The developer of ScummVMX, Milo, has made quite a few updates to his project. You can now add in fan-made translations, speech packs, videos as backgrounds and alternative soundtracks to name a few changes. It's really shaping out to be an interesting tool.

Why would old games looking modern be a good thing?

Yeah, and engines are so designed around it now you usually can't turn it off with having a shimmery mess or even broken effects like Red Dead 2's tree foliage. DLSS has similar downsides and is being relied upon for playable framerates in games like Cyberpunk. As Digital Foundry says though, there's no going back. Devs are designing around it and it is what it is, unfortunately.

Are you aiming to do a complete upscale for Laura Bow 1 or 2? Is that feasible?

Well, I actually already did a version of upscaled Colonel's Bequest: https://bit.ly/3tp8Nyv

But, for that to look actually good, it would have to be mostly redrawn. Backgrounds would be actually quite a feasible task.

The dagger of Amon Ra would be a simpler one, as you could rely more on upscaling the existing art. The tests I've done look pretty solid, even the sprite art scales up relative nicely.

I am actually somewhat intrigued to try a proper upscale for both of them, but if I ever get to it, remains to be seen.

Man, that was so convincing that I almost turned on the news to look for updates!

+1 and let us know if there's any new developments. :)
. I'll double dare him. My 1080 from 2016 is already outdated lol.
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I gotta admit, I too thought this topic was about some magic program that modernized older games. I so wanted to see what an upgraded Curse of Azure Bonds would look like if it was converted to a Baldur's Gate or Neverwinter Nights style.
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The "old" and "older" games will not have the sophisticated graphics of a game released in 2021, but there is a 99.9% chance those "old" and "older" games will have a better story/tale to tell. See Planescape: Torment, Morrowind, Baldur's Gate, etc.

I think we hit some milestones in graphics and it's allowed a lot of laziness on the design side of things, while we pump graphics, art, and marketing departments full of money. I'm not arguing all games are lazy and not innovative because that's clearly not true. My point is more that a half baked idea with a million dollar coat of paint can make it out the door now without being recognized as flawed. Older games that were flawed had a more difficult time hiding behind graphics I think. My opinion. Dispute that if you'd like,

Sports games are probably a good example of this. Everyone knows about the "roster updates" yearly but the graphics are another thing they focus on. There are minor rule changes to soccer/football, baseball, American football, etc. each year but rarely enough to change the overall way the game is played. So at some point developers started adding real physics-based hair and dynamic grass smudges on uniforms. There just wasn't much else to do. You can certainly rework control systems and stat-building but you may risk alienating yearly buyers. While there are lots of games in other genres that play similar the constraints of sports seemed ripe for this argument.

I think the same thing is true for many other genres at this point. It's hard to shake things up too much when stock prices depend on your game selling x number of units. Each successive generation of AAA games looks better but they don't end up being particularly different. It's a double edged sword because different doesn't always mean better either. What has happened though is that graphical improvements have slowed from O(n^2) to O(log n) and the human eye hasn't really improved in millions of years. Particularly in motion I think most of us would struggle to see a difference in the amount of bump-mapping between a game last year and this year.

All this is probably actually good. If graphics plateau a bit plenty of "old" games won't be such a hard sell, but more importantly we can get back to focusing on design.

Personally, I think art direction is more important, and some games have timeless graphics.

For example:

- Monkey Island 2 (1991) - there's something about that LucasArts 2D art style that still holds up
- Sim City 4 (2003) - beautiful pre-rendered isometric
- Bioshock (2007) - it's showing it's age slightly now, but the tricks the devs used to make Rapture seem believable (and the decision to use art deco stylings, which are low on detail but look fantastic) mean that it still holds up today
- Dishonored (2012) - almost looks like a painting. A bit grey, but works for the atmosphere of the game

The jump in fidelity between 2000 and 2005 vs 2015 and 2020 is an interesting one. I think part of it is the fact that you've gone from very few polygons to a low, but considerably high number. So, the fidelity looks a lot better, but it's still quite basic.

2015 to 2020, you've gone from loads of polygons on the screen to loads and loads - probably a bigger jump in raw numbers, but less visible to the naked eye (things already looked quite good). Plus, developers have got a lot better at hiding rough edges and shortcuts taken to make things look good. That, and the fact that with an insane amount of HDD space available vs 15 years ago, anyone can stick high definition textures on stuff these days.

By any chance, is he a cute fox?

Excellent point about storage space being a factor as well as raw horsepower.

Bioshock and Dishonored are two of my favorite games simply for the worlds themselves. Art direction and how it paired with storytelling made everything feel alive and engrossing in a way that no amount of graphical fidelity would have managed on its own.

Ah, you may think that graphics have more or less peaked, but I remember seeing Luigi's Mansion and Smash Bros Melee on the GameCube and thinking "This is it, I can't imagine graphics being substantially better than this". Those games have aged pretty well, but obviously graphics have still come a long way in the last 20 years.