Yahtzee on "remasters" and "remakes"

[Carrion]

Can anyone give am opinion on the Grim Fandango remake? I've been meaning to replay it for a while, and I'd definitely prefer a version with mouse and an updated control scheme. Maybe even an updated interface. But the original art style is so great a part of that game that I don't want to get the remake if it changes it to a significant extent.

You can switch between the original and the remastered visuals with a push of a button, and the backgrounds are unchanged anyway. In my experience it's very buggy in the original mode, though, the mouse controls don't always work quite as well as you'd like (pretty natural since the game's designed with the keyboard in mind, like with Manny's head occasionally turning to face objects that aren't even visible on the screen or are right next to or even a part of another object) and the remastering is kind of half-assed to be honest, but if you just want to replay the original with improved controls, it gets the job done.

 

[Sceptic]

I was hoping for a good article, but this being Croshaw it's pretty stupid as usual. There's nothing to be torn about when the arguments on one of the sides are utterly retarded. Let's have a look shall we.

Perhaps we should show some gratitude that the owner of an old work put the effort into wading into the trough of convoluted guts that is old code and updated it so that we can all share in the old enthusiasm.

Yes, let's show some gratitude for all the work that they put in making money out of selling me something that I already have. Sorry, but no. Sure, I'm not going to blame the developers for coding a game for Windows 3.0 (hah, and he thinks 3.1 is bad) and then not having it be compatilble with Windows 7. I am however going to blame developers for taking advantage of this to make a quick cash-in, spending a negligible budget on getting the game to run on the modern OS then charging $20 for it, ie what passes for the price of a full game nowadays. We used to call these things "compatibility patches" back in the day, and we didn't expect to pay this much for them.

Emulation falls short in one respect: Remastering usually comes with improvements, not just the old game made available again.

Except this isn't true. Whether a remastering actually fixes anything is entirely up to how much effort the developers are willing to put into it (for counterexamples see BGEE, or even better, ROA HD). Whether an emulator does more than just emulate is also up to the programmers. Look at ScummVM, which fixed many issues with LucasArts games and added some "best of both worlds" options that weren't available out of the box (see MI2 and the mixed Roland/Adlib mode; IIRC it also works for SQ3). As for fixing bugs you don't even need emulation or a remaster, just a good programmer willing to reverse-engineer the code, as Greyface did with MM6-8, as Drifting did with BT2-3, and as many, maaaaaaaaany other unofficial patches have done. And since we ARE talking about compatibility patches none of this costs a penny of course, provided you still have the original game.

the old pixelly graphics can be smoothed over. We can play something that's more in line with the creator's original vision, hampered by less of the limitations they faced back in the day.

Ah yes of course, smoothing those pixellated graphics, totally worth paying money for.

If you start updating your game's graphics to allow it to be competitive again, where does that stop? You're going to have to do that again every ten years or so; your game's never going to be perfect.

I have only 4 words for you Croshaw: WHO GIVES A SHIT. You and your graphic whore friends are the only ones who measure a game's perfection by whether it has up to date graphics. Funny too because this is supposed to be an argument against remakes, but he completely misses the point: that those graphical upgrades weren't needed in the first place. I've made this argument about the GK1 remake in the past, and Richard Cobett wrote a great section in his review of that dissecting why updated graphics are worse.

And it's not the graphics that are selling a remastering, it's nostalgia. Once a creation has been released, bought and critiqued and become part of our shared culture, then the creator has no right to dictate how the audience are permitted to enjoy it; some people prefer to listen to music on old LPs than on high-quality media because they find the hum, pops and scratches pleasing, more evocative of better times past.

I'm not even going to touch this analogy.

Old classics have a greater responsibility than merely being fun or looking good; they're part of a historical record. It tells us something about the creators and the society from which they arose. And for that, they need to be preserved with warts intact. Someday it might be useful to know that PC gamers in the late 90's had to put up with shitty tank controls.

Ah of course, the "good for its time" argument, totally didn't see that coming! Or maybe, my dear Benjamin, people should look back on some of the old games to see all the gameplay complexity that we have sacrificed in the name of slick controls (never mind that a humongous number of modern games still have shitty controls) and purty graphics.

tl;dr you're much better off reading Amiral Jimbob, excellent argumentation and just ignoring the original article.