Yeah, they somehow made it look worse than the fan-made SCUMMVM version. How that happened is just a mystery.
When the game was created, the artists tailored the environments and level of detail to the resolution and graphic fidelity available on home computers at the time, and added things like smoke effects that not only created mood but obscured the limited details. Scaling up the resolution and “cleaning up” the images makes everything look plastic because it’s too clean.
The places where detail was actively removed, I suspect it just looked too awful in up-scaled resolutions. Textures that hinted at unseen details and lines in the original became such an unreadable mess of pixels that they figured they were better off without them.
Well, they figured wrong. My guess is most of the issues would be addressed via a sharpening filter, which adds detail back to the image lost via upscaling.
Anyway, still worth buying, just play the ScummVM version also included in the purchase.
Only on GOG.
And ScummVM is working on restoring even more content, so the game will get better over time. Unfortunately Night Dive will get your money even though they don’t deserve it.
You still need to buy the game content regardless, and that money certainly wasn’t going to Westwood.
I wonder who it was going to. But Night Dive just raided the IP, raised the price back up (it was on sale at $7 on GOG) and did the crappiest job possible “enhancing” (aka ruining) it. They don’t deserve a cent.
Thankfully with Steam’s review system, the game will be buried in the Mostly Negative section.
Nightdive deserve all the support they can get. They been doing a great job most of the time, doing something everybody talked at length about how it should be done, but nobody was ever doing.
No company “deserves” your support. Evaluate every purchasing decision separately, don’t be a patsy.
You don’t buy anything, stop talking!
Nightdive normally does do great work. But they do sometimes do bad ports, which seems to be the case here. Maybe they have an A, B, C, D teams. But this time it got assigned to the Z team.
I feel like the graphical differences shouldn’t be too noticeable when playing handheld on the Switch. I plan on picking it up tonight.
Please tell us, I’m very curious.
I was playing FFX in portable mode and was thinking “meh”. Then I played it on TV and wow, some of those settings are gorgeous.
I still have my original CDs of this game. I should try it on ScummVM.
Why wouldn’t you just play the scummvm version regardless?
Is that available on Switch? I want to play it handheld, on my couch.
ScummVM version now also included on Steam.