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Doubling the frame-rate, in his estimation, didn't deliver double the visual impact, it made the movement seem "jarring" - a little too real, almost. This is something that technology editor Jacob Kastrenakes grapples with in his assessment of watching the first Hobbit film in 48 frames per second, instead of the industry-standard 24. These graphical "improvements" ended up diminishing the game's iconic foreboding, claustrophobic atmosphere. This isn't the first time that the objective "improved" visuals haven't lined up with the subjective "aesthetically pleasing." In 2012 Konami released the Silent Hill HD Collection, a remaster of the first three games in the popular survival horror series, which, in addition to a myriad of technical issues, featured expanded resolutions, a wider aspect ratio and increased draw distances. It's hard for me to say that the PC version is the "ideal" version of Reach, only because it looks a little too perfect. The PC version certainly looks "better" than the 360, but the 360 version "feels" more like the Reach I remember-because, well, it is. Having played through the single-player campaign on both 360 and PC this week, I kept going back and forth between the two, trying to discern which version I preferred.
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It sounds silly to say this when talking about a groundbreaking first-person shooter franchise, but the reduced framerate and blurred visuals give the original version Reach this distinctive cinematic feel that you do not get in the remastered release. Trying to land a headshot on an Elite with a control stick at 30 FPS is not the same as trying to land one with a mouse at double, or even quadruple, the frame rate.īut these two experiences are so different that it's hard to say that this the intended experience Bungie wanted players to have back in 2010. The increased visual fidelity combined with the added precision offered by playing the game with a mouse and keyboard on the PC delivers a Reach experience that's "improved" over the original. Sure, the game "plays" better than it does on 360. The remastered version looks sharp and smooth, while the original looks imprecise, almost dream-like in the way that it moves. "The disadvantage with this technique is that in fast motion, ghosting is a serious issue, resulting in a look rather akin to what we saw on very early, latency-heavy LCD displays."Īlthough major critics at the time failed to pick up on the fact that Reach looked much blurrier than past Halo games, looking at a side-by-side comparison of the MCC version versus the original, it's clear that the use of temporal anti-aliasing is the biggest difference between the two. " major positive is that the effect on far away scenery in particular can be quite extraordinarily good, and one of Reach's major accomplishments is the creation of massive, sprawling levels with tons of view distance," wrote Digital Foundry's Richard Ledbetter earlier in 2010. While Tchou uses "free" within the context of hardware resources, the use of TAA in the 360 version of Reach still came at a cost.