Completed my first championship in Dirt Rally 2 GOTY edition and really enjoyed tinkering with setups and all those near-misses (and occasional off-road adventures).

Plus all those kilometers of stages look pretty great.

I still have my issues with the TR reboots, but Shadow does look very good.

I'm playing Control again now that I have a PC. Originally I'd played on the PS4 Pro and enjoyed the experience, but obviously the framerate was lower, the resolution was lower, and there was no ray tracing. I'm playing now with that ray tracing and it mostly looks really good, but after the initial experience of seeing my reflection for the first time it became more of a piece of the graphical experience rather than a showcase. But, occasionally, things will happen with RT that still amaze me.

In this image, there's a projector playing a video. The image I captured was the window's reflection of that image. I legitimately thought there was a duplicate projector playing the video in the hallway and when to look at it only to realize I'd been tricked by a reflection.

It's hard to see it here, but my character's reflection is shown on the computer screen, full animated along with the rest of the room within view of the screen. I just though that was really cool.

Love me some ETS2. I also love ATS.

Wrapped up Death Stranding earlier this week. What a strange and beautiful game.

Comparing my custom Shepard from the 2008 PC version to the Legendary Edition. I miss the dramatic, high-contrast lighting the most. HDR helps but it's still not the same. The Shadow Of The Colossus PS4 remake was somewhat similar in its art direction where the added detail sacrificed the dreamlike, blown-out bloom of the PS2 original.

That being said, the Legendary Edition has far less graphical glitches like texture loading, shadow flickering, and clipping.

@superjoe:

Yeah, it's weird. I'd imagine the new look is probably more 'accurate' lighting but it's less stylized too. I will say though, I didn't look at comparisons until about 5 hours or so into playing the Legendary Edition and up to that point the game looked to me as it did in my mind's eye back in 2008.

You know, it's not a full on remake but Mass Effect 2 cleans up pretty well in the rerelease.

There are shots from a game called 'Edge of Eternity.' It's out on the older consoles too. It's only $30 and made by 8 people from France. I'm really enjoying it. You can see the budget constraints, but it's pretty amazing what can be accomplished by such a small team.

So I got the Ninja Gaiden Master Collection on PC and it's a bit of a mess. For those that don't know, there are no graphics options besides changing gamma, brightness, and contrast. Only the controller works, even in menus (which is fine with me but is still a little weird). I don't think at least the first game has surround sound, only stereo. And there's supposed to be a button combination to leave the game and enter the main menu, that doesn't seem to be working. So to quit the game, I also have to ctr+alt+del the application closed. Oh, and it also doesn't support a proper fullscreen.

To fix a bunch of this, you can use your GPU's control panel to add things like antialiasing and anisotropic filtering. Also, go into each game's folder, right click the game's .exe file, and turn off DPI. Because with it on the game won't show at your display's native resolution. I don't know what resolution it did play at, but it looked pretty low resolution until I fixed it.

But, after all that, it does look and play pretty well.

I'd like to request some raw/uncorrupted png or gif screenshots from more recent pixel art games if anyone has some!

Psychonauts 2

I'm 212 hours into this game... i don't know what happened...

A Plague Tale: Innocence

Soooooooo heartbroken! ;)

You know, after some modding, these games look pretty ok on PC.

Far Cry 6

@cikame: Jeff Grubb would be proud.

It kind of got a bad rep, but Dirt 5 is a really nice looking game on PC and a fun arcade racer. It's on Gamepass if you guys want to try it.

So I decided to download Shadow and Rise of the Tomb Raider because they were free on the Epic store. Shadow has some extra PC features including raytracing shadows. I've used ray tracing shadows in the past, but this is the first time when it became more obvious the difference it makes.

For those who are don't know what raytracing does for shadows, essentially, as in real life (which I didn't really notice until I read about raytracing in games), shadows that are cast by objects that are nearer to the player appear sharper and darker while objects that are farther away cast more diffuse and transparent shadows. It's a pretty cool effect.

I'm back to playing Flight Sim again now that some aircraft mods are available, which lead to a bit of an adventure.
When checking out the cliffs of Dover i was looking at the map and saw the town of "Sandwich" in Kent, nearby was Sandwich Bay so naturally i had to investigate.

Turns out Sandwich Bay is about 5 miles of golf courses, then i noticed an unmarked runway on the map further north.

It's "Manston International Airport", or it used to be it was closed in 2014, its origins begin in 1914 as a makeshift airfield but grew over time and was very important in WW2 due to its strategic position on the frontline of the battle of Britain.

As it was important it was bombed a lot and many damaged planes limped back here to finally rest, this is also where the famous bouncing bomb used in the dambuster raid were tested, apparently there's a museum on site.
Since 2014 it's been used as an overflow lorry park, but there are plans to bring it to life again this year for short haul flights and cargo transport.

Flight Sim always gets praised for stuff like this, but i legitimately stumbled onto some real history while playing a video game and making fun of a place called Sandwich, also the FBI were there.

Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy

As many others have come to realize, this game is actually really fucking great. (Also really fucking gorgeous).

Fuji Speedway with Mt Fuji in the clouds.

Mt Fuji.

I guess that's where people climb up.

Angkor Wat.

Cool building on a hill nearby.

In real life it's actually temple ruins with a new smaller building out front, but here it looks like a sick dojo.

In between all the dumb shooting, Far Cry 5's been a nice game for just enjoying the scenery.

Look... Jessie is waifu what do you want from me.

Ok so it was only a matter of time before i searched for Hololive plane liveries and this one's perfect.

Then i flew around New York in a Corsair.

The Witcher 3 with mods still looks pretty good. And if you have Windows 11, or an insider build of Windows 10, it supports auto HDR and looks great.

Some of my solo [mis]adventures in GTA Online last January:

Departing Germany with live weather, it's been sucky weather in western Europe recently.

Heading towards the Czech Republic, hopefully it's better there.

Lots of players flying around Ukraine at the moment.

Flawless Widescreen works!

@rorie:

There is also a beta framerate mod out, but haven't bitten the bullet on that one.