Dark Souls.
More time has passed between the original and remake than the remake and now by the way. Better pump out another one!
What do we consider to be the best “remasters” of games out there? I’d say command and conquer is a prime example, and age of empires 2.
I also think halo 2 was a good one.
The remastered cutscenes in Halo 2 are so unbelievably good. I read somewhere that the studio has no interest in doing any more Halo cutscenes (burnout I think?) and it makes me a very sad panda…
Trails in the Sky was recently remade. Old one was Ragnarok online isometric style with rendered cg sprites, the new one is full 3D third person environments.
All in all, it’s a VERY faithful remake, especially considering the original was known for pointlessly extra details.
But it could be that doesn’t count as a “remaster”, since it’s a different game.
Yes to me a remaster is just that. The original game with a lot of spit and polish.
FF7 trilogy is a remake. My kingdom for a remaster.
You forgot the moss and foliage on the walls that all remakes add for some reason
Part of this is the fault of cheap shitty flat panel TVs that only became ubiquitous after the original came out. The original media that looked great in dark scenes on CRT tvs can be completely incomprehensible on all but the best flat panels. As a result the HD remakes shy away from playing with shadow too much to avoid complaints.
Strangely enough, this also affects HD remasters of old shows. The Buffy The Vampire Slayer HD remaster has a lot of lighting issues. A lot of scenes which were colored to look like evening or night just look like daytime.
To this day, the TNG remaster is still the best remaster of any TV series.
The secret is that it was filmed on film and the originals were still around. So they were able to just reprocess the original film with higher resolution and such.
Other shows were either digital, or filmed on film but the only thing saved was the broadcast transfer.Lots of stuff was filmed on tape too.
“To this day,
theTNGremasteris still the bestremaster of anyTV series.”That sentence works like this too!
Jesus Christ.
They messed with the aspect ratio too didn’t they? Shots are framed wrong now
Old stuff made for TV is often in 4:3, the modern stuff is in 16:9 or even wider like for cinema. Sometimes older stuff was filmed in something closer to 16:9 and was cropped to 4:3, you can just crop it differently for a remaster without losing anything. You can see that in the picture, there’s a lot more space to the right of the characters, which unfortunately places them closer to the center instead of the side of the screen.
I remember watching an early episode of Angel that clearly had been un-cropped, because you can very clearly see a camera man filming an action scene from a different angle.
Yeah, cropping was a pretty big issue too.
Mel Brookes probably loved seeing this.
Exactly. A lot of times there is footage to pull out that got cropped out of the original broadcast, BUT the original shot was made with the crop in mind and there was a decision made about how to crop that particular scene. Just tossing in the full frame without any thought about the result can really change the feel of a scene.
Our 21:9 cinema (or whatever the 1:xyz is) and 16:9 home ratio is the equivalent to the old school 16:9 cinema and 4:3 old ratio.
Good analogy, but it is not nearly as close. Movie aspect ratios are actually variable. Most movies today switch several times over the course of the movies depending on what the director wants to convey. The problem is that they can easily do that on theaters, where the screens seamlessly accommodate the different aspect ratios almost imperceptibly for the audience, but to great emotional impact. However, the same is not true for home TVs, it is a little less flexible and far more noticeable.
Yeah but most formats come very close around 21:9 where the bars are less distracting than on a 16:9 monitor
What the actual fuck am I looking at.
Yeah, but the cracks per brick count is way up, and they’re each unique cracks.
I’ll show you a unique crack
Well?
Where crack?
You forgot the quest marker hovering above the monster’s head and the popup saying, “Monsters can hide in darkness. Use your lantern to light up dark areas.”
Alright, on this topic, kudos to Amnesia: TDD.
They gave you a tutorial message about enemies, combined with one growl sfx…but then you don’t actually find any monsters for about 15-20 minutes of gameplay. Perfect way to keep people tense.
Focus, M.
You can press Jump to Jump!
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
It’s hella night fam. Nom’d by a grue? Bet.
Now there’s a flashback
You need to use magic missile to fight the darkness
not Karate and Friendship?
And watch out for the dreaded gazebo.
The fucking Doom 3 BFG edition. Yeah, i get that people hated the flashlight mechanics, but it was an integral point if both the gameplay and atmosphere. i much prefer the Doom 3 duct tape mod where your pistol and shotgun were the only guns that got a flashlight and it was significantly narrower and worse than the handlight. made it riskier to use powerful guns, but balanced rather nicely. not that Doom 3 was a hard game, its ridiculously easy, even on veteran.
but the BFG edition butchered the lighting and gave you a shoulder light. it ruined it so badly.
Atmosphere is one thing, but not being able to see anything in the game without having to play in a completely dark room is another thing. Skyrim got it right, the dungeons are dark but you can see without issues, even in a well-lit room. And then there are the people who install mods that make the nights pitch black.
