What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

[BrianC]

The meter was actually used in the AC Punch Outs first,

I've never played the arcade Punch-Out games, are they worth it? I admit to being more interested in Arm Wrestling than AC Punch Out, but that's mostly for character variety.

I like them, but the timing is stricter than the console games. Arm Wrestling is actually my favorite of the Punch Out related arcade games. Actually feels closer to the console Punch Outs, despite being Arm Wrestling (and thankfully, it uses a joystick and buttons for control rather than a fake arm). It also has a bonus round where you try to catch a big bag of money by pulling up on the joystick.

[Steven]

Dropped Mario Galaxy. I just can't do it.

Instead, let's play something that's way better: Command & Conquer Remastered. First of all, I really really really need to say this: "remaster" is a really fucking stupid term to apply to video games.

In any case, however, if you are going to do that type of thing, this is the single best example of how to do it properly. Gameplay has been slightly altered to bring it in line with modern RTS, it gives you new graphics or the old graphics, you get three separate soundtracks per game including the old ultra compressed music, skirmish mode against AI is now here, it has a bunch of bonus stuff in the game, mods are officially supported, and, most importantly and most interestingly, it's officially open source with at least some of the source code available on GitHub.

I still can't believe that EA released the source code for this, but they did. Other than this and Doom, I can't think of many instances in which one of the most important games ever made had its source code officially posted, and especially by a company as greedy/terrible as EA, but there it is. See that, other companies who make six trillion ports of the same game with minor graphical changes that aren't even necessarily improvements? The standard has been set. Make your thing both flawless and open source. Do it right.

Anyway, almost done with GDI now. I've had this since launch (and the original C&C since its launch), but until now I've only really tried skirmish mode, which itself is a new addition to this collection. Unfortunately the skirmish mode AI is not that great, especially because it doesn't know how to deal with Orcas and Apaches (the latter is now given the new, super generic name Attack Helicopter) properly, so you can win with little effort by massing helicopters. It also still doesn't attack walls, just like in the normal single player mode, so if you wall off your base properly the AI literally can't hurt you at all unless it flies a helicopter over the wall to shoot at you.

This game is much easier than I remember it being, although I am now at a certain mission with a very frustrating opening. Who thought it was a good idea to give me just a handful of grenadiers against 3 turrets, a light tank, and, significantly more concerningly, a flame tank? Really? I'm not entirely sure if the grenadiers can outrange the flame tank, which of course kills the entire lot of grenadiers in only one attack. Hopefully I can find another path that avoids the flame tank entirely because I really don't want to fight it.

[Marc]

Minish Cap is done. A rather excellent 2D Zelda. Really impressive art, animation, and music in this. Great instrumentation of classic songs and a few new ones that are so good they could be put in a Castlevania game. Top tier presentation and a joy to just look at it and take in the soundtrack. The game is a little shorter than the average Zelda, clocking in at six dungeons instead of eight, but has a little bit more overworld complexity than the other 2D games. This is a much better choice than needlessly padding out the game to hit a desired run time. And it’s nice to be left wanting more than to want the game to be over already. Nice gimmick in this with the shrinking system. Quite a choice to portray that sense of scale on what amounts to slightly more powerful SNES hardware. I imagine that was quite difficult to pull off but they did an excellent job. After a little bit of a slow start the game really picks up. It does have one overdue library book fetch quest I could live without, but it does encourage the player to explore the town. The game ends on a strong note. It saves the best two dungeons for last (the Wind Temple and Hyrule Castle), and they are both excellent.

The credit roll has a who’s who list of top tier creatives in it. Fujibiyashi, Kondo, Inafune, Miyamoto, and Iwata all appear in some form or another. 9/10.

Mr. Driller is beautiful. I bought Drill Land hoping for more of the same but I don't think it's quite as great as the original.

I love Drill Land. You get five modes of varying quality, but the dungeon mode and Aztec puzzle mode are seriously great additions. And of course you get the classic Mr. Driller arcade experience too. Menus are incredibly slick as well, from the same UI designer as Ridge Racer Type 4. It’s the definitive Mr. Driller game, in my opinion. It also goes on sale for $4.79 around once a month, and it’s a total steal at that price. It’s worth the full $30 regular MSRP and the some.

