The original Resident Evil has been given the HD upscaling treatment, and it gives Capcom’s classic horror game a whole new look. While the 1996 game springboarded a whole videogame series alongside the survival horror genre, its visuals haven’t aged the best. It still has great artistic direction and brilliant ideas that haven’t aged a day, but now a group of players has used modern technology to make the Resident Evil Spencer Mansion feel as sleek as ever, and you can see it below.
Part of the Resident Evil Seemless HD project, the 1996 original is the last of the classic trilogy to receive Machine Learning upscaled backgrounds and models. So if you and your friends are anything like the PCGamesN office – where you argue about which versions of the old-school Resident Evil games are better – you can shut up the detractors with the video below.
I’m partial to all the extras in the GameCube remake of the original, but getting to see those iconic FMVs and experience the cheesiest videogame voice acting ever performed with even better visuals is definitely a win in my book.
With the original game now a part of the AI upscaling RE Seamless HD project, the entire original trilogy has been given a visual face lift by the Seamless HD team.
While the AI upscaling isn’t perfect, considering the team hasn’t completely replaced the original assets, it still looks pretty great. The team knows this and has explained how it has gone about making these upscaled textures.
“Neural network upscaling is not magic. The algorithm has an especially hard time with dark areas and RE games are clearly not games with the brightest and the most colorful backgrounds. Expect to see a lot of ‘melting’ artefacts on dark corners and distant parts of the backgrounds,” the team writes. “Small texts will also end up being processed as melting garbage. We replaced them when the result was too distracting.”
That said, the team says they have combined game data analysis, PC to GameCube texture matching, texture upscaling, and texture recreation to do a great job of making the classic Resident Evil trilogy feel as polished as possible. Not all of the textures line up perfectly either, but I’m still floored by the effort put into this project, and admire the time it’s taken to attempt it in the first place.
Some in-game screens have been manually edited, while other parts of the UI, visual effects, and in-game models have just been upscaled, clearly in an effort to keep within the original vision as much as possible.
You can learn more about the HD Resident Evil project over on the team’s website.
If you want something with that Resident Evil DNA but with a twist, we’ve broken down the very best zombie games and survival games on PC, two genres that RE helped birth and inspired back in the ’90s.
