How to ruin a perfectly good game

Agh, my eyes! Default resolution.

If you forget to setup a higher resolution than the default 800x600, you'll be met with absolutely horrible jaggies and texture shimmering as soon as the opening movies end. The game gives no graphics setup options for anti-aliasing or texture filtering, so you'll have to force them on using your video card driver. Resident Evil 4 gets zero points for configurability and user friendliness. With a higher resolution and anti-aliasing, the game world looks slightly better. The only high-polygon count objects on the screen are the various characters, Leon himself in particular. The same goes for textures - the contrast between Leon and his surroundings is often pretty distracting.

Boss battles are graphically intensive, but only choke the minimum system

While the visual quality of RE4 was astounding on a GameCube system, it just doesn't pass muster as a modern PC game. Items and characters blend into the dull, drab textures and color scheme, and effects are similarly nondescript. The good news is that the game should be playable with older gaming PCs as well, and indeed the publisher's stated minimum system is very modest. Incredibly, a Pentium 4 1.4 GHz paired with a GeForce FX 5900 runs the game almost perfectly at a 1280x1024 resolution, with no anti-aliasing enabled in the drivers. Only the required Shader Model 2.0 support is a major hurdle for owners of old systems, but other than that, running RE4 on a modern rig feels like a waste. The frame rate is capped at 30 per second, and there are no high-quality graphics options to enable in the game. Most Windows applications would choke with 256MB of RAM, but RE4 plays pretty comfortably; only major boss battles in large areas cause the frame rate to plummet to a hardly playable 15. With the still modest publisher's recommended setup, frame rates stayed at a constant 30.

Low-quality cutscenes, now with free interlacing artifacts!

That's not too shabby performance for a GameCube emulator, you might be thinking. And you'd be wrong. Resident Evil 4 for the PC is a technologically cut down version of the original GameCube game, just like the PS2 port was. Where the GameCube original rendered cutscenes in-game, allowing for truly seamless transitions between story-advancing cutscenes and action, in the PS2 port these scenes were pre-rendered to save processing power. The difference is noticeable even at the lowest resolutions. When resolution is increased and the normal game looks less horrible, the cutscenes in contrast look like bad quality web videos. What's more, the game keeps pausing to load more data during extended cutscenes, no matter how much RAM your system has. This is terribly, terribly annoying. The only technological advantage of the PS2 port, native widescreen support, was thankfully moved to the PC version as well.

Widescreen support is a small comfort, however, when you consider other features lost in translation: sound effects - very important for ambience in a horror game - are low quality, and the amount of in-game character speech was cut down, all to fit in PS2's 32 megabytes of RAM. Despite loads of available memory, PC gamers will get the same low-quality sound. Many sounds seem displaced: Ganado growls and shrieks come out of nowhere, unnaturally loud when the Ganado is far, distracting instead of helping the player locate the threat. The English voice acting is cheesy but appropriate for the game plot.

Character design and animation are strong points of the game, and they are carried over unchanged from the original version. In stages where Leon has to protect and guide Ashley, she looks genuinely frightened and cowers behind his back when he aims his weapon, and the two cooperate to pass obstacles. These fairly inconspicuous details add a lot of charm to the game, a welcome contrast to the killing spree. Art direction, on the other hand, seems fixated on filth and gore: the village is full of unsavory details that Leon comments on, there is carnage around every corner, and all boss enemies morph into grotesque monsters.