Death of the Author: Fans “Fixing” Games

[Becksworth]

As I assume many are on this forum, I’ve been looking at a lot of Metroid stuff online in the wake of Metroid Dread’s announcement, and I stumbled on this:

Basically a fan made a mod of Other M trying to fix many of the common grievances with the game’s story, as well as some of their personal gripes of a more technical nature. Most if not all of Samus’s inner monologue has been removed, with the exception of the no power bombs edict the weapons authorization has been replaced with an overdubbed comment from the scientist in the tutorial that Samus’s suit needs to self repair after the events of Super Metroid, and the infamous PSTD scene has supposedly been paired down or removed altogether. The results seem… mixed. Many of the cutscenes have weird pacing now, and even glitched out effects in some cases where the visor overlay pops up in incorrect spots over the cutscene events. I also don’t necessarily agree with replacing the ambience score with remixes of classic Metroid tunes, as it introduces new bugs apparently in places. Still, I kind of want to try this mod out so I can go back and revisit the gameplay of Other M divorced of the problematic narrative.

Speaking more generally, I thought the concept of fans modding games to “fix” them would be a fascinating, thread worthy subject. In some other cases, the fan mod is generally agree upon to be the way to play the game, like Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines. What are some other examples?

 

[RT-55J]

I haven't played Other M in ages (mod or no mod), but I feel that it would need an extensive script rewrite and redubbing rather than just some careful editing to be fixed. Still, the idea of fixing that game myself is something of an intrusive thought that has plagued me for the past several months, if not years, so it's nice to see that somebody's attempted it.

As far as the music replacements, I'm definitely not a fan of what I've heard. Replacing this perfectly fine atmospheric song with the peppy Main Deck theme from Fusion strikes me as evidence of poor taste on the author's part (the game's soundtrack is literally the least of it's problems).

Anyhow, speaking of Metroid (like I always do), the original Metroid has several hacks that try to "fix" various perceived issues with the game. There are ones with quality of life enhancements such as respawning with more health (cool), letting ice and wave beams stack (neat), replacing passwords with saves (neato), and adding a pause screen map (blah). There are a few that attempt more substantial changes such as redrawing the graphics (some better than others), tweaking the map (understandable), and making the Ridley fight more interesting (yes please). Personally, I find the map edits tend to be the worst since they tend to oversimplify the map to a depressing degree, rather than adding interesting landmarks or wrinkles to make navigation more intuitive.

I wish I could say one of these hacks provided the "definitive version", but I'm too much of a purist to give any of them my seal of approval (tho Metroid+Saving might be the closest one currently).

 

[Mightyblue]

Didn't the FDS version of Metroid let you save to the disk anyway? Hacking in a save feature for NES Metroid might be viewed more as a feature restoration than anything else.

 

[Ludendorkk]

I mean of course that Other M mod is going to be bad, you can't just hack away at the game's narrative without replacing it with something, as if it was completely superfluous to the "real" game.* In general I can't stand derivative works that bill themselves as "fixes", as if subjective artistic decisions could be boiled down to "objective" problems that could be put right like a malfunctioning toaster. There just seems to be an increasingly unwillingness in pop culture to acknowledge that Sometimes Art is Bad and That's Okay



*this same attitude that aesthetics aren't really a true part of a video game is what gave us Bluepoint's baffling artistic decisions with the Demon's Souls Remake, but that's a rant for another day

 

[Beowulf]

I think we need to draw a distinction between "fixing" technical or translation issues (I honestly think Frue Lufia is the best way to play Lufia II) and "fixes" that try to rewrite the story or substantially change the gameplay. There are a lot of cases where we all know something was a mistake or agree that a translation was bad (cough, Nintendo policies, cough) and the fan fix is getting closer to what the original devs would have done in a perfect world. The Other M example above seems more like "This is what I would have done if I was on the original dev team"...and you weren't, dude.

But then, I've run several Ultima games and The 7th Saga as tabletop rpg campaigns to fix the plot according to my personal headcanons, so who am I to criticize?

 

[muteKi]

I greatly appreciate the expanded 2P level stuff going on here.

However, I am confused by what purpose those special stages are meant to serve, if you can access them during a round like that.

 

[Phantoon]

I mean of course that Other M mod is going to be bad, you can't just hack away at the game's narrative without replacing it with something, as if it was completely superfluous to the "real" game.* In general I can't stand derivative works that bill themselves as "fixes", as if subjective artistic decisions could be boiled down to "objective" problems that could be put right like a malfunctioning toaster. There just seems to be an increasingly unwillingness in pop culture to acknowledge that Sometimes Art is Bad and That's Okay



*this same attitude that aesthetics aren't really a true part of a video game is what gave us Bluepoint's baffling artistic decisions with the Demon's Souls Remake, but that's a rant for another day

Yeah, I agree. Other M is the ghost of a good game, but I think it's better left as it is. It's a swing and a miss to me, but I don't think it's possible (or right) to fix it. The problems with it are features, not bugs.

