How Should Games Be Remade For A New Market?

Thanks to GamerDad for its editorial discussing some of the problems of videogame remakes. The author, having recently played Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes for GameCube ahead of playing the original, comments "I never really came to grips with that game either until I played the VR missions in [the original Metal Gear Solid" He goes on to point out: "Never assume that the audience for your remake is the same as the audience for the original. Hollywood has been remaking a lot of old movies and TV shows in the last few years but they're certainly not expecting audiences to know those plots inside and out to the point of leaving out crucial bits. That's kind of the situation I think Silicon Knights and Konami got in with leaving out the VR missions (or something similar) in Twin Snakes." But he concludes by arguing that 'what makes a remake most worthwhile is when time is spent reworking the game to make things 'different'." So exactly how reverent should a remake be?

Comments

Original MGS

[MMaestro]

Slightly offtopic but, the original MGS for PS1 didn't ship with VR missions. It had short videos explaining the controls and how to do certain actions (like using an enemy as a shield) but no VR missions. The VR missions were made into another game, MGS:Integral, and came out as a seperate game.

The same thing holds true with MGS2 (the original PS2 version), the original didn't ship with VR missions. Thats why both games plummeted in price so quickly. There was nearly no replay value without the VR missions.

I would say pretty close.

[Anonymous Coward]

Games are very different from movies/TV shows. Alot of times what makes a game is the look and feel of the game, not the story. For a perfect example of this look at the quake series. Eventually they just had a paragraph on the inside cover of the cd booklet that said something like "uh, there are monsters, you have a badass gun. get to it."

The trick is to preserve those traits that make the game. A perfect example is the mario bros. series transition to 3D. Its completely different, but still has the same surreal characters and platform jumping fun factor that made all its predecessors great.

An example of a game changing too much is civ 3. I LOVED civ2, and I suppose all I was really looking for was an add on pack for civ 2 when I bought civ 3. I loved certain aspects of it, the expanded diplomacy, culture, and automated workers for example, but they made certain aspects of the game so tedious (like defending borders). In general, the game just lost alot for me, it felt like I was playing a game like civ 2, but something very different and not belonging to the series.

Sometimes remakes just completely miss the boat though. I saw the remake of the original final fantasy, which was essentially the same game w/ updtated graphics and sound, but they just totally missed it. The 8 bit graphics and sound are part of what made that game so great. I completely lost the nostalgic aspect of playing it.

When is a Remake not a Remake?

[iainl]

When its a Sequel. Most Hollywood "remakes" of previously Hollywood films (with the clear and obvious exception of Gus Van Sandt's Psycho) are just retelling the same basic plot as the original, but doing it in a very different way.

In the game world, however, if it isn't practically exactly the same game with maybe updated graphics (if you're lucky), then it'll get called a sequel anyway. By the above Hollywood logic, every EA soccer game since about '99 should be called a remake, and the same pretty much goes for every other Sports series and half the FPS games as well. There is more difference between New Dawn Of The Dead and Dawn Of The Dead Classic than there is between any Crazy Taxi release, for instance.

Do it right or don't...

[Ayaress]

If I told you about Mary, but left out the Little Lamb, do I even have the right to call it the same story? Adding content is one thing, so long as it fits the premise of the game (like the extra dungons in the Link's Awakening and Link to the Past remakes)

I'll admit there are things they can just take out (like the blue staff from Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, or fourty or so player characters from Chrono Cross), but they never take out the useless/pointless junk. They take out important things, change defining bits of dialog (Square showed great wisdom in not fixing the "You spoony bard!" mistranslation, or they'd have rabid fanboys burning their homes in the night), remove great plot insights, entire sections of the game sometimes, and usually cover it up by adding some completely random and unrelated bonus level that makes no sense in the overall game.

Sequel Bonus

[robbway]

One of the nicest things to find in a sequel/remake is when the original game is included, like on Metroid. In these cases the game is emulated, and that's usually fine as long as it was play tested.

So I typically like remakes with the originals, and sequels with the originals. One game that shows this is Pokemon Coliseum. The battles mimic the Gameboy, except with 3D characters and special effects worthy of Gamecube. It's a shame with this game, as it was with Pokemon Stadium (N64), that they simply didn't emulate the Pokemon Sapphire/Ruby in 3D with the same Pokemon models. Yes, the graphics would have square borders around areas, but it'd be a nice twist on the game play.

X-Com Remake

[Saige]

Glad to see him mention the desire for an X-Com remake. I still don't understand why they don't do something like this - surely it would sell well with all the people who loved it the first time around, and would love to see it redone even better.

Remove the bugs that never got fixed (the difficulty bug, for example, or the base defense missions with sealed off sections). Enhance it in GOOD ways (ie not making it real-time or some inanity like that), with even the options to play it with all the enhancements off, making it just a fancier looking and bug-free version of the original, and you'd make many gamers happy.

I'm still suprised we haven't had enough fans of the game get together and code up a freeware clone of the game.