Remake/Remodel.

[bgmnts]

I played Silent Hill 2 on original Xbox and I didnt really care about the visuals. I've always liked Silent Hill for the aural aesthetic, which is always top class.

[H-O-W-L]

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."

I've no idea how this is at all objectionable though. It's like asking people not to watch Blue Velvet on a TV in a loud and crowded bar and think that they've experienced the movie based off that. Some things, pieces of culture, genuinely deserve to be experienced as intended and have been made with more care and degree than others.

I've been saving this one because it's an actual spoiler, and it won't make sense unless you've played SH2, but the right-hand side is how Mary's famous tape cutscene plays out in SH2HD. Yes. It ACTUALLY plays out like that.
They didn't give a shit.

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.

1. There are some conveniences, concessions, that should be made. The HD Versions did not make concessions or conveniences, they are a lazy, cynical cash-crab re-release made by developers that did not give a shit, on the orders of a publisher that also does not give a shit and turned the series into complete shit (look at the review scores for later Silent Hill games, and ask any fan why they never suggest them.)

2. The widescreen patches are genuinely crafted with care by fans who have played the games through and taken the time to analyze the games from top to bottom, and, like I say, have been tailor adjusted in every cutscene to ensure that the intended visual scope of the game as made for 4:3 is not compromised while also fitting widescreen.

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.

If you use your computer for sending email and have installed a browser before you can install these patches. If you can read English you can install these patches. Deadass. It has never been easier to install these patches. Back in the day when I played on PC you had to fuck about with so much but now it is literally just running an EXE and pointing it to the SH2 folder. If anyone wants a copy of SH2 for PC then they can even PM me and I'll try and sort them out -- even see if I can make a portable pre-patched copy that only requires per-PC setting adjustments over the weekend.

If you can download a digital version of a game onto your console and sit there adjusting the visuals to fit your massive telly, you can install a digital version of a game and the five patches (all of which are EXEs or drag-and-drop affairs, no INI tweakings) and adjust the settings, ingame, to fit your PC. It's literally the same thing. The path

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.

Please do. The Enhanced Edition for SH2  is all you need. It's five or six patches, all of which are simple EXEs or can be drag + dropped.

If this were any other set of games I'd agree with you  wholeheartedly about going with the most convenient option (EG Bioshock Remastered, a game I really love but find the remasters lacking/poor) but honestly Silent Hill 1/2/3 are so good, so lovingly hand-made as I keep reiterating, that I can't overstate how worth it playing these games in proper, lovingly fan-remastered quality, as faithfully as is modernly possible, is.

There has never been a better time to play them as perfectly as possible, so why not take advantage? Fans have done it all for free.

I'm not telling anyone to hunt down a PS2 and play it -- that'd be madness. But most everyone has a PC capable of running these games now, since they're so old and the fan patches merely restore what was lost between PS2 > PC. I played through both on a ten year old onboard graphics card at 30-40FPS (not ideal but still) ten years ago, so modern PCs can run them on their bloody CPU-mounted onboard graphics, let alone their motherboard GPU, or dedicated GPU.

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.

I actually intentionally sought out pictures there that had no texture injection mods (which is a very complicated and arsehole process) and merely have the resolution natively increased.

[Zetetic]

I've no idea how this is at all objectionable though. It's like asking people not to watch Blue Velvet on a TV in a loud and crowded bar and think that they've experienced the movie based off that. Some things, pieces of culture, genuinely deserve to be experienced as intended and have been made with more care and degree than others.

I think your previous post made a really clear argument by example that it's not even about "as intended" - not least because that's open to aggressively absurd interpretations (as madhair showed) - but that there's an obvious degree of difference that makes it very straightforward to show that the "HD Versions" are not really the same thing as the original, even if one is clearly derived from the other.

Yeah, I'm sure it's possible to argue that I'm playing Silent Hill 2 on my hoop-and-stick but it's a fairly silly argument.

[Zetetic]

Edit fuck

[Glebe]

Would like to see an update of the Legacy of Kain games actually.

[Pink Gregory]

I played Silent Hill 2 on original Xbox and I didnt really care about the visuals. I've always liked Silent Hill for the aural aesthetic, which is always top class.

There's a fuzziness to the Xbox version (also the one I played) that I think adds to the atmosphere.  Might be more to it than that, I've never done a comparison.  Might look exactly the same for all I know.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

I actually intentionally sought out pictures there that had no texture injection mods (which is a very complicated and arsehole process) and merely have the resolution natively increased.

Well there you go. It's kind of gobsmacking to think how little time there was between the very dated looking original Silent Hill and the fairly timeless graphics of SH3.

