I Think We’re Doing Remakes Wrong

 

I recently happened across a teaser for a remaster of legendary PC game Deus Ex.  A game so revered by gaming culture that there’s a joke that says every time you mention, someone will reinstall it.  The remaster, based on the teaser, basically looks to be the same as the original but with a bit of a face lift but it suffers from the problem of looking like complete and utter shit. 

Deus Ex was released in the year 2000 and it wasn’t the prettiest thing to ever hit our PC screens but being one of the first “immersive sims” it was an intensely interesting experience.  This new version looks less like a loving graphical rebuilding of that kinda fugly game and more like an amateur student project that you’d download for free off a modding site.  Some crap thrown together by a guy who’s been learning blender for about a year titled something like “Deus Ex HD Mod” or some shit.  Something you might download out of curiosity and then remove from your system after about 30 minutes into a new game. 

But does Deus Ex really need a remaster or a remake? Personally I don’t think so.  It was a great game when it dropped in 2000 and you can easily grab a copy, install it and still have a great time with it to this very day.  You could have just left it as is and everything would have been just fine.  Let’s face reality for a second here, though.  If you’re the kind of person who looks at something like Deus Ex (or any other deeply respected game for that matter; RE4, Crash, Dragon Quest etc etc) and then start posting online about how these things “need/deserve” remakes, then my bet is that you don’t actually like the game all that much in the first place. 

I caught whiffs of this the hardest when the RE4 remake came out.  Suddenly people in comment sections saying that they were so happy RE4R came out because the original version was “clunky”, “stiff” and even “unplayable in the modern day”.  If you GENUINELY believe any of this stuff about an old game then the reality of the matter is that you just don’t like RE4 that much.  That’s fine by itself but because RE4 is such a respected title and you’re too much of a quivering pussy to hold your own opinions on media, you start pining for remakes.  Even if your pines for modern releases are purely based in aesthetics then you’re still a bitch.  If you claim to be a fan of something or you see something that looks interesting and you’re put off even trying simply because it looks “old” then why are you even here? If you have that much open disrespect for gaming history like that, maybe you should fuck off to another hobby.

But this leads me to the title of this post, I can’t help but feel that we’re doing remakes wrong.  There’s no need to remake Deus Ex because we already know it’s good.  The only purpose this remake serves is so a sales team can utilize the power of nostalgia to make a line go up.  I think we should be using remakes and remaster to have a second go at games that were bad at the toke but that made of had value were they executed better.  One example I can think of for a game I played this year is The Bouncer on PS2.  A lackluster beat em up with extremely basic gameplay that demands that you spend about 60% of its 4 hour run time watching cutscenes.  Some levels in that game are single rooms with 3 dudes that you spam a single button to kill before the movies start playing again.  But the aesthetics were great, the world seemed interesting, if you remade The Bouncer in 2025 and fleshed out the combat, maybe made it a little Yakuza-esque you might have something special on your hands.  A more personal example for me would be a remake of the horror game Outlast.  Let someone who doesn’t have severe brain injury rewrite the plot and bring it more in line with the horror themed Mirrors Edge that I thought it was going to be instead of the painfully boring non-game it ended up being. 

Not that I’m ENTIRELY against remaking good stuff though.  I had no problems with the Crisis Core remake, for example because that was locked to the PSP, a system famous for having the battery swell and maybe explode.  Putting it on my PC was welcome.  SMT3: Nocturne was also OK in my book because original PS2 versions of Maniax were stupidly expensive and giving me a version that cost 30 bucks instead of 200 was nice.  If your remake serves as a middle finger to the retro game market then I salute you.  Finally I was completely OK with the remake of moon: Remix RPG Adventure because it never got a real English release until that came out.  I personally might be fine playing Japanese only games but when I find a good one I want to be able to suggest it without having to point to a shitty fan translation made by a guy that couldn’t order a beer in an izakaya without having a breakdown however the absolute state of that side of gaming is another post for another day

What I’m saying with all this is that we should be using remakes and remasters to have a second shake at stuff that didn’t quite make it in the execution.  Buying remakes so that you can pathetically wallow in nostalgia while giving money to suits who don’t care about the medium even a little bit needs to stop.  Next time you see a remake of a game you already know is good, just ignore it and instead go find something new and interesting and put your money there instead.  Doing a little digging will enrich your life much more than doing a 15th play though of Deus Ex but with shittier graphics this time

Edit: Please forgive the weird highlighting, the Blogger post editor is actually one of the worst things to ever exist, Ill try to ensure it doesnt happen again, maybe this post needs a fuckin remake

The Last of Us Part 1 Is Pointless (and stupid)

 

Oh boy here we fucking go again. 

I remember when The Last of Us: Remastered came out on PS4 and I had all sorts of nasty things to say about that because is there anything more obviously money grubbing than "remastering" a game only a year after the release of the inital version?  Well history does like to repeat itself as yet another lazy cash grab from the hacks at Naughty Dog, who haven't done anything other than bottom of the barrel, shallow dross since the early 2000s I might add, are doing yet ANOTHER version of the first Last of Us game.

See, there is nothing inherently wrong with a remastering of a game as evidenced by the release of Resident Evil on the Gamecube. 

 When this came out it was cool to see because there was a 6 year gap between the release of the original and this one and in that time there were HUGE leaps in graphical tech and game play conventions.  We went from the game having cereal box people walking around on low poly pre-renders to models that actually looked like people walking around some really high detail environments.  On top of that the game was changed up a little with some additional mechanics, new areas and new bosses and a few other things.  When this came out it was absolutely incredible to play.

The problem with The Last of Us Part 1 is that even though there is technically a bigger year gap (9 years) the tech hasn't jumped up quite as dramatically as it had back then and game play conventions have become a homogenised mess that even the PS3 version back then was very much playing into.  If what I've read about the game is true also there is no extra content or nothing particularly special about it so it's literally a case of throwing it into an up-res machine, spitting it out and charging $70 for it.  It's disgraceful, lazy bullshit and the fact that anyone is even remotely excited for absolutely boggles my mind.  

If I'm being really honest, if a company MUST wallow in their back catalogue I'd rather they remake a game entirely rather than just remaster it and slap a new price tag on it.

For example I'm much more a fan of something like the Final Fantasy VII Remake because is's basically an entirely new game.  The good thing about a remake over a remaster is that it's not really a replacement for the original game and therefore feels like almost an entirely new experience.  If I want to go back to my 3 disc semi-turn based RPG with Duplo people on the PS1 then I can pop that game into my PS1 and enjoy that.  Then if I want to play a stealth-sequel retelling of those events with real time combat and modern graphics, I can play that and now both the old and new retain equal value. The same thing goes for the Resi 2 Remake.  If I want to enjoy some classic zombie murdering with tank controls, RE2 is right there for me to enjoy and if I want the same thing but a bit more modern then I can fire up the remake and enjoy both the game and the ugliest 3D burger ever produced by an artist ever made.

If The Last of Us Part 1 had waited, let's say, 10 more years to come out.  When the first game was nothing more than a memory in some old mans mind and then he could re-live that memory in 2032 turbo-graphic-o-vision then I wouldnt mind.  If the game had been added too, or reworked in some way akin to REMake then I also wouldnt have minded.  But as it stands The Last of Us Part 1 seems like a soulless, lazy, cash grab pile of bullshit because Naughty Dog KNOW they can milk your comfort zone to cash and they are willing to do it, as hard as possible, with absolutely no remorse

Shameful bullshit