Zero Punctuation: Remastered Editions

Chewster

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Apr 24, 2008
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Petromir said:
There's still a moderate stream of new games to be fair.

A much stronger reason is they are seen as easy money, they are usually cheap to make and sell enough to make a tidy profit as they were so cheap to make. And with Backwards compatibility being much rarer these days there's extra reasons for publishers to do it. New games (even with an off the shelf engine) tend to cost much more, and often fail to make proportionally as much money.
The nostalgic in me is thrilled but the cynic in me views this as a cheap cash grab. Seems like a lot of these are overpriced. Fifteen - twenty dollars for a game that is twenty years old now is pricey, especially in digital form. That's almost a dollar for every year I didn't play it.

Hell, if I were more computer savvy, I could blow the dust off all my old CD ROMs and just play all these on my computer. Most hardcore nerds never got rid of their old games in the hopes of one day making their own game room like we see in nerdy listicles. And by "most" I mean "me."
 

nightazday

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They won't be able to remaster Loom because if they did they would be hit with as much "where's my sequel" as Half-life.
 

darkrage6

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Miral said:
Planescape and The Dig were both great games, although it's true that the first is mostly a novel (Yahtzee, you're a book author, you shouldn't be dissing novels) and the latter suffered from a bit of Moon Logic Puzzle Syndrome (although that's not entirely inappropriate, given that most of the game was set on a moon).
Books and games are totally different mediums though.
 

Kenjitsuka

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bjj hero said:
Sqeenix need to pull their thumbs out and remake Vagrant Story from the PSX. It is the best thing they have made IMO. The atmosphere was amazing.
OMG, me and my buddy played THE SHIT out of it!
I even have the game proudly standing in a closet for all to see :D

Yahtzee: ET for the Atari 2600 will be remastered 5 nanoseconds before it needs to drop to be a Christmas release, thus repeating the cycle with what you told us about it's development way back when ;)
 

rembrandtqeinstein

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Callate said:
Oh, I so want to see someone re-master E.T. now. Preferably someone with nothing to do with Atari. And then when whatever shell company is currently wearing Atari's rotting corpse-skin tries to challenge the move in court, they just say, "Seriously? You're claiming ownership of E.T. for the Atari 2600?"
You can hate the ETs core mechanic of falling into holes and failing to fly out of them all you want but the design was revolutionary for its time. I would argue that ET was the first "open world" game where you could complete the objectives and explore the map in any order.

It was also one of the first to use contextual controls where your button scanned on the "world map" and floated while in pits. AND it was the one of the few to use enemies that set back your progress rather than as a hard loss condition. Though Adventure did it first with the bats stealing your shit.

Damn this makes me want to bust out Unity and remake ET... wonder if I could do it in an afternoon....
 

bjj hero

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Kenjitsuka said:
bjj hero said:
Sqeenix need to pull their thumbs out and remake Vagrant Story from the PSX. It is the best thing they have made IMO. The atmosphere was amazing.
OMG, me and my buddy played THE SHIT out of it!
I even have the game proudly standing in a closet for all to see :D

Yahtzee: ET for the Atari 2600 will be remastered 5 nanoseconds before it needs to drop to be a Christmas release, thus repeating the cycle with what you told us about it's development way back when ;)
I wish I still had it. Its a crying shame that we got Final Fantasy over and over when Vagrant story never got a sequel. It ended set up for one too.
 

Jorpho

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Could the problems in Parappa be due to input lag, i.e. because one is using a television that does some kind of "motion interpolation" and thus displays frames slightly after the console expects them to be displayed?

I was trying Rhythm Heaven Fever (Wii) for the first time in a while the other day and it was far more difficult than I recalled.
 

Callate

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rembrandtqeinstein said:
Callate said:
Oh, I so want to see someone re-master E.T. now. Preferably someone with nothing to do with Atari. And then when whatever shell company is currently wearing Atari's rotting corpse-skin tries to challenge the move in court, they just say, "Seriously? You're claiming ownership of E.T. for the Atari 2600?"
You can hate the ETs core mechanic of falling into holes and failing to fly out of them all you want but the design was revolutionary for its time. I would argue that ET was the first "open world" game where you could complete the objectives and explore the map in any order.

