Castlevanias: Aria of Sorrow, Order of Eclessia, Dawn of Sorrow, Portrait of Ruin (no, no Symphony on my top-top list, it’s awesome, but not that awesome);
Ori and the Blind Forest mentioned already;
Axiom Verge 1 and 2;
Some call it heresy, but… Dark Souls! bit harder, bit turn-based (combat, aye, heresy x2, but stamina system makes it turn based for me, thats wild)… but running all around, having maze with many options, each boss unlocks new paths and parts of map… 200% metroidvania to me.
+1 for the Castlevania Aria/Dawn of Sorrow games. The Soma Cruz games were where the series truly hit its peak.
Portrait of Ruin was alright. I enjoyed that they found a way to incorporate more varied environments into the series.
Order of Ecclesia took me a while to start enjoying. The weird hybrid 3D graphics threw me off at first. Once I got past that, I thoroughly enjoyed it.
I wanted to enjoy this game, but it gave me hardcore motion sickness after about 10 minutes. I haven’t had that happen in very many games, so it was notable in this one.
Idk I still think it’s way more common for remasters to be good. There’s been a handful of bad ones, but they’re the outliers. What’s way more common seems to be bad PC ports in general, which affects both remasters and new games.
Just looking around for some examples: the Phonekx Wright original trilogy was great for me on PC, and the PC remasters are pretty well-received overall. The Sonic remasters from Christian Whitehead were so good that Sega let him make an original game. The BioShock games aren’t really good to replay, but I didn’t really notice anything different on the PC remasters compared to how I originally played them on the PS3.
Ones that I haven’t played yet but have reviewed well: the Legacy of Kain series, the Last of Us 1&2 (you can argue that the remasters were not needed, and specifically the PC ports of those games had rough launches, but the console versions reviewed well and reportedly the PC versions have been mostly fixed). The Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters are widely considered to be the definitive way to play those games.
The examples I can think of for bad “remasters” weren’t really remasters. The Grand Theft Auto series might be the most notorious for this, because they removed the original PC ports and released “remastered” prior Android ports instead of remastering the original PC or console versions. Silent Hill is another case- Konami lost the original source code so it was, by definition, a remake that they just chose to market as a remaster instead.
It is often very different though. I know you meant it to be ironic but the quote you mentioned pretty close to something that people actually do say. It’s one thing to remain absolutely pixel-perfect, frame-faithful and bug-for-bug-matched to the original. As soon as you break that commitment, you’re in totally different territory, and it’s risky territory and it’s got a long history of not being received well.
Remastering with more realistic 3d typically destroys the charm of the original graphics, whether lovingly crafted pixel art or low-poly 3d with simple textures, these have places where our imagination has filled in the gaps. I think that something that modern game and art design and remasters in particular often lose sight of, is how important leaving things to the imagination still is, leaving room for people to fill in their own details and become part of the game themselves. It provides an opportunity for the player to have a degree of creative control of the game or to even self-insert to a degree, but at least to interpret the game and the story, and yes even the art in their own way. Not everyone has a strong imagination, some people need more structure and support than others, so it’s a tricky thing to find the right balance for, but there IS a balance, and often classic games have already found it. That’s why they’re classic and loved by a large number of people and why they’re being remastered.
Remasters are walking a delicate line on this. People do want a remaster to add things and add detail artistically and otherwise, and it’s inevitably going to come into conflict with some of the perceptions that each person imagined on their own. In some senses it’s starting from a disadvantage, because it is going to have to provide enough additional value to overcome that inevitable conflict before it can even start to earn acclaim as an improvement.
You can say the exact same thing about PC ports though. The mere act of changing from a console experience to a PC experience means that you are changing the medium and changing that experience. Most PC ports have always had options to support different resolutions, frame rates, color modes, aspect ratios, and more. Not because of some grand artistic vision from the creator, but because the hardware was not standardized the way TV’s are and the developers realized that those options were insignificant details that were best left to the player to decide. Even a lot of console games had options like Widescreen or high-resolution modes in the 90’s and early 2000’s as widescreen HD TV’s transitioned from rare enthusiast items to ubiquitous.
