The original games are so old that it is quite messy to get them to run on PC these days and the remake changed the gameplay quite substantially. So this remaster is quite welcome and probably a lot cheaper to produce than a full 2 and 3 remake.
As for Anniversary, the story there is a bit weird, as Anniversary and Legend are basically completely independent games that have nothing much to do with each other other than the engine. Legend is a reboot and Anniversary is a remake. It’s only with Underworld that the the story of those two get wrangled together into a trilogy. Only the first game is taken into account there, all the other sequels of the original game are ignored.
Gimp was competition for Photoshop some 25 years ago. Photoshop has improved a lot since those days, Gimp hasn’t. Gimp isn’t even the best graphics app in the Free Software space anymore.
Very tricky to accomplish as long as people can interact with each other in the real world and bypass whatever rules and restrictions you have in the game rules, be it in terms of just communicating in situations where they shouldn’t be able to or running multiple accounts and characters at the same time to boost their power and influence.
You’d need to get extremely draconian with the anti-cheat, require real world ID for account creation, not allow new player once the game started and all that.
Gimp’s problem is not so much the UI, but that it has fallen way behind Photoshop in terms of features. Fixing up the UI wouldn’t hurt, but you’d still be stuck with a graphics app that’s 20 years behind the competition. It would need a heck of a lot more work to catch up.
It’s good in the sense that Nintendo is sitting on a lot of old games and rather terrible at republishing them. Nintendo Switch still has no VirtualConsole support from what I understand, which is absolutely ridiculous. I’d expect Microsoft to address that. It would also mean Nintendo games becoming multiplatform, which would also be a welcome change.
The downside of course is that Nintendo is rather special in the gaming world. They are still doing a lot of quirky, innovative and family friendly stuff like it’s the 90s. That’ll be lost sooner or later when absorbed into Microsoft.
Prince of Persia (2008) is a game where you can’t die. You get a companion, Elika, early on and whenever you are on the verge of dying, she jumps in and rescues you. They even use that mechanic for a little puzzle later in the game where you have to find the real Elika out of a bunch of illusions and the solution is to
spoilerjump of the nearest ledge towards your death, real Elika jumps in and saves you.
All the Wing Commander games featured branching story lines, where things would take different paths depending on if you lost or won a mission. Even if you got yourself killed you still got a funeral cutscene ending your story instead of just a Game Over screen.
Eurofighter Typhoon had an interesting concept where you took controller over multiple pilots at once across a lengthy war campaign. You could switch between them freely at any time, the remaining ones switch to AI when not controlled by you. If one got killed, injured or ended up as POW, you could just switch to another one and continue as usual. The missions you would have to fly were dynamically generated based on how the war progressed and your success and failures. Basically a flightsim with an RTS running underneath, along with story cutscenes for some important moments. The game had some rough spots and arguably EF2000 or Falcon 4 did the dynamic war campaign better, but at least on paper what Typhoon was trying to do was really interesting. Rather sad that 20 years later we still hardly ever see games that do the small scale and large scale simulation at the same time.
IMDB is especially useless when it comes to comedies, they hardly ever reach a 7/10. Hot Shots - 6.7/10, Ghostbusters2 - 6.6/10, Naked Gun 33 1/3 - 6.5/10, Gremlins 2 - 6.4/10, there is a whole lot of amazing movies hidden in the 6-7/10 range.
Street Fighter 1 is an interesting case of an historically extremely important game, that just wasn’t very good. Which in turn explains why it was largely forgotten and completely overshadowed by its sequel. While it invented most of the conventions for the fighting game genre, it implemented them all in a really clunky way. Special moves can’t be triggered with any kind of reliability, jumps don’t even follow a smooth arc but just jerk around and the thing is a button masher, due to originally not having the six-button layout of the sequel, but two huge buttons that would register how hard you pushed them. It’s barely even a functioning game by modern standards, yet it is the birthplace of a franchise that lasts to this day. It’s fascinating seeing all the elements from later fighting game on display in such a rough shape.
Some of the original developers made a modern version with Overload.
There is also Miner Wars 2081, a criminal underrated Descent-like game from the makers of Space Engineers, has great story campaign, destructible environments and a lot of other really nice touches. Failed however on the mulitplayer aspects that were promised in the EarlyAccess thus lots of negative reviews.
I don’t really see a problem with this, quite the opposite, it’s an important step forward for gaming. It’s similar to the transition from FMV to motion capture. You can complain all day long that the actors will be out of the job when games can render them in real time, but for the time being at least, you still need them, it’s just that their recorded performance will not be the final result you see in the game. Voice recordings are malleable now and can be changed and edited in ways that weren’t possible before. This opens up a lot of possibility that just wouldn’t have been affordable before, e.g. similar to how a real time rendered sequence can reflect your current equipment, which a FMV could not, a AI-voice can now reflect your custom character, name, race, health, age, gender and whatever, without having an actor record the same line a million times.
And yeah, maybe the celebrity voice actor might lose a bit of status and become more like the mo-cap stunt man. But for gaming as a whole, I just see nothing but upsides. And it’s not just AAA games either, just look at all the small indie games that can’t afford voice acting, only for some lines or only English, with AI they can offer all the languages and all the lines, for which it would have been impossible to pay for without AI.
And it’s not like the voice actor is out of a job, if you want some AAA level performance, you can’t just get that out of AI just yet. AI is great at transforming and editing content, but much less good at generating original content from scratch, especially if it needs to fit a given artistic vision.