The problem with World - unless I'm missing something - is that it makes you play every world to the same degree to progress. Drindy is kind of neat, though I'm still puzzled by the boulder behaviour - is it just completely random? The Druaga and Haloween ones are fuck awful though and having to engage with those sours the package for me.

[XoPachi]

Nerd essay. Spoilers maybe.

Near completion of Zelda. I assume I have 2 temples left.
I really like the game. Wild and Tears were painful disappointments for me but I now feel like they were stepping stones to this one.

-Overworld is really great but still has nuZelda density concerns. There's stretches where you aren't doing a lot and rewards, again, semi-frequently do not match the trouble involved.
There's a lot of those boring `Blin outposts from Wild/Tears where better content could be. They very quickly become pointless and turn into these map sinkholes you can just ignore even if you didnt "clear" one. The treasure resets so they're just unnecessary farming spots as if you need that many resources in a top down Zelda.

-Combat took a big hit. At worst it takes forever to kill things and just move on. At best you are really not involved unless you burn your sword form. A low focus on combat would be a fine explanation for this if it wasn't the largest, most aggressive Zelda bestiary yet in a game where you HAVE to kill everything to catch every Zeldamon. I dont mind that it's unorthodox. But it's not nearly as fun or freeform as solving puzzles and traversing. Boils down to watching your monsters usually.

-The Echoes menu is terrible. Duplicates are not stacked. Enemy and objects are not split into different rows. You cannot pin favorites. You cannot forget/"archive" worthless echoes. It is all a sloppy, tedious, single file row that destroys pacing and bloats playtime. It also makes fighting worse. Thankfully, thats the ONLY bad bit of menuing. Tears was a *clusterfuck*.

-Temples are finally good again but they still insist on no unique temple goodie sometimes. :(

-Entirely too much talking. And its that bad, stale trope heavy, anime RPG dialogue. The characters waste speech boxes getting in one final meaningless blurb to waste time or say something corny with robotic, forced emotion. Just shut up.
-Little slow bits that seriously add up: Not being able to make multiples of the same smoothie, repeat chest animations, constant echo capture animations for the first 2 acts of the game, echo recall stops everything for some reason, etc.

-As usual, Hero mode sucks.

Despite ALL this, the game is a treat. I'd say buy it or emulate. It does more right than it does wrong but that makes the wrong really stand out. I hope they go for this again. Really fun game.

[Lander]

Wait, there's a new new Zelda? And it looks like a successor to the Link's Awakening redux?

Shit, I feel like I should be way more excited to see the series survive the Breath / Tears dark age.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

At least we got Age of Calamity, a Musou game that uses the BotW assets to good use and gives us actual characterization between living characters. Still makes Link into a heroic mute though, missed opportunity there. But the characters are arguably more likeable in general. If you dig the Musou series it incorporated BotW well.

Tears's menu, particularly for having to select items over and over to attach to arrows instead of a "automatically attach last selected" or something is incredibly tedious and legitimately awful for what was the wildly successful sequel in a major franchise.

[XoPachi]

Finished Echoes.
I stand by my opinions but the good parts of the game continually got better. Unfortunately, you get to a point where you can really bullshit a lot of stuff, but I guess that's just a reward for exploring. Certain echoes, for puzzles and traversal, are simply broken.
The last boss was surprisingly chaotic relatively. They definitely heard the complaints of Wild's terrible climax because Tears final engagement was notably better and now this fight is even more frantic and involved than that. I'm surprised how treacherous that was for a game like this.

I'm also now convinced that the *echo* system is not the problem with combat, rather it's the enemies and most bosses themselves not really pushing you.
The last boss really puts a strain on everything and suddenly positioning and timing seriously comes into focus. It was a lot of fun. I actually had no more instant healing items and even with damage reduction, he was chunking me. It is also a long fight. It took me like 15 minutes I think. It wasn't like white knuckle, brutal difficulty. But it was nice pressure I didn't expect from Zelda.

[Air Master Burst]

Still makes Link into a heroic mute though, missed opportunity there.

