HD Remasters

@SyphiloidMonkey

To kick this article off, and rant slightly about some things I’ve read that bug me, playing an HD remastered game is not retro gaming.  I am not a fan of retro gaming, particularly when it seems to only consist of sidescrolling shooters, basic jump and climb platform games, and anything that’s a Ricochet clone.  I grew up avoiding patterns of flashing bullets on the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amiga, and whilst they were great at the time things have moved on since then.  Being really pedantic, the retro tag should only be applied to something over 15 - 20 years old (thanks Wikipedia for that one!), and on the current generation, a lot of PSOne games on the PS Vita will be retro games.  It’s got an HD display, multi-touch screen, online capable software, dual analogue sticks, and most of this will not be used by the PSOne games.  I’d rather have the money spent developing PSOne emulation moved to enhancing remote play, or even marketing how great the Vita is.  Alright, I’m done moaning.  For now.

HD remasters have been coming out steadily for the last couple of years, mainly on the PS3 but are now starting to appear in larger numbers on the Xbox 360, and in most cases have been selling well.  The gaming community seems quite divided on them, are they a good or bad thing?  There’s one side that bemoans the soulless-ness of games companies cynically cashing in on their old IPs and not having to bother with investing in new game development (though they seem happy to buy into the CoD, Madden, Fifa and Tiger Woods franchises every year); and the other side that praises the efforts of developers to bring their franchises to new generations so that classic games are never forgotten (and maybe don’t always see how moving a game in a new direction isn’t always bad).  Whichever camp you fall in is not going to affect whether they’re released or not, and the chances are (I hope) you’ve played at least one of the remasters to give you the opinion you have.

I lean towards the positive side of having these remasters, mainly because I’ve been able to play games I never got round to during the PS2 and Xbox years.  Maybe it’s my dislike of retro gaming going into overdrive, but whenever I’ve traded up to the next generation of console I’ve not gone back to playing older games, even if the backwards compatibility is there, and this has meant with the move to the current generation I missed a couple of high profile releases from the end of the last console era.  There’s also the fact I am a PlayStation fanboy who won’t defile my apartment with an Xbox, so gaming experiences have been written off before they had a chance to even suggest how good they’d be.

Have a think, how many of the following did you play on PS2 or Xbox? 

• Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, Warrior Within, The Two Thrones
• God of War: 1, 2, Chains of Olympus, Ghost of Sparta
• Splinter Cell: 1, Pandora Tomorrow, Chaos Theory
• Ico, Shadow of the Colussus
• Sly Cooper: Thievius Raccoonus, Band of Thieves, Honour Among Thieves
• Ratchet & Clank: 1, Going Commando, Up Your Arsenal (the US titles were so much better than the EU numbering!)
• Silent Hill: 2, 3
• Metal Gear Solid: 2, 3, Peace Walker
• Halo
• Oddworld: Strangers Wrath
• Medal of Honor: Frontline
• Tomb Raider: Legend, Anniversary
• Resident Evil: 4, Code: Veronica X
• Jak & Daxter: The Precursor Legacy, Renegade, 3
• Beyond Good & Evil
• Devil May Cry: 1, 2, Dante’s Awakening

I think I played about half, but that didn’t include the God of War franchise, Sly Cooper, or the Splinter Cell sequels.  And this is unforgivable, but I’d never played the full game of Shadow of the Colossus.  All the titles in the list are available to buy or download right now, and there are more planned for release in the coming months, with some being games I’ve yet to have a go at like Zone of the Enders, or ones I can’t wait to play again like the Hitman Collection.  

What I like about this current run of HD remasters is that the games being done don’t vary too much from the gameplay style we get from the current triple A titles.  Some show their age a bit, Ratchet & Clank 1 doesn’t have a strafe option that’s in all the other games, and Sly Cooper has a lives system that I don’t think I’ve seen in a game for about 5 years, but the majority are great to play and look fantastic with the reworked visuals.  In particular God of War 2 is stunning, and it’s amazing how the developers have brought the PSP games detail out so that they can be played on much larger TV screens.

This leads us nicely to the technical side of the remasters and the studios that have done the work to get these up to scratch.  Probably the best ones are the MGS, God of War and Ico Collections, all of them done by Bluepoint Games who seem to spend a lot of time and care getting the best out of the original assets.  Next up would be Just Add Water who are doing the Oddworld updates, followed by Idol Minds who handled the Ratchet & Clank collection (as well as being the studio behind Pain).  What stands out with these studios is not just the HD overhaul, but the smoothness of the games, lack of screen tear and slickness of the revamped presentation.  Shadow of the Colussus has really benefitted, according to people who played the original there was a lot of slowdown whilst battling the Colussi, this has been completely eliminated. And it’s worth remembering that it’s not just the graphics that are done, audio is overhauled and re-recorded in some instances (MGS HD on the Vita), the source code is optimised, and new engines developed so that the older games will work with the newer hardware.  It might sound obvious, but it’s not just a case of picking a game and burning it to a blu-ray for sale, there’s a lot of detailed work needed.

MGS2 SD on Bottom, MGS2 HD on Top

However, and this is where I understand the cynical, money-grabbing side of the argument, not all developers lavish the care and attention these games deserve.  Most high profile in its failure is Konami/Hijinx Studios and the Silent Hill Collection with Silent Hill 2 missing the fog from the town.  The very thing that gives the game the atmosphere is gone, caused by the updated coding, but passed through QA anyway. This has been patched on the PS3 but took nearly 2 months to arrive and is unlikely to fix the loss in sales.  The Xbox version is still waiting to get this patched.  Although not a glaring error this time, Resident Evil 4 came in for some bad reviews.  The gameplay was still there but the graphics were pretty poor.  This could have something to do with the fact that the PS2 game was an inferior port from the GameCube version (according to the developers), and that version was the one used for the remaster.  And lastly combining bad graphics with poor gameplay comes the Prince of Persia Trilogy.  I have genuinely never been so happy to trade a game in, Ubisoft made a mess of these and I could not force myself to even finish the third game.



Silent Hill 2 SD Right: Silent Hill 2 HD Left

That said I’m glad that we’re getting the chance to play these games again in an updated format.  There are plenty of people out there, usually trolling forums, that think we should all break out the old consoles and just play the originals as they should be experienced.  But that’s missing what’s great about the remasters, I don’t have dig out and setup my PS2 and drop the resolution on my TV to sub-HD.  I can enjoy the games I’ve played before and see them looking better than I remember (so often not the case with memories of games), and trophies add the incentive of doing things differently to how I’ve done them before, or finding all the secrets and collectibles.  For the ones I’ve not played before I get to appreciate how good some of these games were for their time, and in the case of God of War, experience the full story arc without having to manage different pieces of hardware and track down second hand discs and UMDs.

It’s a matter of preference on whether you want to play an original or remaster, much the same as whether you prefer vinyl, CD or MP3.  But if the developers didn’t give the go ahead and work on remasters then there would be no choice for gamers, and it’s sad to say that some of these great games would be consigned to words and pictures in articles instead of being played and experienced.