March 01, 2022 game

N64 Games Look Stunning with High-Res Textures

Credit to Federico Viticci for pointing me to Henriko Magnifico who creates HD texture packs for a bunch of old Nintendo games. I love two things about this:

One, this breathes new life into old games. They let us expecience the classics, but in a way that is more in line with what we would expect from a game today. This doesn't look like a PS5 game, but it sure looks better than what it looked like when it released in 2000.

Two, much like the Resident Evil 4 HD Project, this is a great example of regular people doing the work to make classic games better in the modern era. I love it, and I wish that the companies who owned these games would put as much work into maintaining the classics as their fan do.

This may be controversial, though, as it is technically changing the original art. The intention of the creators behind the HD texture packs I mentioned are attempting to match the intention of the original works, but that's still a change. Are these like an HD remaster of an old movie, or are they more like a colorized version of a black-and-white film? For the record, I'm not a fan of colorizing old films, but I do like HD texture packs for old games…am I inconsistent? Are they different things? I don't know, but I love that people care enough about this stuff to do it.