 

[conchobhar]

In general I can't stand derivative works that bill themselves as "fixes", as if subjective artistic decisions could be boiled down to "objective" problems that could be put right like a malfunctioning toaster.

Eighteen years later and we're still getting hacks for Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance that seek to change the palette or replace the soundtrack, with each one using words like "dignified" or "appropriate". It drives me nuts!

 

[muteKi]

Eighteen years later and we're still getting hacks for Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance that seek to change the palette or replace the soundtrack, with each one using words like "dignified" or "appropriate". It drives me nuts!

I can understand adjusting the palette to better suit backlit screens. I cannot fathom changing the music

 

[Zef]

I'm a staunch supporter of Death of the Author but I'm also fundamentally opposed to "fixes". However much I may dislike a creator's final output, it still remains their output and that is what must remain for interpretation and analysis. Fan edits that seek to replace that are only substituting one creator's flawed work for one aggrieved fan's likely flawed rewrite.

Unless they're explicitly promoting their personal version as "fanfic", I'd rather experience the original, warts and all, than presume that any individual fan edit is a "better" version.

 

[Phantoon]

Yeah, exactly. Really, a "fixed" version would present the original intent, but not crap. Once you change the intent you are firmly in fanfic territory.

 

[q 3]

What about full-on fan remakes, like AM2R? I thought that was rather well received.

 

[ArugulaZ]

Something important to remember: games during the 16-bit era were often kept from their full potential by chip shortages or the limitations of televisions of the time or a lack of experience with the hardware. There are dozens upon dozens of hacks for Sega Genesis games that adjust the color palette and improve voice digitization but do little else to the core experience.

I definitely support those, along with the small but growing handful of Super NES titles that rely on acceleration chips to improve the overall quality of the game. Have you seen how much Race Drivin' improves with a DSP chip? It went from moving to a crawl to running faster than the arcade game! That was definitely worth the effort.

Re-localizations are a little trickier. Someone did a rewrite of Dynamite Headdy and while the adjusted difficulty and more detailed dialog is appreciated, the new stage names feel pretty uninspired, illustrating that a straight translation is not always the right way to go. Same goes for Downtown Nekketsu Kunio-Kun... it's offered in the Double Dragon/Kunio collection for Switch, and good grief is the new dialog BORING. I can't play the game that way... River City Ransom is just so much more charming.

Then you have the games that make changes to the nuts and bolts of the game play, like Working Designs' localizations. Legend has it that Silhouette Mirage changed the prices of items, forcing you to farm for coins... but I also had the Japanese Saturn version, and still found myself bitch-slapping every weirdo I came across to afford new weapons. So I guess I didn't notice a difference, but I certainly didn't need to waste even MORE time farming for coins.

Anyway. Games that came to the United States end up getting "tweaked" by the manufacturers to make sure players don't finish them in a single rental, but it's not what the designers had intended, and the game typically suffers from having its difficulty artificially increased. I don't blame hackers at all for, say, putting the life bar back into Contra Hard Corps.

 

[Kazin]

I think fan edits, "fixes," and "improvements" are possibly the coolest thing to happen to the retro gaming scene since the advent of emulation itself. None of these mods erase the original version of the game, so anyone can still play the originals if they want. But if I want to, say, play Super Mario Advance without the constant vocalizations from the cast, I can. That is not the intent of the original creators! But I like the game so much more in this way.

Though, yes, there's a lot of crap mods out there, too.

 

[Phantoon]

Oh yeah, fixing palettes, making Final Fantasy magic actually work properly, getting rid of terrible sound effects are all great. Mods are great, full stop, and can be more exciting than the original game. Mods to the story even are fine, although from my experience that's generally much less successful.

You can't present that as a fix, though, it's a change. I think it's the height of arrogance to change an intentional feature in a work that's not yours and call it a fix. I'd love to play a version of Other M with all of the rubbish stuff removed, but at that point it's not Other M any more.

 

[nosimpleway]

I greatly appreciate the expanded 2P level stuff going on here.

However, I am confused by what purpose those special stages are meant to serve, if you can access them during a round like that.

I liked the part at the very beginning where Sonic beat Tails to one of those rising stairway block things that shut off access to the shaft that Tails needed to climb. If it were reversed and the player who couldn't fly got there second, what would have happened?