[H-O-W-L]

The original XBOX SH2 is almost identical to the PS2 version iirc, it just has slightly different/lower quality audio because of the way the PS2 played back audio and the slightly dodgy conversion. And slightly compressed FMVs but you'd never notice because the XBox outputs at like 480P anyway I think.

[Famous Mortimer]

Having played both, I really didn't much care. It's not like, however many years between the two experiences it was, I noticed the significant differences or anything like that. The game played mostly the same and it was fun both times. I mean, yes, reading about the process, it was fucked, but if someone had the right console and found the HD remasters a shop for a few quid, I'd definitely recommend they play it.

But my main contribution to this thread is Metal Gear Solid. Never played the first one in its first incarnation, but played the "Twin Snakes" version on the Gamecube. Apparently, upsetting to a portion of the fanbase because there's a boss fight you can do in first person, making it a decent amount easier. Fuck me, though, I'd have never stood a chance on the PS1 version because even the "easy" version was tough.

[Ron Maels Moustache]

The original XBOX SH2 is almost identical to the PS2 version iirc, it just has slightly different/lower quality audio because of the way the PS2 played back audio and the slightly dodgy conversion. And slightly compressed FMVs but you'd never notice because the XBox outputs at like 480P anyway I think.

The Xbox version of SH2 was actually slight upgrade from the PS2 version, as it had real-time lighting effects for the torch and so on that the PS2 couldn't manage.

It's already been said, but the HD Collection was from the top down a complete and utter disaster, it could not have been handled any worse if it had been promoted by Konami flogging the original developers through the streets (although given the profile of the company in 2021, I wouldn't put it past them to actually do this)

They probably thought they could get away with doing a quick and easy cash-in re-release without spending a lot of money, farming it out to a small overseas developer who would do as they were told, out on the shelves quickly and quids in lads. But it's massively evident in hindsight that the scope of the project and the care and attention required to put out something acceptable required far more effort than they were prepared to put in, and it backfired, horribly.

I don't blame the poor developers who were dealt a shitty hand from the get-go - given incomplete pre-release builds of the games to work from and having no access to crucial assets such as sound effects and textures. Of course it was going to be a total mess.

[Magnum Valentino]

Having played both, I really didn't much care. It's not like, however many years between the two experiences it was, I noticed the significant differences or anything like that. The game played mostly the same and it was fun both times.

But my main contribution to this thread is Metal Gear Solid. Never played the first one in its first incarnation, but played the "Twin Snakes" version on the Gamecube. Apparently, upsetting to a portion of the fanbase because there's a boss fight you can do in first person, making it a decent amount easier. Fuck me, though, I'd have never stood a chance on the PS1 version because even the "easy" version was tough.

Twin Snakes is dated terribly by the choreography in the action sequences and suffers from lacklustre performance from the voice cast as they had to rerecord everything due to the fidelity of the original recordings and you can tell they're not into it. Generally though, I like it. It's surprising it's never made the leap to its own HD rerelease.

[bgmnts]

Having played both, I really didn't much care. It's not like, however many years between the two experiences it was, I noticed the significant differences or anything like that. The game played mostly the same and it was fun both times. I mean, yes, reading about the process, it was fucked, but if someone had the right console and found the HD remasters a shop for a few quid, I'd definitely recommend they play it.

But my main contribution to this thread is Metal Gear Solid. Never played the first one in its first incarnation, but played the "Twin Snakes" version on the Gamecube. Apparently, upsetting to a portion of the fanbase because there's a boss fight you can do in first person, making it a decent amount easier. Fuck me, though, I'd have never stood a chance on the PS1 version because even the "easy" version was tough.

If they remade Metal Gear, Metal Gear 2 and Metal Gear Solid using the current Fod engine...

I suppose it will never happen now but to fully link the whole saga together with all the up to date story changes and graphics and physics and yadda yadda. Would love to see those utterly stupid bosses like Shotgunner, Machine-gun Kid and Dirty Duck in current gen.

[Magnum Valentino]

They may get round to it yet, apparently a Fox Engine remake of Snake Eater is in development.

[Pink Gregory]

Does the Fox engine even exist any more?  I think it belongs to Konami, so Kojima and his team couldn't take it with them; probably used it for Metal Gear Survive but doubt anything else is in the pipeline.

What a waste, seemed like a really good, optimised engine.  I was playing MGSV on PS3 and for a cross gen game I thought it was really good.

They may get round to it yet, apparently a Fox Engine remake of Snake Eater is in development.

By Konami?  Is it anything to do with the Snake Eater Pachinko game footage from a few years ago?

