Fan-made replacement models and textures whatnot have been jazzing up games for decades, but recent years have seen the curious development of custom cinematography. Tools like ENB and SweetFX jack into a game’s rendering pipeline, letting people create their own vision by tweaking things like lighting, shadows, colours, reflections, anti-aliasing, and all manner of blooms and blurs. While some try to bring a look closer to reality, others go more moody.
Perhaps the most popular of these for Grand Theft Auto IV is iCEnhancer, adding enough fancy effects and tonal tweaks to make a six-year-old game look fresh as a daisy. Version 3.0 has now arrived, with plenty of new prettiness and a little extra performance.