The other day I was walking down the street, (Huh, unintentional Arthur) and I happened upon a movie poster that really made me stop and stare. This wasn't because the strength of the marketing material, rather the opposite actually. This was a movie that was starring Will Smith, was soon to come out, and this poster was the first I'd seen of it. Even now, with the thing out, I'm still yet to see a trailer. (How little did you guys leave your marketing team with?) It seemed particularly noteworthy given that the movie boasted the enviable gimmick of pitting Will Smith against Will Smith for some reason. (Again, haven't seen a trailer so I don't have context.) However, I was curious enough, from the poster, to look up how and why this movie exists.
I discovered that this film, Gemini Man, was making use of de-aging technology in order to have a modern day version of Will Smith battle against a version of him that looks like he just walked off the set of Fresh Prince. (Okay, he doesn't look that young.) This makes sense giving that the 'wow' tech of modern years has been the systems that can be make actors digitally appear younger in a convincing way. Just look at Disney's attempts in 'Civil War', 'Antman & the Wasp' and 'Endgame'; as well as... Disney's work in 'Star Wars: Rogue One'. (I guess The House of Mouse are really the ones pushing this, now I think about it.) All this got me thinking about the idea of going back and sprucing things up, whether it be an actor's face, an old film's picture quality, or an entire franchise. With that in mind, let's talk about remasters. (No, you're a weak segueway!)
Ask any film fan about their feelings towards reboots and re-releases and you'll likely hear the same response across the board. "I don't why studios keep rehashing the same ideas instead of doing something new. It's just a waste of time, money and talent." (Those same people will then proceed to watch those movies.) There is a slightly different sentiment when it comes to how these things are handled in games. We've yet to get a significant full-blown reboot in the video game market (With the exception of, perhaps, 'Bionic Commando' and 'Sonic Boom'), but we have certainly seen a lot of remasters, re-releases and a few remakes, especially as we're nearing the twilight of this console generation. Gamers are, therefore, more forgiving to some approaches whilst more critical in others.
Firstly, there are the re-releases. These are always a celebrated event when it comes to film. It's the chance for modern movie goers to experience an event in cinematic history that they may have missed out on long ago. Fans can see cult classics like 'Back to the Future', 'The Godfather' and 'Apocalypse Now' on a theatre screen like they were meant to be seen. There isn't a movie fan alive who wouldn't get a little giddy as such a prospect. For gaming, on the otherhand, re-releases are something a lot more cynical. Game releases are never a huge event beyond being the point at which the public can finally get their hands on the software. When those games come back around for a re-release, it's usually just an excuse for the studios to update some minor things and slap it back on store shelves for full price. (In that sense, I guess it's a celebratory event for the accountants.)
We see this for games like 'Dishonored: Definitive edition' and the constant Nintendo reduxes of 'Ocarina of Time'. These are situations in which the company has decided that they need to re-establish their game's value and rake in the same sort of money that they originally saw. This is often the case when a new Console generation has launched and it doesn't support backwards compatibility. (Or it does support backward compatibility and they just knowingly opt out of the process so they can make a quick buck.) Defenders will often point to slight graphical improvements as justification, but I chose the above two games for a reason. 'Dishonored: Definitive edition' is a game that is attempting to impprove upon a highly stylized original product, to very little avail. The only noticeable improvement is a frame rate bump, and that is hardly worth £60. For Zelda, on the otherhand, Nintendo don't even touch the frame rate. (It's part of the charm, I guess.) All they do is touch up the controls, fix a decades old design decision every now and then, and slap a heavy price tag on the box. In gaming, we use the term 're-release' to refer to the laziest form of a company capitalizing on your nostalgia.
Remasters are a slight step up from Re-releases, although their quality can vary greatly. Once again, these usually crop up when a game becomes inaccessible, due to an across-the-board hardware upgrade, and the primary concern is ensuring the product is playable once again. However, game companies sometimes decide that they want to take advantage of the new tech available, or they have to in order to make the thing function, and so we get these 'improved' products labelled 'remasters'.
The problem is that sometimes these 'remasters' get the things we love about the original wrong. Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD went the graphical improvement route, only to sacrifice some of the advanced graphical integrity of the original. Sure it looks better when all you do is count pixels, but the artistic merit sometimes suffers. This is because these remasters are usually not handled by the same people who made the original and sometimes not even the same studio. It's like asking members of the public to restore a faded painting, sometimes you get what you want and sometimes you were better off living it alone. One game in which this was certainly the case was the 'Return to Arkham' remasters of 'Arkham Asylum' and 'Akham City'. There are countless examples of the way how almost every character model in the game were uglied in the pursuit of 'graphical improvement'. (With the exception of Harley Quinn, who got so much attention put into her it makes me wonder about the priories of the team responsible.) Just look at the comparison between the different version's of the iconic Hugo Strange interrogation scene from the beginning of 'Arkham City.'
Finally, and most rarely, we have the remake, which is the closest thing to a reboot we have in the gaming industry. This is when a gaming company makes the decision to go back to one of it's beloved classics and rebuild it from the ground up, with new textures, gameplay, story, VA's and just about everything really. To be honest, we see so many changes in these projects that they might as well be called 'reimagineings'. But Hollywood managed to make that term sound excessively wishy-washy so we'll stick with remake. This is probably the easiest to respect out of the examples of re-releases in the gaming market, as it is the process in which Devs put the most effort and thought into and truly do earn that price tag.
Capcom have dabbled in the remake territory before, with the decent 2001 remake of the original Resident Evil and the spectacular 2019 remake of Resident Evil 2. Both these games show examples of games that are deigned to capture the spirit of the original, but still take things in a different direction. Resident Evil 2 (2019) even goes so far so to restructure the fundamental game in order to better fit modern game design conventions. Square Enix also hope to jump onto the bandwagon soon with their Final Fantasy 7 Remake, which ditches the semi-turn based style of the original in favour of a full action game approach. Major story beats have been changed or reshuffled in order to accommodate for a brand new episodic structure which is going to have us RPG fans reliving the story of Cloud until 2025. (At least.) Unlike with movie remakes, these remakes are not attempting to replace the original product, rather celebrate everything that those games got right and present a new way that they could have been handled. (Now for the love of god remake MGS 3, Konami. Please!)
Some may look at these practises and conclude that they are examples of the game industry moving backwards rather than forwards, and in a way they would be right. But art, as a whole, is a medium in which you can revisit the pieces you love time and time again and find something new and special. That makes it as much about looking back as it does about looking forward. And considering how every game is devolving into a 'live-service' abomination of late, it helps to take a look back at the classics of old and remind ourselves why it is that we love games in the first place.
No comments:
Post a Comment