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.
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.