Gaming: Resident Evil 1's Remake And The Og Resident Evil 4 Are Still...
The Gamecube-era games receive some scarily good unofficial remasters.
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The GameCube era of the early 2000s was a magical time for Resident Evil. Not only did Capcom return to the first game, releasing a much more challenging and intense remake (where mutating, self-reviving enemies first appeared, a feature every Requiem player is VERY familiar with by now), but it also pushed the genre towards a new, more action-oriented era with the gloriously camp Resident Evil 4.
Liberated from the GameCube and now over 20 years old each, both REmake and the OG RE4 are available with some mild enhancements on Steam. They're perfectly playable straight from the installer—but we can do better.
Thanks to painstaking efforts by the community, extensive graphical mods are available for both games, although not much gameplay-wise. Best not to mess with perfection, after all.
While REmake is fine without mods, at higher resolutions it's not hard to notice that the character models stand out against pre-rendered backdrops originally meant for 480i CRT TV screens. Capcom has done some cursory cleanup with its HD ports, but modders have gone one step further.
While the Nexus page for REmake has several options, your best bet is the well-titled REscale:
This is probably my ideal way to play Resident Evil, though I do recommend sticking to the classic tank-style controls—it wouldn't be RE1 without them.
As with any upscale (done with home-friendly tech predating the water- and power-guzzling AI tools now in wider use), it's never going to be perfect, with some things like the shadows around flickering fires looking a little warped. But this mod does a commendable job of blurring the line between foreground and background without losing that thick layer of grime and shadow that defined the look of the first remake.
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Source: PC Gamer
