Ninja Gaiden Black on Xbox One X is Tremendously Handsome

The First Wave of Original Xbox Titles

I consider Ninja Gaiden on the original Xbox as still one of the best action games of all times. So when Microsoft announced that they would be bringing Original Xbox games to the Xbox One and that Ninja Gaiden would be in the first wave of titles, I was excited!

Upscaling – Not Just Any Upscaling

Emulating the original Xbox is no small engineering achievement, but little did we know that Microsoft wasn’t done there. Microsoft’s backward compatibility team figured out a way to upscale these titles to 1080p on Xbox One and 4K on Xbox One X at the emulator level. It isn’t just a simple video output upscaling, but the actual game on the emulator is rendering out 4x (on Xbox One) or 16x (on Xbox One X) the resolution of the original game with antialiasing thrown in for a super smooth image that is an awe to behold on the Xbox One X especially.

Xbox Graphics

People like to throw figures out: these days it’s teraflops, back in the day we were talking about vertices or triangles a second. However, I think those numbers are pretty meaningless with regards to the kind of image quality a machine is able to produce.

I was never drawn into the Playstation world of games because I found their graphical quality lacking in major areas: objects were too angular, textures were blurry and lacked detail and jaggies were all over the image. This is because Sony make some rather poor design choices when it came to their machines, with the exception of the PS4. With PS1 and PS2, they didn’t have much of a choice due to the available technology to them, however, with PS3 they had only themselves to blame. The machine may have had enough power to complete with the Xbox 360, but the truth is that the machine is not even capable to surpass the original Xbox with regards to graphics and here is why:

From the original Xbox, Microsoft built features into the GPUs to allow for shortcuts in rendering. One of these techniques in the original Xbox was called bump mapping (or DOT3 mapping). Bump mapping allowed the machine to simulate more detail in its textures and more details in the character models than would have been possible otherwise. The Xbox GPU also had pretty sophisticated pixel and vertex shading for the time.

Ninja Gaiden on Xbox One X

So how does Ninja Gaiden hold up after so many years upscaled to 4K with the original assets? Quite simply stunning! I have the PS3 copy of the game as well and running through the same areas in the game, my PS3 copy looks flat and outright horrible in some areas. The Xbox One X image is jaggy-free, has better lighting (except for the first chapter which was re-mastered on the PS3) and beautiful running at 60fps. The original assets hold up remarkably well and the original art really shines through. It is clear the original Xbox was capable of some awesome graphics, just the low resolution was holding the image quality back.

Tremendous job! The Wizards at Microsoft have done it. Now I can’t wait to play some of my favourite games on the platform such as:

• Outrun 2 – although there may be licensing issues with this game because it had to be pulled off retail years ago – Microsoft, sort out a way to replace music in games so this isn’t an issue!!
• House of the Dead III – the original Xbox was an arcade powerhouse! This was so much fun.
• Dead or Alive 3 and Dear or Alive Ultimate (DOA 1 and DOA 2) – come on! Make Xbox One the first platform to have all Dear or Alive games, please. Also bring DOA 4 from Xbox 360! While you are at it, bring DOA Beach Volleyball 1, 2 and 3 so the spin-offs are also on one console. The only thing holding this back might be Tecmo, however, now that they are finished milking DOA 5, they might allow it. Come on, guys!
• Rallisport Challenge 1 and 2 – they are classics!
• Top Spin – I still love the original. Awesome!
• MotoGP 1, 2 and 3 – the original games were some of the best motorcycle racing games on any platform. Still haven’t found any that compares – MotoGP 07 on Xbox 360 comes close.
• Dino Crisis 3 – this game got some beating from the reviewers, but it is one of the best Sci Fi puzzle shooters on the platform with beautiful graphics and cut-scenes to die for. It is a personal favourite of mine!
• Brute Force – why not!
• Unreal Championship 2 – oh yes!

The Future of Xbox Backwards Compatibility

Now that Microsoft has figured out how to upscale original and Xbox 360 games to 1080p and 4K, I can see a future where they enable this for all backward compatible games (400+ and counting). Enabling it and testing it game by game might be tedious, so it would be great if the feature could be switched on and off for titles that have not been tested with the feature yet so the full library can benefit straight away- and we can turn it off per game if the game has glitches because of it until MS gets around to manually updating it. Maybe add some options for upscaling such as 1440p / 1800p / 4K so we can configure it and see what works for now. I know it’s a lot to ask for but dare to dream!

What’s more, this opens the possibility of Xbox One games that were not patched with 4K support for the Xbox One X to actually be upscaled to 4K using an emulation layer / swapping out render targets at run-time. Some of those games currently run at 900p with lack of AA. Even if 4K isn’t possible, 1800p (note I didn’t write 1080p!!) should be easily possible for older Xbox One titles.

One more thing: if they could enable this for all OG Xbox and Xbox 360 games WITH at least 2x AA (preferably 4x where possible), then Xbox One X would be THE PLATFORM to play 3 generations of Xbox games at the best image quality possible. Please make it happen!