There has been much anticipation surrounding the release of "Red Dead Redemption 2," and while we all wait, a bunch of beloved Xbox 360 games have been successfully updated to backward compatible play on the Xbox One X. As has our favorite scarred cowboy adventure. The rugged, immersive world of "Red Dead Redemption" looks awesome in 4K.
Gaming's favorite cowboy gets a makeover
The sprucing up of this favorite game from the Xbox 360 has been described as suddenly changing one's glasses prescription, restoring a painting, cleaning your monitor, etc.
In other words: "Red Dead Redemption" in 4K is clearer, cleaner, crisper, more colorful, more beautiful, and more detailed than it ever was. It's a gorgeous version of an old friend that can comfort us as we wait for the sequel.
Games like this easily stay in the mind as aesthetically pleasing, immersive, and visually arresting, back from when we first played them on the old consoles. Heck, I am still a huge fan of the old original First Person Stealth game series "Thief," which first came out on the PC way back in 1997. I still have a myriad of fond memories of playing those games long into the night, shushing those spectators around me lest the guards in the computer heard us, etc. Looking back on those (albeit groundbreaking for their time) blocky, polygonal, pixellated graphics, I wondered how I ever coped.
But one look at Polygon's side-by-side treatment of the Xbox 360 game as we know and love it with the newly spruced up Xbox One X updated version, and one can see clearly how the backward compatible version has been given clarity without erasing, changing, or ruining what we all enjoyed in the original.
The best is yet to come
Of course, if any of you are "Thief" fans like me, you'll commiserate with me as you you shake your head at what "Thief 4" ended up being on what was then an upgrade to the Xbox 360. But the best of the immersive, sandbox-y, large-world games stay with us, as they dip us headlong into their story, and allow us to create our own version of the story with each time we replay the game.
Awesome graphics or no, we will remember an immersive game the same way we will remember a favorite novel, or a compelling TV series (but more so, as a game is an interactive medium). With the existing beautification of the old game, one can only highly anticipate what improvements and evolutions there will be in the sequel. At least we can enjoy the much ameliorated version of the familiar while we wait for the new.