I dig the high-res special stage (I'm sure that's a mod by itself) but yeah, it's a puzzler why that's still included.

 

[ThricebornPhoenix]

In general I can't stand derivative works that bill themselves as "fixes", as if subjective artistic decisions could be boiled down to "objective" problems that could be put right like a malfunctioning toaster.

On the other hand, alternate start mods for Bethesda games

 

[SabreCat]

If you're modding a game to change things you didn't like about it, or that many people didn't like about it, or whatever, it'd be silly not to call it a fix or an improvement. It's not like someone sets out to mod a game to make it worse unless they're doing some sort of meme.

Will the result be to everyone's taste? Nah, of course not. Does it necessarily follow or imply that there is some One True Platonic Version of the game to aspire to? Nah, not that either. But I for one applaud efforts to fix messes like Other M. The modder's intent deserves its pedestal too.

 

[Regulus]

I don't mind this at all. I don't always agree with the changes that people make in their balance/fix/rewrite/whatever patches, but they're fun to read about and sometimes play all the same. Think of it as a form of fanfiction.

 

[WisteriaHysteria]

Death of the Author is about ignoring what the author of a work has to say about said work extra-textually, because they're bound to be an unreliable source. Especially after a thing has been released for public consumption. Biases, changing contexts, flaws of human memory, public embarrassment, financial interests, a whole litany of influences could lead an author to be less than truthful or inaccurate about what they'd have to say about something they made. That really doesn't have much to do with fans attempting to take ownership of a piece of media they like, it's a separate issue.

I think on an academic level, the various ways fans take ownership and interact with their media is fascinating. But on an artistic level, I think a lot of it ends up being misguided at best, and very often offensive to the people who put hard work into their craft. It's not video games, but consider an adjacent media example: interpolated 60fps anime you see plaguing YouTube and elsewhere. On a certain level, it's a very interesting exercise to see what types of scenes in various shows this evolving technology looks like. But in practice this fan phenomenon is a blight. When they're presented as "improvements" to the original shows, it's actually a grave insult to the people who busted their asses to painstakingly create those animations specifically with their more limited framerates in mind. And when these clips functionally end up replacing the original material out in the world, because those clips are the ones people end up watching over the originals when the 60fps interpolated versions are what make it past youtube copyright bots, it goes beyond casual ignorance and disrespect into erasure.

 

[keurig]

I greatly appreciate the expanded 2P level stuff going on here.

However, I am confused by what purpose those special stages are meant to serve, if you can access them during a round like that.

This is ridiculously impressive. Definitely going to be trying this out with friends when it releases. Thanks for posting the video, I hadn't seen this before!

 

[Bongo]

Derivative works are cool.

 

[Patrick]

I spent a lot of time working on a Hobbit fan edit. Honestly, it was just super fun to do and I felt that it was a great use of my time. I learned a ton about editing & film, and I feel like I have a much better understanding of what it takes to make a movie feel right. So, I feel like there’s value in digging in to things and seeing if your ideas really work, even if the end result isn’t a success.

 

[ShakeWell]

Resident Evil 4 "HD" didn't do a great job of making the game HD. None of the textures were replaced, so while the game does, in fact, run in 1080p, it... uh... looks pretty rough. Fortunately, there's a big ol' ambitious fan mod to help that. The only way to play the HD version, honestly.

 

[Phantoon]

The love (and work) that's gone into that mod is astonishing. They hunted down the original textures where possible, it's an incredible feat.

 

[Ludendorkk]

The funny thing is Capcom originally just stole those textures without proper licensing and is now facing a multimillion dollar lawsuit over it, the fans do what Capdoesn't

 

[RT-55J]

Isn't that lawsuit the result of fans sleuthing for the sources of those textures in the first place?

Like, I don't know what to say here, but that seems like an incredibly hilarious/awkward nightmare scenario on all counts.

 

[Ludendorkk]

No, it's due to the ransomware leaks, which contains such information as Capcom not even changing the original file names

 

[Regulus]

I doubt it was intentional theft. Considering how liberally they appear across multiple games across multiple years, the photos probably ended up in a cache of company art assets either by mistake or because someone misinterpreted the license requirements. Hanlon's Razor or whatever.

That doesn't matter from a legal perspective, of course.

 

[ShakeWell]

I mean, the photographer explicitly sells these images for this purpose (as in, her photos aren't just a nice coffee table book) with a ready-made license agreement. Someone along the chain definitely knew the deal. I might be more willing to give them the benefit of the doubt were it not for that whole Frankenstein's Army fiasco.