Remake/Remodel.

[Glebe]

Been playing Resident Evil HD Remaster recently and really enjoying it, this interesting video has almost convinced me that it's better than the original PS1 version that I'm familiar with, sacrilegious as that sounds (it's actually a redo of the 2002 GameCube version). It's weird how primitive it looks now, not that that really matters, the remaster is obviously leaps and bounds ahead technically and adds a lot of extra stuff, but there's a charm about the original, a big part of which is the legendarily terrible dialogue ("You, the master of unlocking!") which is indeed mentioned in that video. Also, some of the great atmospheric music of the original PS1 version is sorely missed.

Silent Hill HD Collection is going cheap on Microsoft Store, but apparently it's an absolutely awful mess so I shan't bother with it. Anyway, remasters/remakes, discuss!

[bgmnts]

Yeah REmake is still the gold standard for remaking a game. It keeps everything from the original game, makes it better AND adds stuff to it. It still looks absolutely gorgeous as well, and it shows off what pre rendered backgrounds can do. I think it looks better than most resident evils even now.

I'd probably say within the RE community it's considered the best entry? Not sure obviously because you have RE2 and 3 and lots of people love 4 but yeah if game developers want to remake a game, look at REmake.

The Silent Hill HD collection is the exact opposite. I think they took away everything good about the games and didn't replace it with anything.

I'm currently playing the Mass Effect Legendary remake thing and it's sort of in the middle. It looks a LOT better and has made some little changes but nothing too much.


But yeah please everyone play REmake it's one of the best games ever made.

[Magnum Valentino]

Thirded, I'll love it forever. Zero looks amazing but it's not as good a game. They're frequently packaged together though, may as well get both, go on, aye.

The PS3 remasters of Metal Gear 2 and 3 are brilliant too, but you'll need a PS3 to play them. Or a PS Vita but no cunt has a PS Vita

[Cold Meat Platter]

The PS3 remasters of Metal Gear 2 and 3 are brilliant too, but you'll need a PS3 to play them. Or a PS Vita but no cunt has a PS Vita

I've got them for XBOX360.

[Glebe]

Thirded, I'll love it forever. Zero looks amazing but it's not as good a game. They're frequently packaged together though, may as well get both, go on, aye.

Downloaded REHDR off the Microsoft Store on it's own for €5 (I am an Irish Euro cunt), I'd never played the original Resi 0 having not had a GameCube but the remake is currently available for €5 too. Should add that it's the Xbox One I'm playing these on. Micro Store bastards have Code: Veronica going for 20 quid, a decade-old 360 release, ffs!

Oh yeah also I just recently completed both of the Return to Arkham games on me Xbox, there was some controversy about the graphics and framerate and that, apparently they weren't remastered by Rocksteady. I'd no problems with them myself. I had the first three Arkham games for my laptop, City was not playable on it (surprise, surprise) but I finally got around to playing it when I got the Xbox. Sadly Origins didn't get the remake treatment, oddly enough the 360 is not available to download so you have to seek out an old physical copy to play it (it is backwards compatible apparently).

[Magnum Valentino]

Well worth it, but especially so if you haven't played City recently as it feels very familiar at times. I had no bugs whatsoever on my first playthrough, and couldn't finish my second because of them. Batman and Christmas are an ace combination.

[Glebe]

Well worth it, but especially so if you haven't played City recently as it feels very familiar at times. I had no bugs whatsoever on my first playthrough, and couldn't finish my second because of them. Batman and Christmas are an ace combination.

Yeah I really enjoyed it on me old laptop, and yes, the Christmas atmos is great. Love the hotel corridor bit when you're going after Joker. That big building that you can't swing around is annoying admittedly (or am I thinking of the bridge?) but otherwise it's good stuff and didn't deserve the slagging it seems to have gotten. Might have encountered a few bugs myself but nothing major as I recall. Was surprised to discover that Rocksteady had owt to do with it. Also had Arkham Origins: Blackgate for PC, which was apparently originally created for the Nintendo 3DS and PlayStation Vita, it's technically a 2D game but does a fine job of giving it a 3D feel (not really explaining that properly, guess you just have to play it). It's actually a surprisingly enjoyable spin-off.

[Glebe]

I had the first three Arkham games for my laptop, City was not playable on it (surprise, surprise) but I finally got around to playing it when I got the Xbox.