You know what, fair, fair.
Yeah, redesign the lighting engine and redo all the textures, without once thinking about the intentionality behind the original design. I honestly think that remaking a game is a harder task than making a new one in most cases, or at least requires a set of skills most game developers don’t have.
Absolutely true, but it’s really easy to do a bad remake, slap the original pricing on it and cash in on nostalgia
Warcraft III: Reforged
GTA Trilogy “Remastered”
any creative medium/experience will never be limited by the technology they use to produce it if they lean into a really good artistic vision, like the first terminator movie
Dawn of war was severely limited by the tech of the time and was basically released as multiple separate games due to file size limitations. The Enhanced addition beyond cleaning up and updating the game for modern systems is still the janky mess it was in 2006.
sure, but did people love it? I think that’s all that matters when having fun
I guess what I am trying to get across in my original comment (poorly lol) is the fact that you don’t have to have a lot more computational power to make good art, you just need a good vision to make people feel positive emotions when playing a game.
it’s what a lot of these HD remakes today are missing. the most recent example I can think of is the remaster of the first gears of war game: all the darkness and grit in the campaign was simply deleted
Reviews are good for the game and it plays just as the originals. My point was there’s a point where technical limitations exist that can and do cause issues, Dawn of War being the best example since the original game was spread over like 5 individual games due to limitation reasons from the era, meanwhile they should’ve been individual DLCs.
That’s blatantly false
can you name any examples
If I want to make a 3D game on a gameboy (the 3D part being an essential part of the experience) I simply can’t. That’s a technical limitation of my art that has nothing to do with the art style
I think the point they’re making is that you don’t HAVE to make a 3D game, that’s not required for art. If you can’t make an artistic experience out of something without access to 3D, it’s not the hardware that’s limiting you, it’s your artistic vision.
If I can’t make my art how I want it it’s not my art
My point is that you can be limited in your art by the technology of your time
Imagine giving Bach a synthesiser, or a caveman clean white paper and colour pencils
Imagine giving Bach a synthesiser
what’s funny about this is that there are two existing ideas at play here that already came to pass.
We can listen to “Switched on Bach” which is what it sounds like when you play Bach songs through a synthesizer.
Also, there are lots of ways to manipulate the timbre of an organ, which is what Bach actually played. So he was already playing the synthesizer of his era.
Your argument defeats itself. Was Bach’s art not “his art” because he didn’t have a synthesizer? He worked with the medium he preferred and used the tools available and made his art fit within them, he made people feel incredible things that are still relevant today despite not because of the instruments he was limited to, that’s what an artist does.
Ping pong, but you use a couple of Game Boys as the paddles. It’s still considered the highest fidelity game played with a Game Boy…
…and in low light conditions you can turn the back lights on.
Except Game Boys dont have backlights without those massive attachments, they didnt get a backlight until the SPs came out.
Dang, this game STILL needs mods to get the best graphics.
mods the gameboy to have an alluminum case
“I thought you said I had to mod it to get better graphics”
I guess if we are getting nitpicky, how is something that doesn’t support 3d a technical limitation of your art? it never supported it in the first place lol
Oblivion, and Diablo II did a really good job, but I temember playing the Fable 1 remaster and feeling EXACTLY like this. The amount of fleshy detail added to the eyelids and skin made the game hard to play for me
Fable is such a weird game to do that to as well. The proportions of the people and items were cartoony and unrealistic in a way that saved it from being revealed as the insanely screwed up world that it is. Giving it the photorealistic treatment was doomed from the start.
I would say Diablo II still holds up if you put a CRT shader over the game. It is such a good game.
Yeah, definitely! I still play original D2 for Median XL as well as the remaster. The original graphics were really well done and the cinematics were a fucking masterpiece
I’ve been playing a lot of Project Diablo II lately. I don’t know exactly what they’ve done, but the graphics look like I remember them, but with proper widescreen and more fps. The team behind it have done an absolutely incredibly job.
Yeah, I loved playing the oblivion remaster. It gave the old “high fantasy” art style a fresh coat of paint and updated some mechanics to be a bit more modern. The original still holds up great sans everyone looking like putty.
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Oh oh, let’s also bring back the DLSS5 memes because the automation literally does this. Lol
All for the low, low price of 5x RTX 5090 installed on your 'puter!
This seems reversed to me. The right drawing has more style and feels way more retro while the left is less style and more “oooh, look at these shadows and stuff that the original didn’t have”.
Gears of War and Halo. At least Halo 1 and 2 let you switch back.
Switch back with caveats, the lighting on “old” graphics where broken for a very long time, maybe even still broken. At least on MCC
The ruination of horror games…