One of my favorite PS1 games growing up was Moto Racer, a pretty generic and unremarkable arcade motorcycle racing game. It originally released on PC, and the PS1 version released a month later. Which, for the 90’s, was basically a simultaneous release. a couple years ago I bought the original PC version on steam because it was super cheap- it sucks and it’s completely unplayable. The controls are just too twitchy. I went and emulated the original PS1 version and… It’s fine, just like I remembered it. The game also had a re-make for its 15th anniversary, but I haven’t played that version.
For games that originally released on PC as ports, I think that the publishers should leave those available. I really hate that Rockstar took down the original PC versions of GTA for example, and replaced them with what they called a “remaster” but was actually a port of the Android versions of the games, which I would say crosses over to “re-make” territory.
In order to get the full, original experience of when PC games first came out I would have to sit at a tiny desk shoved in the corener of my mom’s living room and stare at a shitty CRT monitor that had washed out colors and warping around the edges. The room would be filled with cigarette smoke and there would be other children outside playing with lawn darts.
Even when I emulate games, I usually try to mess around with resolutions, original textures versus HD texture packs, locking at different frame rates, different filters or shaders, etc. I always thought Armored Core was a clunky mess of a game as a kid but as an adult I was able to emulate it and
I appreciate trying to preserve parts of history and culture, but that endeavor will always be limited. We cannot perfectly store an infinite amount of information indefinitely. Society and culture change over time, so we need to be careful when considering the context that art was made in versus the context of when we are experiencing it. I’m not going to learn Olde English and travel to England to handle the Norwell Manuscript to read Beowulf in its original form- it’s not worth it.
Remasters dont necessarily mean pc port (looking at you demons souls). And then theres differences. Even though i think the remaster is worth those differences, there are legitimate lore implications in the differences. And then with something like demons souls, emulating it is a huge pain. Ive given up trying to emulate it on linux. Remasters are not just strictly a replacement for a pc port even if there are times they can be.
The meme is specifically comparing these to PC Ports, so I’m limiting my scope to games that have PC versions. So no Nintendo games either for example.
And if there are lore changes then I would call that a “re-make” or “re-imagining”. Part of the problem is that marketing teams have just chosen to go rogue in terms of what to call what. “Re-master” itself is a term that came from the mastering process of the music industry, to differentiate from “remix” or “re-recording”, so I suppose you could argue that we need a better term overall for videogames. So this means I generally ignore whatever words they decided to slap onto the title screen and focus instead on what the changes actually are.
Those darn millenials and their forcing everyone to drink their fancy drinks and then Karen gets mad at me, the poor veteran just trying to give this business my dollar!
I don’t know, I played Blasphemous this summer and had a very mixed time with it. I really wanted to love it but it mostly pissed me off. Too much gameplay design specifically intended to waste your time and make you miserable. Which - I guess - is the point because the game is all about the virtue of suffering. I just didn’t find it particularly fun to play.
Yeah, it’s neat. At the very least it behaves like a normal modern window. Original d2 has big problems with a monopolitic behavior over your screen estate while being 4:3.
Another counterpoint is Nier, where gameplay became more smooth and story additions made it worth another whole run. Character designs changed, that expectedly caused some drama, but having almost-unheard of prequel of Automata being there accessible to new audiences with new lore for old souls to is a win-win situation. Rare games made me not question preorder or first day purchase.
Absolutely yes. It’s timelessly good. I played a bunch of the post-SotN Castlevanias on GBA and such and even with the more advanced systems and everything, none of them hit the same. It’s insane how well they nailed it on their first go.
There really isn’t a remaster, just ports. There’s very little to improve.
I think there may have been some voice re-recordings here or there, but otherwise most versions are pretty much the same. I think the Xbox 360 Live Arcade version is missing some unimportant FMVs and some other minor details, but it’s still completely decent.