Not City, Knight rather!

[BeardFaceMan]

I had a lot of fun with the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater remakes, they were very well done.

[H-O-W-L]

Please don't touch the Silent Hill "HD" versions, ever. They utterly gutted those games and left them completely ruined. Even simple things like the vignette and visual noise -- crucial to making the fog not bland as fuck -- are gone. Nevermind the fact they got a bunch of genuinely shit new voice acting.

If you have a halfway decent PC you can probably run SH2 and SH3 on PC with a bit of tweaking-- I can dig up the guides since I haven't done it in about ten years, but the PC versions, with fan patches, end up being remasters in their own right since you can render them at 4k+ natively -- it was a surprising, massively ahead-of-the-curve feature of the Silent Hill games on PC that you could run them beyond your rendering resolution and have them natively downscale for absolutely beautifully smooth edges. Back in the day I taxed my fledgling 2010s GPU to ballbusting point by running SH3 at 4k on a 1280x1024 monitor (!!!) and it was bloody lovely.

Their textures are lower-res of course but the visual noise of the Silent Hill style means that the low res nature actually lends itself to improving the visual style rather than subtracting from it. I don't think those games look bad in the least nowadays, even despite their age:




These pages will help you with getting SH2 and SH3 working fantastic on PC -- I had no issues with SH3 out of the box back in the day, but if you're on widescreen you'll want a patch or two.

http://enhanced.townofsilenthill.com/SH2/
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Silent_Hill_2:_Director%27s_Cut
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Silent_Hill_3

As for where to getting them? Pirate the fuckers, Konami will never make them available digitally.

[madhair60]

The Silent Hill HD Collection is bad but honestly it's fine if it's your only option. Setting up those PC versions seems like a monumental arseache

You can switch off the new voice acting but I think only in SH2, which is fucking weird

[H-O-W-L]

The Silent Hill HD Collection is bad but honestly it's fine if it's your only option. Setting up those PC versions seems like a monumental arseache

How is running a couple .exes and dumping stuff in a folder an arseache? Literally less work than setting up yer Zooms to phone into yer office or whatever the fuck. Less effort than making a cup of tea.

What's better, putting a bit of effort in to make a game work at its best and enjoy it, or playing a shit, scuffed version that dead-arse loses chunks of the original aesthetic and audio design because you can't be arsed?

[madhair60]

If you hadn't already played it you wouldn't notice anything was wrong or different

[H-O-W-L]

Alright, here's beans on toast. I've made it with dog shite but you've never had beans on toast before so you won't know the difference, alright?

[madhair60]

Edit: I'll leave it! You're the expert.

[earl_sleek]

Alright, here's beans on toast. I've made it with dog shite but you've never had beans on toast before so you won't know the difference, alright?

As long as you let it cool for ten minutes that's fine.

[johnlogan]

The Resident Evil remaster is a funny one to think of now - I know it's because I was younger, but it did feel like the 6 years between the original and the Gamecube remake was ages, even though by today's standards, that would be someone doing a remake of, say, The Witcher III.

By the time I got a PlayStation, Resident Evil 2 was already nearly out, so the first game already looked creaky by the time I got to play it, and I was rubbish at it. I remember thinking the remake had unbelieveable graphics at the time, so in a weird way the graphics have aged worse than the original, in my mind. That aside, this and the remake of Resident Evil 2 have to be the gold standard for this sort of thing, are they not?

[oggyraiding]

I seem to remember the Crash remakes changing the shape of Crash's hitbox, which resulted in it being more likely to slip off the edge of ledges. Don't know if the devs ever addressed it. Unusual for a modern remake to actually be harder than the original game.
REmake is a great game, albeit a stressful one. I'd love to see a new Resi game in that sort of vein, slow burn fixed camera angles instead of the more action focused FPS/TPS of recent games.
As for the Silent Hill remasters, they're serviceable. I wasn't aware they were meant to be shit when they first came out, so I didn't notice the change of voice acting or lack of fog or whatever. My only real criticism of SH2 was that it punishes you for playing it like a survival horror game, but that's my own personal issue.

[Magnum Valentino]

I seem to remember the Crash remakes changing the shape of Crash's hitbox, which resulted in it being more likely to slip off the edge of ledges. Don't know if the devs ever addressed it. Unusual for a modern remake to actually be harder than the original game.