It was also one of the first to use contextual controls where your button scanned on the "world map" and floated while in pits. AND it was the one of the few to use enemies that set back your progress rather than as a hard loss condition. Though Adventure did it first with the bats stealing your shit.

Damn this makes me want to bust out Unity and remake ET... wonder if I could do it in an afternoon....
I'm probably one of the few people on the Escapist who actually played ET on an actual Atari 2600. I agree. The game managed to allow the player to access a remarkable number of different powers for a game that played with an eight-direction, one-button joystick.

And, yes, that the game not only involved falling into and floating out of a ridiculous number of pits but required it in order to find all the pieces of the communication device to win the game was more than a little ridiculous, but then, it was apparently all cobbled together in six weeks.

It's reputation as "the worst game ever made" is undeserved.

And all that said, it still has its reputation, and the whole "landfill" legend... So the idea of someone coming into court and claiming ownership of it still amuses me.

And if you do re-create it in Unity, I'd be willing to give it a look.
 

sXeth

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It still would be an artefact of its time at best, but the issue with Parappa is probably the lack of calibration settings. The timing windows are too tight to work with the audio/video delay and input delay back to actually sync up properly.
 

XenoScifi

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RJ 17 said:
Is Stage 5 the one where you're waiting in line to use the bathroom and you lose when you literally shit your pants? If so, then yeah, that's the one that me and my friend could never get passed when we were kids. Indeed, the game seems to arbitrarily decide when it wants to say "you hit the button right when you were supposed to."
I worked on that for weeks as well. I eventually did get it but it was beyond stress inducing.
 

Imre Csete

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PS:T actually has its narrative woven into gameplay, skill/stat check dialogue options are why I love Black Isle/Obsidian/Troika games so much.

I can understand that the thought of having boatloads of INT and WIS conversation options doesn't make everyone moist, but that's a pretty good way to turn your character stats into roleplaying mechanics.
 

gorfias

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I wonder what on Earth they could do for an Ultima IV re-master on PS4. Sigh. I'd play that.
 

Dalisclock

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nightazday said:
They won't be able to remaster Loom because if they did they would be hit with as much "where's my sequel" as Half-life.
Fun fact, a sequel to the Loom was planned. In fact, two of them were: Flock(or something to do with the shepherds) and Forge. However, to the best I've been able to tell, nobody was really that into making them so it was pretty much a plan for two more games and work never really started.

A few fan game sequels are out there but last I checked none of them were remotely close to done and playable.

Not sure what Yathzee has againest the Dig. Aside from a few iffy puzzles(the turtle skeleton one can suck it) it was solid.

Besides, Full Throttle really did need a remaster. The bike combat does not play well with DOSBOX last I checked and you can't really finish the game if you can't get the bike combat to work.
 

Carl Morris

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Finally, someone who agrees that 'the dig' was shite.



nightazday said:
Besides, Full Throttle really did need a remaster. The bike combat does not play well with DOSBOX last I checked and you can't really finish the game if you can't get the bike combat to work.
I can't believe that in there are still people who never heard of ScummVM
 

Dalisclock

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Carl Morris said:
Finally, someone who agrees that 'the dig' was shite.



nightazday said:
Besides, Full Throttle really did need a remaster. The bike combat does not play well with DOSBOX last I checked and you can't really finish the game if you can't get the bike combat to work.
I can't believe that in there are still people who never heard of ScummVM
Actually, it was probably SCUMMVM I was remembering but either way the bike combat didn't work last I tried. Maybe they patched it since.
 

Li Mu

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Dear Yahtzee, beware mocking Millennials. Apparently anyone born between 1983 and 2004 are now classed as Millennials. I seem to recall you being almost the same age as me, and I was personally vexed and disgusted to find myself now categorized as a Millennial.