Remakes, Remasters, and Ports Thread: If at first you don't (or do) succeed...

[Kazin]

So I love my Switch, but not necessarily for new games, because I'm buying like every old game under the sun on the thing, and there's plenty. From mainstream stuff like Skyrim being ported to it, to remakes like Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town and Trials of Mana (I know these aren't exclusive to Switch, but this isn't a Switch-only thread anyway), etc. I thought it'd be good to have a thread dedicated to talking about the difference between various versions of games, be they remakes, remasters, or ports (reboots being something new, they don't really apply here).

I always like to know the differences, and if the new version is worth getting and such. So to start with a brief example:

Final Fantasy VIII Remastered is the best version of the game imo - it not only brings the graphics to HD resolutions, it gives you fast forward and boosted exp and such if you want to use them.

I love reading about remakes/remasters/ports, so post about them here in as much or as little detail as you want to go into.

I am curious - Dark Souls was remastered for Switch - how is it? I've never played any of those games and figured that might be a good place to start.

 

[Kishi]

Dark Souls on Switch features a higher resolution and more consistent frame rate than the original and is the only port that avoids all the lighting changes that significantly alter the look of Dark Souls Remastered. (There's technically an unaltered PC version, but it's been removed from Steam in favor of Remastered.) But there are some scattered graphical bugs, such as the moon in the area where you fight the famous giant wolf boss not appearing at all; and more importantly, the in-game audio is extremely compressed. I've decided to just play the PS3 version when I get around to this game.

 

[Kazin]

Huh. That difference in audio doesn't bother me (and since I never played the original anyway, I probably wouldn't even have noticed it was worse). I might pick it up.

 

[Voncaster]

The Resident Evil Remakes (1-3) are excellent. When someone says remake, my mind immediately goes to the RE remakes.

 

[ShakeWell]

Oh, hey. I, uh, have a YouTube channel dedicated to this kind of stuff.

The Toki remake is quite honestly better than the underlying game deserves. Doesn't change the mechanics much, but brand new art and soundtrack and it looks pretty amazing.

The Genesis Mega Man remakes take more shit than they deserve. They're not as good as the originals, but they're still solid. Mega Man Powered Up, on the other hand, is a damn masterpiece.

Resident Evil 2 is, yeah, spectacular, as Voncaster said. Changes a ton from the original.

Bionic Commando ReArmed is so fantastic, it got a sequel instead of the big-budget full-retail release it was meant to promote.

Please do not sleep on the excellent PS2 remake of Die Hard Arcade.

Similarly, Double Dragon Advance seems to get slept on because I think people assume it's just a port of arcade DD with gussied up graphics. It's not. It's a love-letter to the entire series with new attacks and techniques, weapons, and stages from across the series all smooshed into one. I'm not sure if that even counts as a remake, but it does retell the story of the original DD, so I've always considered it such.

 

[Kazin]

Oh, hey. I, uh, have a YouTube channel dedicated to this kind of stuff.

The Toki remake is quite honestly better than the underlying game deserves. Doesn't change the mechanics much, but brand new art and soundtrack and it looks pretty amazing.

The Genesis Mega Man remakes take more shit than they deserve. They're not as good as the originals, but they're still solid. Mega Man Powered Up, on the other hand, is a damn masterpiece.

Resident Evil 2 is, yeah, spectacular, as Voncaster said. Changes a ton from the original.

Bionic Commando ReArmed is so fantastic, it got a sequel instead of the big-budget full-retail release it was meant to promote.

Please do not sleep on the excellent PS2 remake of Die Hard Arcade.

Similarly, Double Dragon Advance seems to get slept on because I think people assume it's just a port of arcade DD with gussied up graphics. It's not. It's a love-letter to the entire series with new attacks and techniques, weapons, and stages from across the series all smooshed into one. I'm not sure if that even counts as a remake, but it does retell the story of the original DD, so I've always considered it such.

Well! Looks like I have a lot of YT videos to watch. I don't know why I didn't know about this! I assume it's because I don't spend much time on YT. Thanks, your videos look interesting!

 

[ShakeWell]

I hope you enjoy them!

 

[LBD_Nytetrayn]

Alex Kidd in Miracle World DX is one of my most heavily anticipated games right now.

 

[Paul le Fou]

The just-announced SaGa Frontier remake is doing what a lot of people wish for with their re-releases but only few ever get: it's adding some of the fabled cut content from the original release, including finishing a character's story that was noticeably unfinished, and adding the whole new character who was originally meant to be there but didn't make the cut. Plus, for being an HD remake of a PS1 game, it actually looks really good too. I, for one, am hyped as heck.

 

[Sarge]

Uhhh... is this where I should put this?

PC recreations of Wand of Gamelon and Faces of Evil. Downloads have been pulled, but I'm sure enterprising individuals can find them.

EDIT: Ah, I see it's in the Nintendo thread. Will still leave it here, though.

 

[muteKi]

The Genesis Mega Man remakes take more shit than they deserve. They're not as good as the originals, but they're still solid.

