according to Wikipedia there are 308 games for the Xbox series X and over 3
000 titles to play if you count its 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
they're OLED Evo G1 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
we're gonna start with a classic Grand Theft Auto 4 and Linus you might say GTA
4 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 project is a combination of mods that upgrades
everything from textures to NPC and vehicle models to even the graphics or
lighting
comparatively to GTA 5. I mean for a game that I mean yeah I mean obviously
it's not GTA 5 but like
those are some very substantial upgrades
see you later but I mean there's nothing you can do about the uh 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
um well that's okay we don't have to we don't have to look at the clouds you
know when you catch the okay that
um 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 um optimal
what is this looks like slow motion footage of someone like shaking a tray
of jello
oh my goodness oh my goodness so okay mods can't fix
everything about older games but still massive props to Boris for on saw for
making ENB the enhanced natural beauty project which covers this Skyrim and
some other games as well as deep peasant 3 Dax one dkt70 ap84 and the entire
community that has made this possible like this looks really good for a game from
that long ago wee
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 oleds don't use Liquid crystals
their transitions are near instantaneous
how instantaneous okay watch this while
I go grab something
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 upscaling 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 60fps 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
pretty rough but in areas where the original was supposed to be sharp but
it's just low res
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 marked impact on image
quality in the real world especially in Faster paced games
ah I 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 Villa who credits plenty of people in the GitHub page this
is Super Mario World running in
widescreen 16x9 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 managed
to modify the original ROM
and the excellent beastness emulator to
give you an expanded horizontal field of view you can actually see more of the
level than you ever could before
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 upscaled too isn't it
there is no way Mario's butt wiggle is that high definition in the original
game
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 coded 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
have an unresponsive gaming experience that is where the LG G1 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 oh
no
yes yes the worst feeling ever you get
the first two right and you missed 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's somewhere oh I'm good thanks Yoshi see you later buddy
the additional step of sending all the data to and from the cloud adds a frame
or two of delay at best so while TVs have improved by a frame or two over the
last five ten 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 one 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 all right
oh man the just like the space environments look
so much but 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
looks 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 leg
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-2000s computers have gotten a little bit more
powerful so nowadays you can take something like Pete's opengl GPU core
and absolutely crank these older games
so we've got this probably a little overcooked in terms of filtering and
upscaling and stuff like that but look how smooth that looks
like this game running back 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 overcooked 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 you know 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-2000s 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 gameplay
mods going back and playing a game that
you originally played on crap tier Hardware I was running a
Radeon 9600 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 Carver 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 so oh my God okay
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 in 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 um though spoiler alert some of those
games there was a pretty good reason why I never bothered playing them they're pretty bad