It was a secret unlockable in the PSP game Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles with an added character and other stuff, but then you have to deal with the PSP emulation or whatever.
I’d suggest either emulating the original or getting it as a PSOne Classic on PlayStation Store unless some other route is more convenient.
I played it for the 1st time, no nostalgia googles and I didn’t really enjoy the back tracking that much (even using the quick travel spots), the way to get the powers (you kinda need to remember where the monsters are) and discovering the secret rooms felt like a chore to me.
The only Castlevania games that I have played to completion have been Dawn of Sorrow and Portrait of Ruin of ruin for DS, and regarding the genre, additionally to that, it would be Metroid Zero Mission, Guacamelee! And I think those are the ones I can remember… And I didn’t feel that way with them.
I did enjoy the OST and the graphics a lot though.
I’ll admit that 100%ing (or rather “100%”ing it - iykyk) it can get pretty tiresome, but I actually found that the backtracking wasn’t too bad because the castle map was so good. For some reason I was able to remember a lot of routes in it, but I couldn’t find my way through the later games for the life of me without checking the map screen every five seconds.
As someone who played later entries first and then went back to SotN, IMO it's a bit rough around the edges in comparison. Still a fantastic game, but I think later games managed to improve on it.
You don’t have to have nostalgia for the game to appreciate how wonderfully crafted and expansive it is. It has one of the best soundtracks of any game, period, and its art is highly detailed and numerous. It has a ton of secrets (including one MAJOR secret) and a couple of extra game modes that enhance the replayability.
I would say the game seems to get better every time I play it. Is that nostalgia or something else? There are a lot of games I played before I had ever seen SOTN, yet I don’t feel the same desire to keep replaying them. I think it’s like a piece of classical music or a great movie. The more you replay it, the more details you come to appreciate. The original Deus Ex is like that for me as well.
It’s an fantastic game, as other have already told you. But I’d like to add that there’s a randomizer for it and this basically adds almost infinite replay value (at least for me!)
I may have to try putting an emulator on my Steam Deck
I always tought it was standard for pc players to have at least 1 emulator installed, usually Retroarch or Emulation Station.
But since you are willing to give them a shot, try Metroid Fusion too, I admit it’s heavily on rails, but it feels fun and the movement is improved over Super Metroid.
There is a patch to make Super Metroid behave somewhat like MF, but I think playing it vanilla first is fun on it’s own.
Yes. At least I didn’t hit any roadblocks like in Hollowknight where a lot of patience and concentration was required to beat certain bosses and not lose your sanity on the ridiculously long ways to the arena.
The only one I’ve played is Dead Cells, and it’s fantastic. I haven’t even bought any of the DLC, the base game is already endlessly replayable. I also listen to the soundtrack at least once a week.
I definitely want to get around to playing Hollow Knight and Animal Well at some point.
I’ve always thought it was both. I’m definitely no expert on Metroidvanias, since I’ve only played the one (if Dead Cells counts as one). I actually thought the term “Metroidvania” was about the movement and combat – today I just learned that it’s about the exploration and finding things. You do at least have to do that in the bank level, if I remember right. And the castle level.
There are also areas you can’t access until you have beaten a specific boss which gives you exploration abilities for future runs (ground pound, grow vines)
It does have metroidvania aspects, for sure. But if its the only “metroidvania game” you’ve played, then you haven’t really played any metroidvania games, in my opinion.
It must have been me hoping that cortana would reprise her role in 3… aside from odst and seemingly reach, the only thing I remember is how much of a slog the cortana hallucinations or whatever that was and the didact part being somehow even less enjoyable
Whoa, 3 and ODST absolutely rule, and Reach is great if you aren’t a purist. Especially Reach’s forge mode, that shit was the bee’s knees back in the day
I wasn’t inlcuding odst, and was reach the one that opens in a helicopter with the invisible elite on the ground? Those get a pass. None of the numbered releases after 2 did it for me though
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Aktywne