strygo wrote:Very disappointed in this. I remember how exciting and magical the original All-Stars was when first highlighted in Nintendo Power. It managed to dramatically level up the experience of the featured games, included an experience that (at the time) was truly foreign, all the while preserving the controls and "feel" of the games.
Although I preordered this (shame on me) - my view is that Nintendo truly dropped the ball here.
If that's what people believe, then the only way to "not drop the ball" was to abandon the project entirely. They could never release a compilation of high quality remakes at a marketable price point. This was always obviously emulation. People with experience in game development could have told you so instantly.
I agree Nintendo may have been able to do a little more, but not much.
Porting NES assembler to the SNES was a smaller undertaking by multiple orders of magnitude. Super Mario All Stars was significantly easier to make. The biggest expense back then was probably the game design. Things have changed.
Making a few new sprites and porting a little assembler is nothing compared to remastering these monster games. Think about it.
Want a bump in the visuals? Think through the amount of work it takes to model, texture, and rig new assets for every one of these games! That alone would break the budget!
Obviously, you can't just write a new game engine to support the entire project and try to get "close enough". Yes, it's written in C dialect. So? Object oriented C dialects aren't a magic bullet. The differences in hardware require almost entire rewrites! These programs are huge and each one will need special attention. You're not just porting from one machine to another. The original sources are based on multiple different original platforms!
Could all the original games run on a VM that emulated all the underlying hardware, hosted all new assets, and hit frame rate? Maybe in our dreams, but not on Switch. So, there goes that idea.
Many of the people that coded those NES titles were still in house when SMBAS was made. They knew the code and both machines intimately. They were also a smaller team and they were working just a few years after the originals were made. The same teams had worked together on the NES and SNES. Nintendo could not possibly have that much organizational memory and mastery on staff for this project. The entire team that made Super Mario 64 isn't in house and they don't have the details fairly fresh in their minds.
Even with their advantages, the first SMB on SMBAS is completely unplayable rubbish due to the collision bug. (Can you imagine the bugs we would get with these huge programs?) SMB3 doesn't have the same amount of visible vertical screen real estate and it affects interactions with lakitu; the results are inaccurate.
Of course it's emulated. A real collection of remasters would be too expensive to produce; people wouldn't pay the retail cost Nintendo would need to charge.
It's not a hobby. It's a business.