See, and I feel the same way, but that the answer is to lean entirely into it and make Link officially and unironically mute. Remove all his battle yells and grunts, have him wave at people or tap their shoulders to get their attention, and maybe give him a little pad and stylus for writing when he really needs to tell someone something important. Think of how adorable the animations would be!

[BulletMagnet]

Even better, make him exaggeratedly pantomime everything a la Super Mario RPG.

[XoPachi]

Tears's menu, particularly for having to select items over and over to attach to arrows instead of a "automatically attach last selected" or something is incredibly tedious and legitimately awful for what was the wildly successful sequel in a major franchise.

The sheer amount of menus in Tears almost drove me insane.
Echoes has the terrible arrow fusion menu but thankfully nothing else. For some reason, down on the Dpad doesn't have an action and that could have easily been used to access favorites. Unless I just somehow missed something after 20+ hours and completing the game.
Right stick could have also been used to access some kind of real time, custom favorites wheel. Like Mega Man 11's weapon selection. A quick flick in a direction and you'd have your Echo live. Literally just 6-8 slots would be enough. I would take that over the camera pan it does which isn't so useful that I'd miss it.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Have been on a PS1 horror era kick, replaying some games.

Resident Evil 1: The Director's Cut, non-dual shock is the best English release. For some reason there's 3 separate releases, the vanilla one, the DC, and the DC Dual Shock. The dual shock release changed some music for the worse for some reason, avoid it. The original Japanese version also works if you understand Japanese, but steer clear of the English release of RE1 because they removed the auto aim and lock on button which makes it incredibly annoying to play (you can't rapidly retarget hunters if they jump over you). Pretty fun, even if the dialogue and visuals have not aged tremendously. Jill's scenario is canon as far as I'm concerned, because Chris's is quite silly and he comes off as wildly incompetent by comparison.

Resident Evil 2: First time trying the Dual Shock version. It's the definitive release thanks to the really fun Extreme Battle Mode that's added to the PS1 Dual Shock ver., serving as a kind of Mercenaries Mode. The only change to the vanilla game that people have located (thanks to a GameFAQs thread with detailed enemy/damage info) is that the moth enemy late in the game has like 25% less health for some reason. It's an entirely optional enemy and isn't particularly difficult or noteworthy in the standard game, so this has no practical impact on the game's difficulty.

Resident Evil 3: It's not quite as spooky and cramped as RE1 or RE2 in terms of tense exploration, but running through a chaotic city layout is really fun, even if Jill's default outfit is silly. The combat is exceptional, with the addition of quickturn, zombie shoving, dodging, and so on, that works pretty well when you understand the system. Fave RE game to replay, even if I think the plot isn't as strong compared to the first two games (if you've played RE1 and RE2 you already have a good idea of what's going on, there's no creepy files to find that give you significantly new or interesting information).

Resident Evil Survivor: I hadn't played this before. It makes me wish we had more first person horror PS1 games as it reminds me a lot of Silent Hill 1's unlockable Self View Mode. The setting of the game is pretty good, and the story is in some ways even creepier than the other RE games, even if it feels a bit cramped at times. There's a few problems with the game, namely that the aiming in the non-guncon USA version is a bit iffy (it's not that bad, merely a bit janky) and worse, you can't save the game in the middle of gameplay without suiciding. You have to beat it in one sitting (or use an emulator and savestates I guess). It's not well regarded among RE games but I think it gets rated worse than it deserves because most reviewers are north american audiences stuck without guncon support.

[ryu]

Finally finished Dragon's Dogma. It turned out to be a surprisingly great game. Questing actually isn't too overblown, exploring the world is fun (because it's fairly obvious where you can go and can't) and rewarding. The story takes a backseat to the gameplay, the Pawn system is a lot of fun. Dark Arisen adds a fantastic horror dungeon crawler to the base game. My biggest gripes are the automatic camera doing nonsense when climbing enemies and how grindy the endgame is in regards of acquiring gear.

