsov
for making ENB the "Enhanced Natural Beauty Project",
which covers this Skyrim and some other games,
as well as Deep Peasant 3, Dax1, DKT70, AP84,
and the entire community that has made this possible.
This looks really good for a game from that long ago.
Weee!
Of course one of the key contributors
to our better than ever experience is our OLED display here.
The thing is no matter how sharp the picture is
on a traditional LCD screen,
as soon as the image moves it blurs.
That's because there's a small delay
while each pixel changes color.
And this transition period is called pixel response time.
Now because OLED's don't use liquid crystals,
their transitions are near instantaneous.
How instantaneous?
Okay watch this while I go grab something.
(knife slashing)
(somber music)
Going back and re-experiencing in-game cinematics,
that blew your mind 10 or 20 years ago
is almost always a major letdown.
But one of the more recent trends in game modding
has been exporting and up-scaling these cinematics
to match the resolution that we're now gaming at.
And I think this example from Dragon Age Origins
is a great one.
They managed to juice them up to 1440P or even 4k 60 FPS
in a way that looks surprisingly convincing.
It's a really nifty idea.
And there are lots of tools that you can experiment with
for yourself.
You can see there's certain things that age
a lot worse than others.
Like anywhere they've tried to apply a depth of field
kind of bokeh to the shot.
It's pretty rough,
but in areas where the original was supposed to be sharp,
but it's just low res.
It's a lot better.
I'm back with this,
using an oscilloscope,
we can quantify the amount of blur to expect from a display
by measuring the time it takes to transition
between say black and white.
On the left, we've got a regular old LCD and on the right,
our LG OLED display.
Now to find pixel response time,
we're using this blinking line test pattern
and our oscilloscope to measure the amount of time
between the black and white transition and vice versa.
Impressively our OLED gets as low as .016 milliseconds
compared to 4.9 for the LCD
though it should be noted that if we were flashing
a much larger portion of the screen,
we could get results closer to 0.1 millisecond on the OLED.
And as we've already shown in the past,
this has a market impact on image quality in the real world,
especially in faster paced games.
(shouts) I've put off playing this
until we could make a video about it.
We finally had an opportunity.
This is it, ladies and gentlemen,
from Vitor Vilela who credits plenty of people,
in the GitHub page.
This is Super Mario World running in widescreen 16:9.
And it would be easy enough to run widescreen
just by shrinking the vertical resolution.
That's the way that all the crappy games
handle widescreen support,
but no they manage to modify the original ROM.
(laughing)
This is,
and the excellent bsnes emulator to give you
an expanded horizontal field of view.
You can actually see more of the level
than you ever could before.
(cheerful game music)
I'm gonna at least get to a level
that's at least like marginally challenging.
Now, hold on a second,
I didn't even look that closely before
this is up scaled too.
Isn't it?
There is no way Mario's butt wiggle
is that high definition in the original game.
- [Plouffe] You know you can run ahead now,
'cause of this widescreen.
- I know, right,
except I'm gonna get crushed if I do it,
oh wait I could, oh, you can totally go ahead.
That's not how the game's supposed to be played.
Retro games like this are some of the hardest
to re-experience and a big part of it
is that the way that modern displays work
is fundamentally different from older CRT tube displays.
Now we can get around some of this by enabling filters,
for example, to add fake scan lines,
or otherwise recreate the retro look.
But one of the hardest things to overcome,
is the dreaded input lag.
You see almost all CRTs accepted analog inputs exclusively
that were immediately passed along
to an electron gun that ripped back and forth,
drawing the image on a phosphor coated screen.
Then along came flat panel displays
with their digital inputs that required image processing
for the best results.
Now there's no doubt that they look better,
especially today, but if that processing takes too long,
you could have pixels that change their values
nearly instantly, like we saw with our oscilloscope,
but you could still have an unresponsive gaming experience.
That is where the LG G-one TV
makes an excellent case for itself.
As the ultimate gaming display,
6.8 milliseconds on our Leo Bodner Input Leg Tester
is less than a single frame at 120 Hertz.
A funny thing about input lag and early digital flat panels,
is that many of the games that were released
while they were gaining in popularity
were intentionally made less difficult
because it just wasn't possible to achieve
the same kind of pixel perfect timing
on these new displays that you could on the older CRTs.
So going back and playing games like this,
even if you don't mind the look
can be impossible because you just,
you can't time your jumps properly.
Ah.
No.
Yes, yes, yes.
That's just the worst feeling ever.
You get the first two right.
And you miss the last one like that.
Now, one of the reasons that input lag
has come up in conversation so much lately,
is because of cloud gaming.
Obviously, if you're going to have a server that somewhere.
Oh, I'm good.
Thanks Yoshi, see you later, buddy.
(sad music)
(laughing)
The additional step of sending all the data to,
and from the cloud adds a frame or two of delay at best.
