I don’t like 1:1 ports for a simple reason. The janky af controls and cameras. Sure 1:1 is fine for some older games. But some games could use a coat of paint before a port. I don’t want that nostalgic feeling of playing an old game for the sake of playing an old game. I want that nostalgic feeling of “holy shit this is crazy” from advancements in technology.
This is why i like the FF7 remakes because they’re more than just retreading the same steps and story. At face value they are but if you have played the original you’ll soon notice that there’s something going on with the story that kind of makes it more of a sequel, rather than a “remake”.
The naughty dog kind are the worst in my opinion. A waste of time, money and talent. If you’re going to remake a game now, I want something that makes it worth playing whilst not replacing the original. The only way I think I’d be mostly okay with a remake replacing an original is if they’re remaking a shit game to make it good, but they never do that.
I’m not a retro gamer, but I also don’t really understand the appeal of 1:1 PC ports - in my mind you’d either want to go for the full experience with the original console and controllers, the CRT TVs they were designed for etc, and if you really wanted to play it on a modern device emulators fit the bill perfectly. Is there something special about the original code being ported to x86? At least remasters try to take some advantage of that modern hardware, although I understand it’s not the “same” game
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.
Halo Combat Evolved Anniversary: the remaster was way brighter and removed some of the mystery and fear that was essential to the story. Thankfully, they put in a button to use the old textures, and I don’t know anyone who doesn’t keep it in old mode most of the time.
GTA:SA could be run at 144 fps. Just be aware that the whole engine is fps based, so cars will turn at a varying speed depending on your current fps, your physics will go wild and you’ll see cars clipping into roads and shit, and it will be full of bugs.
Sometimes a remaster can basically break the whole thing.
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.
La-Mulana 1 and 2. They have excellent music, and more importantly, the exploration is a lot more interesting than most metroidvania games. This is because these games are all about puzzles, which come in the form of riddles, lateral thinking, and so forth. You don’t complete any area in one go - rather, each place you can go has information about the other zones, so you criss-cross and cross-reference, completing them piecemeal. Plus, there is a great deal of cultural architecture for each area, making them very distinct. If you want an lengthy and difficult metroidvania that is all about the details, this fits the bill.
The original freeware version of La-Mulana is also worth playing, due to the audio and graphics resembling what could be on the MSX computer.
This…shines a totally new light on a bunch of decisions that originally made me fairly upset and caused me to quit playing the game.
I played the game with nearly every free moment I had between the time I bought it in 2012 and the 1.2 release in October of 2013. Multiple worlds. Multiplayer sessions with players in several countries possibly requiring port forwarding and VPN tunnels if I remember correctly, and all of it stopped dead for me when I had to quit focusing on creating and exploring and was instead spending most of my time struggling to survive.
There were enemies before, and you could find one of the three bosses and just… Not go there, but 1.2 really made combat the forefront of the game and killed it for me entirely.
In the intervening 12 years. I’d be surprised if had more than a couple of hours into the game.
Viewing it through the lens of a metroidvania where you craft your own progression is not something I’d considered before.
I might actually go back to the game on the rare occasion I’m in the mood for something like that.
Thank you for the insight, while it probably sounds silly, it gives me some perspective into something that was so jarring it still causes me to panic when a game announces combat where combat was not previously the focus (I’m looking at you, Dyson Sphere Program 😄) and I really appreciate that.
I used to be that until I realised that the satisfaction of finishing a game is much better. Since I buy my games, I feel better when I finish the game that I bought
I feel like I have no freetime now and I used to somehow play games go drink do my homework and exams.. oh wait now I remember, 3-4 hours of sleep and ocassional allnighters, I was dissasociating and in a haze by graduation I didnt even shave or get a haircut, looked rough
I don’t feel like playing a lot too which is why you see a lot of gap between skyrim and rdr1. I have a lot of games installed rn but nothing gets finished. I only have one single player game at a time but been playing minecraft a lot with friends these days so thats where my time was going towards
So what made 2007 even better for you? I feel like that‘s important to know since these games didn‘t come out in 2025. You could‘ve played anything in 2007 that came out before that year.
That was almost 18 years ago so I dont remember much but i do remember playing SNES and NES games and some adobe flash games during that time. Nothing major happened during all these 18 years. My gaming activity peaked last year. Earlier years, I only used to finish 1-3 games tops. This year its almost 40. Yes. 40 games in a single year
It is… kind of. Hence the half-cheat. First off it’s 3D, but the game is completely centered around the Oldest House, which is the headquarters of the fictional FBC. Like a Metroidvania you explore and backtrack back and forth through it and unlock new areas opening up from previous places. There is also one (although only one) proper ability gate that lets you explore previously unreachable parts of earlier areas once unlocked.
Even if you don’t classify it as a true Metroidvania it’s definitely Metroidvania-inspired.
I would absolutely categorize Control as a metroidvania game. It has all the characteristics of one. I know some debate it because it’s so combat focused but aside from that it checks all the Metroidvania boxes.
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