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Halo lol
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, or 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
People are shy about maybe doing crimes
Speaker on ceiling: Anyone detected using an emulator will hear from our legal department for stealing the product we have but refuse to make available for sale.
It seems incredibly nitpicky to differentiate between a remaster and a PC port.
“No I don’t want the option to run it at 4k 60fps, I demand to be forced to run it at the original 720p 30fps it was released at on the PS3!”
Have you been living under a rock?
Except that we’ve seen more than a few remasters that mess with original game content or completely jack up color/shader rendering.
A remaster is still different than the original and sometimes there’s elements people want to preserve from the exactly as they remember it.
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.
well uh… just emulate it then?
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.
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.
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 don’t tend to come out that great.
I still want an actual remaster of FF7
I just watched the “movie” of FF7 Remake on YT, and holy fuck, what the actual hell was that ending. Off the goddamn rails
I mean the OG ended with the soul of the protagonist fighting the dead ghost of the antagonist in the afterlife, killing the already dead guy (who you have killed at least 3 times, maybe more already) in the afterlife before a cut to 500 years later and everything is plants.
Yeah, and the remake had all those same elements, plus
Tap for spoiler
The regular story jarringly derailed to bring us a space battle with plot device ghosts at the singularity at the edge of creation, and multiverses or time travel or some shit that undo the most dramatic moment of the whole franchise, IMO
Okay, I hear you, but let me counter: Diablo 2 Resurected.
Best remake ever.
Until you want to play with your buddies over LAN. And we would have gotten it if it wasn’t for those meddling suits.
Thankfully D2RLAN exists.
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.
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I could argue with Final Fantasy III remake
I mean yeah, but if any one of those options is going to come out on PC, I’d still be glad.
Though I understand why you’d want the original too.
What’s the original strip about? Upselling something?
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!
…yeah I’m trying to imagine a scenario when this would ever happen. I’ve never seen someone try to upsell someone else on coffee before.
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.
I get uppselling a lot. “Extra shot?”, " Cookie?", “Membership App?”, etc.
I drink black coffee and that never happened to me. I think the baristas would prefer to make a simpler drink.
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.
Jarhead just wants coffee. Old (for the internet) boomer humor comic.