I also played Dragon's Dogma II for a bit. So far I'm not sure how this will fare in the long run. There's additions I really like (new pawn interactions, pawn quests) and stuff that it just does outright worse than the first game. The open world is somewhat annoying to navigate as I find myself wasting time trying to climb walls that turn out to be unclimbable, or getting lost on side tracks that lead nowhere of interest. I think I preferred the character editor of the first game because it was easy to quickly create characters that looked fine enough. In DD II I spent hours on my characters and it wasn't enough to iron out all the issues. The worst part of the game so far are the terrible run animations and the way some armor looks on the characters. In some cases it looks like the equipment floats above the characters instead of sitting tight (cloaks and robes have this problem), clipping and animations with some capes seems to be worse than in any other game I've played and some cloaks aren't even properly attached to the character (the general's mantle being the prime offender). Combat seems to be somewhat worse than in the first game so far, but I wonder how it'll feel later on when I have more skills.

Anyways, the series is on hold because I got two versions of Silent Hill 2 to play and compare.

[guigui]

Finally finished Dragon's Dogma. It turned out to be a surprisingly great game. Questing actually isn't too overblown, exploring the world is fun (because it's fairly obvious where you can go and can't) and rewarding. The story takes a backseat to the gameplay, the Pawn system is a lot of fun. Dark Arisen adds a fantastic horror dungeon crawler to the base game. My biggest gripes are the automatic camera doing nonsense when climbing enemies and how grindy the endgame is in regards of acquiring gear.

I did want to love the game. Setting, exploration, quests, grind looked fine to me, but in the end I could not stick with it precisely because of the pawn system.

Care to explain "the Pawn system is a lot of fun" thing ? I cannot see how having to create almost uncontrollable NPC to fight with you may be fun. My experience is : if you dont have them then you cannot win fights, but if you have them then you have no control over what happens in fights. Where is the fun ?

[Lander]

Finally finished Dragon's Dogma. It turned out to be a surprisingly great game. Questing actually isn't too overblown, exploring the world is fun (because it's fairly obvious where you can go and can't) and rewarding. The story takes a backseat to the gameplay, the Pawn system is a lot of fun.

Nice!

How did you like the...

True Everfall and Seneschal?

Dark Arisen adds a fantastic horror dungeon crawler to the base game. My biggest gripes are the automatic camera doing nonsense when climbing enemies and how grindy the endgame is in regards of acquiring gear.

Yeah, loot is probably one of DD's weaker points. The endgame is rad as an elective boss rush, but not so fun to grind out in the hope that the next chest will be the one with major spoils.

The Bitterblack postgame helps(?) by outmoding all of it almost immediately, though ends up suffering the same and worse after loop 1; you end up needing the good loop 2 drops to actually get anywhere in loop 2, so it devolves into a sad affair of running for dear life and harakiri save-scumming when the loot source inevitably refuses to yield a Lv3 Bitterblack Gubbin. There's some really busted good stuff in there, but I've never had the patience to make the perfect build once the TLB is done with.

I also played Dragon's Dogma II for a bit. So far I'm not sure how this will fare in the long run. There's additions I really like (new pawn interactions, pawn quests) and stuff that it just does outright worse than the first game. The open world is somewhat annoying to navigate as I find myself wasting time trying to climb walls that turn out to be unclimbable, or getting lost on side tracks that lead nowhere of interest. I think I preferred the character editor of the first game because it was easy to quickly create characters that looked fine enough. In DD II I spent hours on my characters and it wasn't enough to iron out all the issues. The worst part of the game so far are the terrible run animations and the way some armor looks on the characters. In some cases it looks like the equipment floats above the characters instead of sitting tight (cloaks and robes have this problem), clipping and animations with some capes seems to be worse than in any other game I've played and some cloaks aren't even properly attached to the character (the general's mantle being the prime offender). Combat seems to be somewhat worse than in the first game so far, but I wonder how it'll feel later on when I have more skills.

Exploration becomes a bit less onerous as the vocations and item economy open up; the melee classes are mostly left low & dry, but things like harpy lures and mage levitation let you get all up in the map's I'm not supposed to be here cracks'n'crevices.
Combat-wise, the vocations are mostly pretty good when leveled. I enjoyed the mobility makeover they gave Archer a lot. Mystick Spearhand chumps everything else for free though, it's like a dedicated Monster Hunter class.