So while TV's have improved by a frame or two
over the last five, 10 years, if the data center is three,
400 kilometers away we could easily end up
right back where we started.
Which leads us perfectly to our next game
because 1994's Tie Fighter was where it all began for me.
For my birthday that year I asked for my family's 386
to be upgraded to a Pentium 1, 166.
That was the first time I ever upgraded hardware
to play a video game.
Now we're flipping the script.
We're upgrading the game to play my hardware.
A massive community of modders has been hard at work,
completely remaking Tie Fighter using more modern assets,
including ships effects and even the game engine itself.
It's called, "Tie Fighter, Total Conversion Mod".
And I am extremely excited about it.
Here it is the X-Wing Alliance launcher, but then wait,
Tie Fighter.
Yes, my friends,
because Tie fighter was using such an old game engine.
I mean 1994,
the mod is actually built
on one of the sequels, X-Wing Alliance from 1999.
It's very different, like it looks freaking amazing.
Hey, here we go.
Alright.
Oh man.
Just like the space environments look so much better.
Oh my gosh,
this looks insane.
You know, what's funny,
one of the reasons we picked this particular game,
aside from that it was one of my favorites
when I was growing up was
because it's a perfect showcase for inky blacks on OLED,
but now space, isn't just, just black.
There's all these like Nebulas and stuff.
Let's look at this lens flare.
Coming back to the deep blacks that you get with an OLED,
there's another advantage for gamers.
So one of the ways that LCDs combat OLED
is through local dimming,
where they will actually modulate the backlight
in certain parts of the screen,
depending on what is being displayed.
The problem with it is that it requires the scene
to be analyzed before its output,
which can add, you guessed it, input lag.
So because you don't have to do that on an OLED,
because black is just, pixel off,
it's just less processing that has to be done.
This gaming is making me thirsty.
lttstore.com.
One of the coolest things about running games
and emulators is that obviously
if I was playing PlayStation 1 emulated games back in,
you know, the mid 2000's.
Computers have gotten a little bit more powerful.
So nowadays you can take something
like Pete's open GL GPU core,
and absolutely crank these older games.
So we've got this probably a little over cooked
in terms of filtering and upscaling and stuff like that.
But look how smooth that looks,
like this game run about.
Okay, you can see the text is getting mangled a little bit,
text is not the best for upscaling,
but let's see how the actual gameplay looks.
Wow.
Like I said, over cooked a little,
but how sharp this looks is unbelievable.
I mean, to be clear, the original graphics,
they were fine for the time,
but they were designed for a 27, maybe 32 inch TV, right?
Anyway, for our final retro game,
we are going back to what was arguably the prettiest
of the next gen first-person shooters
released back in the mid 2000's
with Half-Life 2, Doom 3 and Halo 2
all on the horizon.
Far Cry came out of freaking nowhere.
Looked absolutely beautiful with its lush jungles,
and beaches and kind of embarrassed them all
by launching first.
At least that's how I remember it.
Maybe it looks like absolute garbage.
Oh my God, this icon,
I haven't seen this icon in 15 years.
I am so excited.
Now for this one we're not modding it.
But one of, again,
the coolest things about PC gaming
is that even if there's no texture packs,
or game play mods going back and playing a game,
that you originally played on crap tier hardware,
I was running a Radeon 9,600 Pro at the time,
and just absolutely maxing it out can be a total blast.
This is going to be this game
as I have never seen it before.
One of the reasons for that is that it's made by Crytek
who has since become famous for well releasing games
that no contemporary computer can run fully maxed out.
Here we go.
Okay, here it is.
This is it, this is the moment when you first see like,
whoa, this game is unbelievable.
Remember guys, like what we had seen up until this time,
like Unreal Tournament 2004
was considered a good looking game, right?
Oh shoot, I only have two bullets.
That's all Jack Harvard needs.
He doesn't need like some mega super suit.
He walks up and he shoots you right in the face.
This kind of vegetation.
Totally unheard of back then.
And totally unheard of back then even playing this game,
because you'd have to turn it way down in order to run it,
on the graphics cards that we had at the time.
Okay, please tell me you have a sniper rifle.
Oh my God.
Look at this. Oh, what did I just get shot off the platform?
You know, what's a big challenge making a sequel
to a game that has such a unique visual style,
but still taking advantage of like,
you know, modern hardware.
This was a ton of fun.
And if you're looking for a new gaming display,
I'm sure this video has given you a lot to think about.
Whether it's the black levels,
the support for G-sync and variable refresh rate
or just the lightning fast input lag,
and pixel response time.
Thanks to OLED just turning the pixels on and off.
OLEDs are a great freaking option.
No matter how old or new the games you're playing are.
And thanks to LG for sponsoring this.
I had an absolute blast.
Probably the only other video like this,
is the one where I tried every unplayed game
in my steam backlog.
Though, spoiler alert, some of those games,
there was a pretty good reason
why I never bothered playing them pretty bad.