He also couldn't jump as far/high. It was because they only developed the physics for one game (the third, I think), then applied those same rules to the first two as well, but that didn't work because they didn't change the maps accordingly. Clearing the jump after the slide under the electric in the bees level in 2 had a LOT of people asking 'didn't this used to be easier?' but the truth didn't come out for months.

[H-O-W-L]

There's reams of further stuff online but the HD collections are such a downgrade.



This is meant to be highly atmospheric, dark, plodding exploration through these apartments, all you can see is your flashlight beam, and it's purposefully used for some scares and environment changes -- which you can see pop into reality in the HD collections because the poor cross-porting removed the dynamic lighting.



All the visual tone is gone here (remaster on the left). It's so much more than just a couple visual changes, it's just straight up an incompetent port. They genuinely downgraded the game to the point of spoiling the visuals.



This is just dog dirt.




Floor textures made flat.

There's also the fact that you can see some environmental changes that were meant to be hidden by camera angles because the widescreen patching is incompetent. The PC widescreen patches accommodate for this.

[H-O-W-L]

I'm not going to start on the re-recorded voice acting, because it'll be chalked up to subjectivity no matter my citation of its original intent being completely lost in the recasting and re-direction.

[bgmnts]

It is shit but I'd rather play the shitter version on my xbox one than fuck about with computers tbh. Would have been nice if they made a decent port though, the bastards.

[H-O-W-L]

I'd honestly suggest you just don't play them at all if you don't want to play them as they're truly intended to be experienced. It's not even a subjective thing like difficulty it just straight up shreds the atmosphere out of a duet of games that were praised for their incredibly curated, hand-made atmosphere that was crafted with absolute care. If you aren't going to understand and respect that  then you're really not going to get much out of them. It's not like the shitty 360 version of San Andreas where you still end up playing the same game but with buggy visuals, it is literally like watching Jacob's Ladder in a high-contrast 240p pan-and-scan version with the lights on and a Hypercam 2 watermark-- at that point, why bother?

And I don't say this out of snobbery, I say this because I want people to experience SH2 and SH3 as intended, so they can appreciate them and enjoy them. Without it the gameplay of them is not particularly enthralling, and the gameplay was never the focus. You are fundamentally going to lose what the game is trying to sell itself on; atmosphere and style.

[Mister Six]

Just want to absolutely second H-O-W-L here. It's like doing a haunted house fairground ride with all the lights on, the crew absent or not in fancy dress and half the decor replaced with cardboard boxes.

[Obel]

And I don't say this out of snobbery, I say this because I want people to experience SH2 and SH3 as intended, so they can appreciate them and enjoy them. Without it the gameplay of them is not particularly enthralling, and the gameplay was never the focus. You are fundamentally going to lose what the game is trying to sell itself on; atmosphere and style.

Couldn't agree more.

[Glebe]

Yeah won't be touching remastered SH with a shitty stick!

[madhair60]

You know when people complain about gatekeeping and its just that they can't finish a level? Well, this is *actual* gatekeeping - "Play Silent Hill this specific way or don't play it at all."

By that logic weren't these games designed for CRTs? Best play them on PS2 or you're not getting the original experience. Widescreen patches?  Why not just spit on the director's face.

Look, obviously they are inferior versions, you are spot on about that and evidently very passionate about the game. But I truly think you undersell the hassle of downloading the games and futzing with patches. Most people don't want to play on PC.

Edit: actually i am gonna put my money where my mouth is. I've never played SH2. I'm gonna download and patch Silent Hill 2, play it, then play the Remastered version.

[Zetetic]

minesweeper.exe is a version of SH2

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

It's testament to how good Silent Hill 2 is (or maybe just my deep seated love of it) that I still enjoyed (for want of a better word) the Demastered version, even though the lack of fog and whatnot is very noticable and bafflingly crap. It's a bit like if someone remixed a classic song and removed the drums.

Their textures are lower-res of course but the visual noise of the Silent Hill style means that the low res nature actually lends itself to improving the visual style rather than subtracting from it. I don't think those games look bad in the least nowadays, even despite their age:

It looks remarkably good. People talk about sprite graphics ageing better than polygons, but that is the better part of two decades old (fan patches aside) and I wouldn't say it looks significantly dated at all.

[madhair60]

Silent Hill 3's character models are ludicrously good for PS2.