If anything, my advice would be to ferret out some key augments, then pick a class that feels fun and stick to it; minmaxing vocation EXP isn't so worthwhile as it was in 1.

[ryu]

Care to explain "the Pawn system is a lot of fun" thing ? I cannot see how having to create almost uncontrollable NPC to fight with you may be fun. My experience is : if you dont have them then you cannot win fights, but if you have them then you have no control over what happens in fights. Where is the fun ?

I like the way they interact with the player, from helping with quests to holding down enemies in combat. Yeah having an AI party is not always perfect, there were times when my pawns were getting me killed, but that was the exception and not the average experience. I mean if you want a solo action game you can just play DMC. Dragon's Dogma actually managed to innovate on action RPGs with AI parties and probably does it best, too.

How did you like the...

True Everfall and Seneschal?

The dungeon crawl was fun for a while but got old after a couple of days. Especially having to godbane to reset those chests - but I also understand that the game was designed around trading items so this was only necessary for me because I was playing like 11 years late with the online dead in the waters. Thought the ending was silly. Seemed like a lot of the story is only to there to justify the gameplay systems. I fought the last boss after beating BBI so I just one-shot him.

[Marc]

Started Silent Hill 2 RE last night. Wow. Bloober.... you did good.

[Sumez]

I don't recall ever seeing everyone do a massive 180 on a video game's hype train as hard as they seem to have done on the SH2 remake.

[guigui]

Care to explain "the Pawn system is a lot of fun" thing ? I cannot see how having to create almost uncontrollable NPC to fight with you may be fun. My experience is : if you dont have them then you cannot win fights, but if you have them then you have no control over what happens in fights. Where is the fun ?

I like the way they interact with the player, from helping with quests to holding down enemies in combat. Yeah having an AI party is not always perfect, there were times when my pawns were getting me killed, but that was the exception and not the average experience. I mean if you want a solo action game you can just play DMC. Dragon's Dogma actually managed to innovate on action RPGs with AI parties and probably does it best, too.

Sounds fair : DD is a multiplayer game with AI controlled partners, why not ? Guess I'll have to try it again, but remember I never knew how many pawns I should create, which ability I should give them and so on.

Usually I like to create a party and stick with it for the whole game, doing some optimisation of characters, equipment and all.
However now I think in that Dragon's Dogma, you actually have to change your AI partners often in order to fulfill whatever objective you've set for yourself in your next bacth of playing ?

[ryu]

You only get to create one pawn in DD. The other two you have to hire from a pool of premade pawns and online pawns (the main pawns of other players).
The vocation system is based on Final Fantasy's job system. You're encouraged to level more than one vocation and combine their shared abilities.
The pawns you hire don't level up so you should pick them depending on your current need.

My first impression of the Silent Hill 2 remake is not good. I just ended up wanting to continue playing the original. Even when I try to judge it on its own grounds, disregarding that it's a remake, I feel that every decision the developers made was a terrible one.

[Marc]

I don't recall ever seeing everyone do a massive 180 on a video game's hype train as hard as they seem to have done on the SH2 remake.

I was mocked a number of times for insisting this would turn out decently. Certainly wasn't expecting this though.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

To be fair, the disastrous rereleases prior of SH2 and 3 didn't give people much confidence I guess. I heard some discourse about how the updated dodge mechanics were a weird addition, but I think that was from people who didn't realize SH2 had a blocking function like SH3, just that most people missed it because it was very poorly implemented compared to SH3's.

[ryu]

Continued the SH2 remake. Got it into the wood side apartment building and made some progress there. For a survival horror the game is ok so far. Resources are scarce and enemies tough. Although I personally prefer the simple combat of the original because I tend to play these games for a quick spook ride alone.

There's a lot of mildly spooky padding that I wish was optional because it adds nothing to the game for me. Leaves me reminded of running through town in Downpour and solving side quests.

The way the remake handles the original's narrative is pretty much an insult however. Just everything about that is awful.

[Lander]

The whole turnaround on Bloober is a kind of spiteful catharsis, to my mind. The in-crowd does so love to pick favourites and unfavourites, and what a shock, they didn't know shit.