The biggest issue with the remakes is that, as you noted, they suffer from some particularly awful slowdown, probably because the game was compiled from C, and most likely without the sort of optimizations we take for granted when compiling code these days. They're actually quite playable if you overclock the system: this is how they fixed lag issues on the Genesis Mini release, running the game at the speed of the TeraDrive genesis-in-a-PC, and that same feature is a single option away on MiSTer.

 

[Pajaro Pete]

how did that panzer dragoon remake shake out, i remember folks being down on the aesthetic while it was being developed

 

[Sarge]

What really kills me with Wily Wars is how halting everything feels. There's too much start-up lag on Mega Man's motion, and you come to a full stop after a slide in Mega Man 3, which feels absolutely awful. Sure, it doesn't instantly make them awful, but it really does show how a few small mistakes can greatly impact the experience.

 

[ShakeWell]

how did that panzer dragoon remake shake out, i remember folks being down on the aesthetic while it was being developed

I haven't played it, but I remember hearing that it wasn't great, but the first big patch made it much better, so now people are pretty happy with it?

 

[Voncaster]

Resident Evil 2 is, yeah, spectacular, as Voncaster said. Changes a ton from the original.

Bionic Commando ReArmed is so fantastic, it got a sequel instead of the big-budget full-retail release it was meant to promote.

Remake 1 is in my favorite games of all time list. Remake 2 may replace Remake 1 on that list at some point.

Bionic Commando ReArmed is so good. The game play is fantastic and the soundtrack is killer. If anyone knows of a legal way to obtain this sound track let me know. I own, but have never got into the sequel.

I re-played Hard Corps Uprising on my PS3 last weekend. I have not played the Genesis game to know whether or not this is a remake. It is however excellent.

I'm not losing sleep over it, but its a shame that Bionic Commando Rearmed and Hard Corps Uprising are not ported over to current gen consoles (to my knowledge).

 

[Kishi]

I re-played Hard Corps Uprising on my PS3 last weekend. I have not played the Genesis game to know whether or not this is a remake.

Not at all.

 

[muteKi]

bc rearmed does at least have a pc release

HCU's 360 port is XB1 forward-compatible at least

 

[Kazin]

how did that panzer dragoon remake shake out, i remember folks being down on the aesthetic while it was being developed

So it's been a long time since I played the original on Saturn, but I really like the remake - I played it after the patch, so I have no idea how the original version looked. Main problem with the remake is that the load times between levels are INCREDIBLY long.

 

[Daikaiju]

The FFIV remake on Steam is pretty great. They got rid of that godawful hardcore difficulty level from the DS version.

 

[Kazin]

The FFIV remake on Steam is pretty great. They got rid of that godawful hardcore difficulty level from the DS version.

Oh wow, really? So it plays just like regular FFIV now? I didn't know that. Is the DS difficulty level available on the Steam version too somewhere?

 

[Daikaiju]

I think so?

 

[Kazin]

See this is why I'm glad I made this thread (and for finding out about ShakeWell's YT channel) - I had no idea about that and never gave the Steam version of FFIV a second look. Now I'm mildly interested in it (since I already own like a dozen versions of FFIV lol)

 

[Sarge]

The FFIV remake on Steam is pretty great. They got rid of that godawful hardcore difficulty level from the DS version.

I don't know if I'm just weird or not, but I didn't find the DS version that hard? More difficult than the original SNES release, yeah, but I'd just always assumed it had been brought up more to official FFIV standards. What are the big changes that made it more difficult, because I honestly can't remember it's been so long since I played.

 

[Kishi]

Boss fights have added gimmicks that make them play out very differently and require more thought as to how to overcome them. The one that always sticks out in my mind is Dr. Lugae, who afflicts the entire party with Reverse status, which didn't even exist in the original game (in fact, it had just debuted in FFXII).

 

[Daikaiju]

I recall having to grind a lot before dungeons. I think I finally nope'd out of the DS version of the Sealed Cave.

 

[Patrick]

The FFIV remake on Steam is pretty great. They got rid of that godawful hardcore difficulty level from the DS version.

Oh, that reminds me: the FFIII remake on PSP/Vita is wonderful. It's the DS version, but with an auto-battle button.

 

[Kazin]

Oh, that reminds me: the FFIII remake on PSP/Vita is wonderful. It's the DS version, but with an auto-battle button.

Oh - I agree! You can speed it up, too, which is nice, because the DS version is super slow.

 

[Super Megaman X]

Oh, that reminds me: the FFIII remake on PSP/Vita is wonderful. It's the DS version, but with an auto-battle button.

It also has the original NES soundtrack, which does wonders to improve the mood and overall aesthetic. The DS arrangements are okay, but they pale compared to the originals.

 

[LBD_Nytetrayn]

Bionic Commando ReArmed is so good. The game play is fantastic and the soundtrack is killer. If anyone knows of a legal way to obtain this sound track let me know.

It is on Spotify, and it was being sold on a site called sumthing.com or sumthingdigital.com, but I can't seem to get those to load. Used to be on iTunes as well, but isn't any longer.

I've had it on my Amazon wish list for years, I'll be disappointed if I can no longer buy it to download.