Like wines, fiber supplements, and cast iron pans, some video games get better with age.

I recently upgraded my PC. It’s an expensive and irritating process, so I wanted to justify the money and time. Recent graphic showcases were boring and buggy and instilled an irksome sensation that I’d made a mistake. On a whim, I downloaded a handful of my favorite games from the previous generation. I buried my PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in the back of our apartment’s coat closet in 2013 and have missed my semi-regular dip into my comfort games. In an hour, I had BioShock, Far Cry 2, Bulletstorm, and a handful of other games from before 2010 ready to play.

For the past month, I’ve almost exclusively played games from 2008 and 2009. January’s a notoriously slow time for video game releases. I figured my diversion into the recent past would be just that, and by now, early February, these half-dozen oldies would be deleted from my hard drive to make room for the gargantuan storage space required by some fresh blockbusters, like Evolve or the Battlefield Hardline beta. But as new games approach, I find myself uninterested. I figured old games were a temporary distraction None of these half-decade-old games look their age. I had upgraded my PC for flashy graphic showcases, but what it does best is improve upon my back catalog. Thanks to my new graphics card and the option on my PC to use that graphic horsepower to improve the superficials of older games, most of the blemishes I remember — the jaggy edges and the low resolution, which made games look both sharp and blurry at the same time — have been removed, polished, or beautified. Because older games don’t demand the entirety of my computer’s power, the remainder of my graphics card can be used to run my adventures in 4k then downsample them to my 1080p television. There are all sorts of additional graphic tweaks, jargon that only a graphics card nut will appreciate, so out of mercy I will instead say that with a few clicks, I can make something old look like something new.

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A five-year-old video game doesn’t look as visually robust as a game made today; even the most powerful computer can’t add new features, like blood pulsing beneath a character’s skin, realistic hair, or embers that raise from digital fires where they never previously existed. But the curious and exciting thing is that their minimal style has a clearer, refined aesthetic. Because games had to be designed around limits, every object feels intentionally chosen and placed. Graphic horsepower benefits simplistic style My grandfather-in-law once described his experience on pot, saying, "The browns are browner and the greens are greener." Looking back on these games, I relate. I, too, feel a little high. The lines are sharper, the image is clearer, everything runs better. If you play new video games, you know they can sometimes be a little too new, as if they need a few more months in the incubator. Video game developers have used patches, files that can be installed after a game’s release, to fix errors and squash bugs. Some games take months to patch, others — that rare game that’s both beloved and substantially broken — can see patches for years. But five years in, it’s safe to say changes that need to be made either have been made or never will be made.