TheRetroArcade
Veteran
Posts: 1,971
Joined: Feb 2026
Joined: Feb 2026
The Gamecube-era games receive some scarily good unofficial remasters.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
You are now subscribed
Your newsletter sign-up was successful
Want to add more newsletters?
Every Friday
GamesRadar+
Your weekly update on everything you could ever want to know about the games you already love, games we know you're going to love in the near future, and tales from the communities that surround them.
Every Thursday
GTA 6 O'clock
Our special GTA 6 newsletter, with breaking news, insider info, and rumor analysis from the award-winning GTA 6 O'clock experts.
Every Friday
Knowledge
From the creators of Edge: A weekly videogame industry newsletter with analysis from expert writers, guidance from professionals, and insight into what's on the horizon.
Every Thursday
The Setup
Hardware nerds unite, sign up to our free tech newsletter for a weekly digest of the hottest new tech, the latest gadgets on the test bench, and much more.
Every Wednesday
Switch 2 Spotlight
Sign up to our new Switch 2 newsletter, where we bring you the latest talking points on Nintendo's new console each week, bring you up to date on the news, and recommend what games to play.
Every Saturday
The Watchlist
Subscribe for a weekly digest of the movie and TV news that matters, direct to your inbox. From first-look trailers, interviews, reviews and explainers, we've got you covered.
Once a month
SFX
Get sneak previews, exclusive competitions and details of special events each month!
The GameCube era of the early 2000s was a magical time for Resident Evil. Not only did Capcom return to the first game, releasing a much more challenging and intense remake (where mutating, self-reviving enemies first appeared, a feature every Requiem player is VERY familiar with by now), but it also pushed the genre towards a new, more action-oriented era with the gloriously camp Resident Evil 4.
Liberated from the GameCube and now over 20 years old each, both REmake and the OG RE4 are available with some mild enhancements on Steam. They're perfectly playable straight from the installer—but we can do better.
Thanks to painstaking efforts by the community, extensive graphical mods are available for both games, although not much gameplay-wise. Best not to mess with perfection, after all.
While REmake is fine without mods, at higher resolutions it's not hard to notice that the character models stand out against pre-rendered backdrops originally meant for 480i CRT TV screens. Capcom has done some cursory cleanup with its HD ports, but modders have gone one step further.
While the Nexus page for REmake has several options, your best bet is the well-titled REscale:
This is probably my ideal way to play Resident Evil, though I do recommend sticking to the classic tank-style controls—it wouldn't be RE1 without them.
As with any upscale (done with home-friendly tech predating the water- and power-guzzling AI tools now in wider use), it's never going to be perfect, with some things like the shadows around flickering fires looking a little warped. But this mod does a commendable job of blurring the line between foreground and background without losing that thick layer of grime and shadow that defined the look of the first remake.
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
While the first REmake's community-made remasters might have some minor tradeoffs, Resident Evil 4's HD Mod is widely considered one of the greatest ever made.
A massive labor of love that went far beyond upscaling textures, the two-man team (one of whom is now working for Nightdive) went as far as to track down the original source images used where possible for creating new high-res replacements. And where they couldn't, they travelled to locations arou...Read more: Full article on www.pcgamer.com
What do you think about this?
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
You are now subscribed
Your newsletter sign-up was successful
Want to add more newsletters?
Every Friday
GamesRadar+
Your weekly update on everything you could ever want to know about the games you already love, games we know you're going to love in the near future, and tales from the communities that surround them.
Every Thursday
GTA 6 O'clock
Our special GTA 6 newsletter, with breaking news, insider info, and rumor analysis from the award-winning GTA 6 O'clock experts.
Every Friday
Knowledge
From the creators of Edge: A weekly videogame industry newsletter with analysis from expert writers, guidance from professionals, and insight into what's on the horizon.
Every Thursday
The Setup
Hardware nerds unite, sign up to our free tech newsletter for a weekly digest of the hottest new tech, the latest gadgets on the test bench, and much more.
Every Wednesday
Switch 2 Spotlight
Sign up to our new Switch 2 newsletter, where we bring you the latest talking points on Nintendo's new console each week, bring you up to date on the news, and recommend what games to play.
Every Saturday
The Watchlist
Subscribe for a weekly digest of the movie and TV news that matters, direct to your inbox. From first-look trailers, interviews, reviews and explainers, we've got you covered.
Once a month
SFX
Get sneak previews, exclusive competitions and details of special events each month!
The GameCube era of the early 2000s was a magical time for Resident Evil. Not only did Capcom return to the first game, releasing a much more challenging and intense remake (where mutating, self-reviving enemies first appeared, a feature every Requiem player is VERY familiar with by now), but it also pushed the genre towards a new, more action-oriented era with the gloriously camp Resident Evil 4.
Liberated from the GameCube and now over 20 years old each, both REmake and the OG RE4 are available with some mild enhancements on Steam. They're perfectly playable straight from the installer—but we can do better.
Thanks to painstaking efforts by the community, extensive graphical mods are available for both games, although not much gameplay-wise. Best not to mess with perfection, after all.
While REmake is fine without mods, at higher resolutions it's not hard to notice that the character models stand out against pre-rendered backdrops originally meant for 480i CRT TV screens. Capcom has done some cursory cleanup with its HD ports, but modders have gone one step further.
While the Nexus page for REmake has several options, your best bet is the well-titled REscale:
This is probably my ideal way to play Resident Evil, though I do recommend sticking to the classic tank-style controls—it wouldn't be RE1 without them.
As with any upscale (done with home-friendly tech predating the water- and power-guzzling AI tools now in wider use), it's never going to be perfect, with some things like the shadows around flickering fires looking a little warped. But this mod does a commendable job of blurring the line between foreground and background without losing that thick layer of grime and shadow that defined the look of the first remake.
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
While the first REmake's community-made remasters might have some minor tradeoffs, Resident Evil 4's HD Mod is widely considered one of the greatest ever made.
A massive labor of love that went far beyond upscaling textures, the two-man team (one of whom is now working for Nightdive) went as far as to track down the original source images used where possible for creating new high-res replacements. And where they couldn't, they travelled to locations arou...Read more: Full article on www.pcgamer.com
What do you think about this?