I played about an hour of RE4 last night. I'm quite disappointed so far but I suppose that's no surprise.
It started off okay. The lack of AA is already evident, but because of the game's colour palette I don't think it's as big an issue as I thought it would be. Slapping some MLAA or FXAA on it would have been a cheap and easy option, assuming the framerate would hold up (which it really should). 720p is also not an issue as the game still looks quite sharp and scales better than most. Nay, the biggest problem with the visuals is the textures. In typical Japanese fashion, the filtering is some god awful mip-mapping that just makes distant textures look like screen noise. It's not evident in stills - in fact that's when the game looks it's best; it's when you start to move the camera, the entire scene crawls in a ghastly way. Add jaggies to this mix and it makes the game look seriously ugly in motion.
I've not encountered any framerate problems yet, but I did see a few minor stutters in cutscenes. For example, when the camera pans down past the police car's lights, it dropped a couple of frames. Generally the game has felt pretty responsive. But here we come to the worst part of it all - the changed controls. Swapping square with X is confusing the shit out of me. It's near game breaking as i'm an hour in and still have not gotten used to it. In critical fight or flight situations, I am still accidentally reloading my weapon when I meant to pull off a last minute shot. The inventory controls further compound the problem because here they still allow X to act as select. I don't know if the PS2 game mapped move item to triangle, but that's another annoyance I continue to endure.
Finally, i'd have to say the worst aesthetic shortcoming is not graphical, it's the sound design, or lack-thereof. In a completely squandered opportunity, the game remains in stereo with lower quality sound effects than I remember. A minimal amount of effort has been put in here, while the MGS collection is adding 5.1, and the new GOW: Origins collection even features some godly sounding DTS.
All points considered, I am not sure if I will even take the time to continue. With Gears 3 out, CVX next week (which I really hope doesn't suffer the same fate) and the far better ICO collection too, there is really no point wasting more on this. I'll stick to the PC version - it is much better than this port, "not true to the source material" be damned (especially when it looks like garbage here). Then it's Dolphin in future when I have the computing power.
