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.
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!
And even if they did upsell like that, it was probably because some boomer insisted (at least at the time of this comic). Out of all the things I associate with “millenials”, wanting to upsell shit to make their employer more money isn’t one of them.
Yeah but how often do they persist after the first decline? I mean, it comes more down to the individual than there generation, but it’s more common to hear “sorry, I have to ask this, but upsell? No, ok cool, that’ll be total” than seeing someone try to argue after the first no thanks.
I often enjoy a simple black coffee, myself, and have never had anyone try to convince me otherwise as if they are dying to do more work. It’s just an ‘other people having choices feels like a threat to my tradition’ kind of comic, I guess. The lady yelling at him is kind of funny, though; I have seen worse boomer humour.
Man, I haven’t imported many games but that game and its sequel were some of the best gaming purchases I ever made.
Really tried to get into Osu (even looked into some of those digital drawing boards artists use, just to try to make it feel like the original) but to me the game just isn’t anywhere near the same without a stylus and a resistive touch screen - two things which are outdated tech now - so I don’t think I’ll ever get something that really recaptures it. I’m glad that the basic gameplay is still being kept alive though, even though what I really want I can never have.
Ayyyy plus one on both Carrion and Supraland! Loved both of those. I can’t wait to get the latest Surpaland game (Supraworld iirc?). Such a fun puzzle platformer.
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.
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.
System76 Oryx Pro is a very powerful laptop that fits your requirements, except for price.
I have an older Oryx Pro that I bought second hand, Intel i7 10875H, RTX 2060, 32Gb ram and 2x 1Tb nvme ssds.
Originally came with Pop!_OS but now runs Gentoo.
Performs well in terms of gaming and modelling shit in freecad to send to my 3d printers.
Big downside is fan noise. The moment you do anything requiring the gfx chip the thing get louder than an old 727 on takeoff.
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I’ve seen recordings of people playing this before in stream VODs a couple times before the player fired up another game, and, well, this post finally got me to try it.
The on-ramp for new players trying to make sense of it is, uh, not great. Trying to make an account on the website tells you to download the game. Okay… Trying to make an account in the game then sent me back to the website!? (Why not just let me register on the website in the first place?)
The basic idea of the circle mode is easy enough to understand – although I doubt I will ever get very good at this, at least with a mouse, and I’m still not quite sure on whether or not I’m supposed to hold a key down/click-and-drag or just click and then follow the motion? – but there are other modes that it threw me in (mania?) when I tried loading another song from the catalog and it was rather difficult to even figure out what keys I was supposed to push. (The diagram on the wiki was not helpful – I spent a while confused thinking I was supposed to use ASDF for a “4K” when it seems like it’s actually DFJK for some reason?) Probably all makes sense to someone who’s been playing it for years, but, yeah… Pretty UI, but the on-boarding could use some work.
Might be fun to poke around at for music discovery though.
Anyway, that’s my 2 cents worth from giving it a try.
In Osu! (Standard, so the circle clicking mode) you can, by default, use Z and X aswell, instead of the mouse buttons. Standard is a long learning process, and if you do decide to maybe play it again, my personal recommendation would be not to get stuck on PP (performance points), it could really ruin the fun of the game, when you play the same song and map for the 100th time in a row.
Mania, I haven’t really played so I can’t really help with that.
A tutorial song and map should’ve immediately downloaded after installing Lazer, but if it didn’t, I recommend downloading it, cause it does help with the basics of Osu! Standard.
Also settings has keybinds and you can change anything to anything pretty much. I would recommend clicking around it.
I did do the tutorial (after fucking up the first time through the initial setup and only getting the recommended songs and going “?!?!?!” for a moment) so I know about Z/X but what I mean is it’s not entirely clear if I’m supposed to keep holding them while dragging. The UI’s clear enough if I missed entirely, but if I kind of got it, I’m not really sure if I’m doing it right. With the reversals and the circle closing-in timing and a lot going on on the screen visually, it’s a bit much all at once. TBF, it’d probably make sense if I spend more time poking at it; those were my initial impressions.
Thanks for trying to help me, btw, with your comment; always appreciated.
Sliders you are supposed to hold until the slider ends, so as soon as it ends, you can let go. Reverse sliders (so the ones that have arrows and go backwards) you hold the same way and keep holding when it hits the arrow and goes back to the beginning, then you can let go.
Starting off, it is a lot to focus on, but you do get more and more comfortable with it the more you play. It’s the first game where I’ve really seen that play more to get better, because theory doesn’t help much.
If you do keep on playing, then more power to you. Top players are insane, so I’d recommend looking at someone like mrekk or Ninerik on Youtube. If you don’t then at least you tried it.
Ori series, specifically Ori and the Will of the Wisps. It’s my absolute favorite game of all time. It’s got the amazing visuals and insanely good OST, crisp and satisfying platforming and combat, engaging and unique bossfights, incredibly gripping story, good difficulty settings and going for 100% is rewarding and not nearly as annoying as in many other games. While it may stray a tiny bit from the classic Metroidvania formula I think it still does it incredibly well.
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