Curious about y’alls opinions on this. I like the idea of getting new people to experience an older game by aligning it to modern graphics and accessibility standards. But capitalizing on nostalgia with quick updates to that make it look modern rather than making new games seems like just more of studios trying to squeeze money out of us.
It is very game specific. Some were innovators for how they pushed the limits of technology of their time, others were held back by that same tech. That alone is a huge marker as to whether a remake will improve or hurt the games legacy.
I like remakes, in a lot of instances it’s the games I have already played, but it has been a while. Mass effect 1, Resident Evil 2-4, Demon’s Soul. Also, so many of these companies put so much money and time into new games that it’s a nice little bonus to get a remake in between those huge releases.
Uhh Command and Conquer Generals Zero Hour certainly does need a remake. It takes a lot of work just to get it running correctly and even more if you want online play. Also online play is still shit, very slow and laggy with disconnects. Also, Sid Meier’s Pirates could surely use a remake as well but at least that game still runs fine.
Also also Red Alert 2 Yuri’s Revenge. The first remake was done pretty well and I thought red alert 2 wouldn’t be far behind but there’s still no news about it.
The only remakes that I really liked were Black Mesa and the MCC. Black Mesa was such an incredible tribute to Half Life.
Some, like The Witcher (1), could absolutely use an overhaul because of bad gameplay issues, time constraints or budget cuts (Xen- Half Life, etc). Most, like Skyrim…eh. they don’t really need it as long as they sent patches for stuff like 144hz and ultrawide support.
You can get a used PS4 for pretty damn cheap these days, and Bloodborne is basically free… I would say it’s worth the investment, the game is phenomenal.
The performance (at least on the Pro; I gave my original to my brother) has definitely improved a lot, too. It was a slide show on the original and the pro with and without boost mode enabled for a good while after I bought the PS4 pro, but it’s not bad now. Load times suck though. I basically only made progress once I switched to PS5 and got to take advantage of the SSD. (Note that PS4 games still load way slower than PS5 games on PS5, for the most part.)
Remakes can be awesome – the recent System Shock remake is an excellent example of doing it right. The problem, as it always is, is capitalism and greed, which lead to lazy money-grabbing remakes of games that didn’t need it. Many games that get remakes should have just gotten patches – Dark Souls is a prime example of this. The remake barely looked better than the original and changed things about the gameplay, not necessarily for the better.
Don’t give me Final Fantasy 6 Pixel UHD 4K with the same old boring Battle System - give me a new game with the same story!
Or heck - let me play as the bad guy! Make it “The legend of Zelda - The Rise of Ganondorf“ where you’re doing the stuff that happens between kid-Link and grown-Link in Ocarina of Time
\1. Many retro games were made for CRT TVs at 480p. Updating the graphics stack modern TVs is valuable, even if nothing else is changed.
\2. All of my old consoles only have analog A/V outputs. And my TV only has one analog A/V input. The mess of adapter cables and swapping is annoying. I want the convenience of playing on a system that I already have plugged in.
\3. I don’t even still have some of the consoles that play my favorite classic games, and getting retro hardware is sometimes difficult. Especially things like N64 controllers with good joysticks.
Studios don’t need to do a full blown remake to solve these problems. But I’m also not going to say the Crash and Spyro remakes weren’t welcome. Nintendo’s Virtual Console emulators toe this line pretty well.
But studios should still put in effort to make these classic games more accessible to modern audiences, and if that means a remake, that’s fine with me.
(I’m mostly thinking about the GameCube/PS2 generation and earlier. I don’t see much value in remakes of the Wii/PS3 generation yet.)
IMHO, it depends on the game and the remake. The old Halo games are probably the best case study on what to do and what not to do.
Halo CE - Don’t do that. The game was old enough to warrant major texture, geometry, and animation upgrades, but the developer also completely changed the art style.
Halo 2 - Do this. It’s the old art style, but with more detail. The game looks like how you think it looked, until you toggle the old graphics on and see how it ACTUALLY looked.
Halo 3 - Do this. The game was in good enough shape to just need a few frame rate, texture, and resolution bumps. New animation and geometry wasn’t needed, and avoiding that was the right call.
Halo 2 Anniversary should have kept the old sounds. A lot of the art was done in the shitty Halo 4 style too instead of the original Halo style. Blur absolutely smashed the cutscenes though.
Yeah, I wonder why they never added the option to combo new visuals and old sounds. MCC will only allow old audio with the old graphics.
That said, it’s still one of those games where I get together with my middle aged friends, and no one thinks much about the game’s in-game presentation until someone toggles the graphics, then people suddenly realize a LOT more has been updated that they realize.
IMHO, they did a better job than most at recapturing how the game felt when you played it back in the day. Not all of the creative choices were perfect, but nailed a lot of it.
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