Will probably watch someone stream the remake later; interested to see what they've done with the place.
The combat really stood out in the trailer - you could stick BFG Division over some of those gunshot-beatdown-curbstomp chains James was doing and it wouldn't be a bit out of place

Care to explain "the Pawn system is a lot of fun" thing ? I cannot see how having to create almost uncontrollable NPC to fight with you may be fun. My experience is : if you dont have them then you cannot win fights, but if you have them then you have no control over what happens in fights. Where is the fun ?

You can win fights without them, but it requires building around solo augments (Rogue / Assassin stuff), and some foreknowledge to avoid getting stunlocked. Knowing how to break the weird subtractive damage scaling (Periapts, Blast Arrows) doesn't hurt either.

There's a degree of control via the D-Pad commands, though the major thing dictating behaviour is actually their given inclination, which the game does a terrible job of explaining, so it's easy to hire a chump.
There are good guides for it out there, but it mostly boils down to "don't pick these ones or else." From memory, the healing item one (Mendicant?) is a solid pick, and the one that makes them ferry KOed pawns over to you mid-fight is bloody awful.

Honestly, so long as you have a healer, you can mostly just do combo and treat them as pack-mule monster bait. Keep tossing duds into the sea, and eventually you'll end up with a crew that doesn't make you want to

The dungeon crawl was fun for a while but got old after a couple of days. Especially having to godbane to reset those chests - but I also understand that the game was designed around trading items so this was only necessary for me because I was playing like 11 years late with the online dead in the waters. Thought the ending was silly. Seemed like a lot of the story is only to there to justify the gameplay systems. I fought the last boss after beating BBI so I just one-shot him.

The trading thing was kinda interesting when online was merely semi-dead; if I recall, trolling meta was to buy the unisex princess dress from the scrivener and send butch warriors home dressed as Peach. Hours of fun.
Though it always seemed a bit uncontrollable unless you were trawling GameFAQs to make specific deals. Kind of smart I guess, since the hiring system makes it asynchronous and more messageboard-friendly, but that sort of thing was never my bag.

And aw man, no love for the cosmology? That's one of my favourite parts!
There's an interesting extra bit if you die to the final boss, though it probably won't turn you around on the idea if you're not already in:

Spoiler

Arisen who fail at the last get dropped through the floor and fall back into the world as the next Dragon - hence all of Grigori's mysterious I know things you don't speechifying.

I liked that the weird multi-world thing actually ends up internally consistent, since Dragon, Dragonforged and Duke are all different degrees of failure to make a new battery and prolong the endless loop.
Though I suppose the pawn lore is a bit thin; thought the reincarnation was an interesting twist - dude sounds like a lady! - but it's a bit unfulfilling that they're essentially just 'raw material' for making NG+ protagonists.

DD2 doesn't give a fig about any of that though, so you might end up liking it better than I did in broad!

[Marc]

Continued the SH2 remake. Got it into the wood side apartment building and made some progress there. For a survival horror the game is ok so far. Resources are scarce and enemies tough. Although I personally prefer the simple combat of the original because I tend to play these games for a quick spook ride alone.

There's a lot of mildly spooky padding that I wish was optional because it adds nothing to the game for me. Leaves me reminded of running through town in Downpour and solving side quests.

The way the remake handles the original's narrative is pretty much an insult however. Just everything about that is awful.

Seems ok to me so far. ...

[Lander]

Bearing in mind that my perspective on SH2 (both OG and remake) is strictly that of an outsider looking in, the remake doesn't seem terribly egregious. Characters and conversation still have that uncanny valley dream-like thing going on, and the presentation is high-quality. The 'bad weather' bits seem an interesting way to ramp tension and push the player to the next major area without explicitly railroading them.

My main nit so far is that the first few hours use the RE2R combi-lock trick (hey, zoom in on this interesting thing... *HORRIFYING MONSTER SOUNDS DIRECTLY IN YOUR EAR*) enough times to be noticeable, though each instance is nonetheless effective.
The weapon progression mechanism seems a bit overmodern too, but it remains to be seen whether it'll become formulaic. Game seems to have a solid grasp on keeping things distinct and interesting as it progresses.