[H-O-W-L]

as they had to rerecord everything due to the fidelity of the original recordings

I believe that's a bollocks excuse made up in the era and it was a money and rights thing more than anything, like it was done by a different company to the later localizations and the rights and direction were all muddled because it was in the infancy of game voice acting and things weren't set in place etc etc... much like SH2's voiceover. But my sources for that are not definitive so I can't say that's fact.

[Magnum Valentino]

The examples I've heard all come from cast members including David Hayter who told Rob Paulsen (once of the few actors who appears in Twin Snakes but not the original) that the lower fidelity on PS1 wasn't an issue but when brought up to the levels needed for the GameCube revealed background noise that couldn't be eliminated. Maybe an example from different media would be that ropey special effects wouldn't show up on VHS on a CRT TV but 4K would make mincemeat of them.

Whether it's true or not it's such a strange thing to have such similar performances in two different versions of the same game. The overlap is such that the original truly should have sufficed.

[Famous Mortimer]

Slightly apropos, gog.com have got a deal today on both Silent Hill (part 4, admittedly) and Metal Gear / Metal Gear Solid. Oh, and the early Castlevania games, which I might have a bash at.

[madhair60]

Famous Mortimer - I would strongly recommend nabbing the Castlevania Anniversary Collection if you can, over that set on GoG. It has more games and is much better. Shouldn't be expensive either.

[H-O-W-L]

I've no clue how the PC port of SH4 is, or if it can be fan-patched, since I've never played it, but apparently it's missing some mild content (specific hauntings in your apartment). No idea why.

[Pink Gregory]

Hope I get to my copy of SH4 before my original Xbox dies.

I went through a phase of buying the (affordable) PS2/Xbox 'games I should play' from CEX and stupidly didn't pick up Silent Hill Shattered Memories when it was like a tenner, which I believe sells for a fair amount more now.

[Glebe]

CEX, I'm not paying fucking €18 for second hand Xbox 360 copy of Arkham Origins, arsed cigs.

[Chedney Honks]

Lots of rumours that Bluepoint are remaking Metal Gear Solid for the PS5, which would be great.

[bgmnts]

Lots of rumours that Bluepoint are remaking Metal Gear Solid for the PS5, which would be great.

Someone made this lovely little intro to Metal Gear Solid using Unreal 4 Engine.

https://youtu.be/sdYFmnQGtbU

So fortunate that the voice-overs were well ahead of their time and there is so much audio recorded for this to make it an easy remake.

It would be incredibly hard not to buy this for pure nostalgia, even a cynical cunt like me would pay full price. It would sell like hot cakes.

[Chedney Honks]

Their Demon's Souls remake was absolutely exceptional, one of the best looking games ever made, retaining the entire mechanical framework of the original. Amazing game and was worth getting the PS5 alone, until Returnal arguably topped it. My only slight concern would be that MGS is mechanically much more dated and stiff than Demon's. Hopefully would only need a little massage.

[elliszeroed]

There was a great mod of the original STALKER game,  Lost Alpha, which sadly didn't run very well on my old laptop.

There was so much cut from the game that the mod restored, making it feel like a totally different game.

Why were they never ported to console?

EDIT new version coming in 2022: https://www.pcgamer.com/stalker-2-heart-of-chernobyl-will-be-out-in-april-2022/

[Pink Gregory]

Very mouse-driven (inventory Ui mainly) games with big open maps and minimal loading screens (although not that minimal), plus they're still quite niche games; I don't imagine they'd have been seen as a sound investment at the time, also considering how unstable they did turn out on PC

[Glebe]

Finished Resident Evil 0 and the bonus Leech Hunter game (with all monsters killed!).

The bit where Rebecca fights the Proto Tyrant, I'd not saved for ages and I only had me handgun but I managed to beat him! Then I killed him with Billy with just the handgun! Played on Easy to be fair.

Not played Wesker Mode as yet mind.

[JamesTC]

If you want to play any PS1 game, then the Duckstation emulator is a must. It turns PS1 games into a kind of PS1.5.

Metal Gear Solid is my all time favourite game, so a play through on Duckstation should be on the horizon soon.

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

[Magnum Valentino]

Brilliant!

I'm jealous, too. I had one for two weeks and I really liked it. Always felt it deserved better, feels a wee bit overlooked, like the Wii U.

[Ron Maels Moustache]

If you want to play any PS1 game, then the Duckstation emulator is a must. It turns PS1 games into a kind of PS1.5.

Metal Gear Solid is my all time favourite game, so a play through on Duckstation should be on the horizon soon.

Thanks for this, I've had a quick go on Duckstation and it looks incredible. Being able to crank up the processor speed like in Dosbox is a real gamechanger. I think I'm gonna be using this a lot.