P

I note that Pyramid Head's violent fucking intro seems to have been toned down a bit. Change of locale for the fight too, though still just as much a pointless ammo dump as the original!
Nice touch that he remains semi-hostile after the siren goes off; a cheeky player trying to get behind him for a farewell cold-cock is in for an unpleasant surprise

I can see Bloober becoming the go-to SH studio for the next 6 years or so, given that 2 is off to a popular start; bang out 1 and 3 remakes as a tidy duology, and hopefully don't fuck up the middle one like Capcom did.

[Lethe]

The apparent cruciality of the whole remake culture thing is simultaneously astonishing and rather funny to me. I've not been paying any attention at all to SH2 remake but the impression I get is that it's technically competent mostly-artless commercial work #712563, and somehow this has become worth celebrating because it's less shit than everything else. Exactly the same position as the Resi remake series, which is presumably what they were aiming for.

The brain drain surrounding these immense IP rightsholder companies is so severe at this point that it's impossible to believe they're running on anything beyond fumes and momentum.

[To Far Away Times]

I got through the character creator yesterday, and I'm about to start Nioh 2 proper today. I really liked the first one - it's my favorite of all the Souls clones - and I've heard the sequel is a big improvement.

[Sima Tuna]

The apparent cruciality of the whole remake culture thing is simultaneously astonishing and rather funny to me. I've not been paying any attention at all to SH2 remake but the impression I get is that it's technically competent mostly-artless commercial work #712563, and somehow this has become worth celebrating because it's less shit than everything else. Exactly the same position as the Resi remake series, which is presumably what they were aiming for.

The brain drain surrounding these immense IP rightsholder companies is so severe at this point that it's impossible to believe they're running on anything beyond fumes and momentum.

Same here. I said in a Mark MSX community post thing that I wonder when it'll be time to repaint the Mona Lisa and sell it as a new piece of art? We should repaint it every 10 years or so and delete all images of the old one, as well as burn the old paintings. Make it impossible for anyone to experience the original art in its original form. Force these zoomers to look only at the NEW ART, dammit.

We should re-shoot Lawrence of Arabia every ten years too. Fuck David Lean! We can do it better now! New stuff made with new technology is always superior to the old!

But seriously, I don't care about the merits of any remake if it doesn't include the original game inside of it somewhere. If you haven't preserved the original work then you can fuck off.

Good remakes: Tomb Raider remasters, Dragon's Trap, La-Mulana, Strange Journey Redux (only because you can disable all the Redux shit,) Devil Survivor Overclocked etc. The basic dna of the original game is still in there. Either it's the same code in a different wrapper or very similar to the original version.

I'm sure people will disagree, because I've encountered the very opposite opinion frequently: that a remake has no value unless it does "something radically different" from the original work. AKA it needs to be a completely separate game but with the same name, and somehow this is a good thing despite how it dilutes search results and makes preservation of the original game harder (since megacorps simply refuse to port the "old" version of the game when they could port the "new" one.)

[Steven]

If you want some really fucking good remakes that make the originals completely pointless, there's always Tales of Destiny Director's Cut, the PS1/PSP versions of Tales of Phantasia, AM2R, Reverse Collapse, and possibly the 2011 remake of Sonic CD if you don't mind the physics being slightly off.

Destiny Director's Cut is amazing, though. It's probably the single greatest remake ever made. The original Tales of Destiny is kind of not very good at all, so taking that and making it into the best game in the entire series is quite an accomplishment.

[ryu]

The apparent cruciality of the whole remake culture thing is simultaneously astonishing and rather funny to me. I've not been paying any attention at all to SH2 remake but the impression I get is that it's technically competent mostly-artless commercial work #712563, and somehow this has become worth celebrating because it's less shit than everything else. Exactly the same position as the Resi remake series, which is presumably what they were aiming for.

The brain drain surrounding these immense IP rightsholder companies is so severe at this point that it's impossible to believe they're running on anything beyond fumes and momentum.

I only bought it out of curiosity, because I didn't want Konami to hurt any of their employees over bad sales, and because it's a new horror game for the Halloween season. It's baffling to me there are people saying it makes the original obsolete. You're right that it's just a mediocre game without any of that special spice that made the original a masterwork.