Gaming Dilemma: Why Re-Make When You Can Just Make?
The online marketplaces of XBLA, PSN, and WiiWare have been a great place for gamers and developers alike. We’re seeing more small (and large) developers than ever before pushing out great games for these platforms, and the market for them can only get bigger. We’re seeing more original game concepts than ever before on these platforms, alongside a collection of classic games.
The current generation of consoles seems to be a perfect place for development teams to test news ideas, push out interesting concepts, or just work on short, well designed games. Think about games like Braid, Flower, Cave Story, or World of Goo. These games were released to great critical acclaim, and featured great, original concepts which were very well executed.
However, these markets, along with the DS, seem to have promoted quite a few remakes of old games. It’s not just the new markets that we see remakes for, but they are what prompted me to write this article. The classic games available on the virtual marketplaces (i.e. the Virtual Console) have been great, but full remakes of games have started to pop up everywhere. Perfect Dark was remade for XBLA, along with Earthworm Jim. The first two Monkey Island games have been updated for most platforms, as well as the original Prince of Persia. Boy and His Blob was even remade for Wii.
I see this as a problem. Not because these are not great games, or indeed great remakes. The remakes of Monkey Island, for example, were very good indeed. In fact, I enjoy playing these remade games a great deal. The problem, I feel, is that they represent a wasted opportunity.
The teams working on these games clearly have a lot of really good developers working on them. The quality of the remakes is testament to that in many examples. Why then are these people not creating new and innovative games? I realise that games are made to make money, but that doesn’t mean that new games don’t sell. If, for example, the development team that created the brilliant remake of Super Street Fighter II Turbo had been put on to a team to create a completely new 2D fighter, I feel that the quality would be high enough for the game to sell perfectly well. We’d also have a brand new fighting game to sink our teeth into, and new players would have a great place to start.
Even Nintendo are guilty. In fact, they might be the worst offenders. We’ve already seen two remakes for a platform that has not even been released yet- Star Fox 3DS and Ocarina of Time 3DS. Don’t get me wrong, I will buy and love these games, but I still feel like the development teams on these games ought to be spent on creating new games with new characters, or even just new games in a series. Just think- we could have had a new 3DS Zelda game (or indeed a new IP). Obviously a remake is much easier to do than a brand new game, but as I have said- the potential to create new rather than old is there.
Although there are a lot of good remakes, sometimes they just cannot capture the magic of the original. Perfect Dark, Earthworm Jim and Vigilante 8 were all great games. When released, they were some of the best games that one could ever play. Now, though, they are not. They have all had remakes, and they seem antiquated and just do not play well. That’s because these old games were not designed as well as games are now. They were good when they were the best available, but game design has advanced so much since then that they end up being purely nostalgia trips. That’s fine for some- but again, the resources pumped into those remakes could have been put into something much more interesting and well designed.
Games remain an artifact of their time. This is why I am skeptical of the new GoldenEye game for Wii, for example. Although going back to GoldenEye on N64 is a nice little nostalgia trip, one can tell straight away that it is just not a good game by today’s standards. For PC gamers, it wasn’t even close to being the best shooter, but for console players it was the messiah needed to push the genre onto their platform- and with four people playing, it was an absolute blast. Imagine playing a brand new game, with a great multiplayer component and great level design- one designed not for online play, but for you and your mates. Why must that game be trying to be GoldenEye? Well, because it sells units- and it will be of a lesser quality as a result, because they’ve got the name, and don’t need the review scores.
Think about the God of War Collection for PS3, as well as the upcoming Sly Raccoon collection. There are development teams that have spent a lot of time converting these games to the new platform. Once again, why couldn’t these teams be creating a brand new game instead of making some not-even-old games HD? God of War II is only three years old- no matter how good, it just doesn’t need a remake.
Obviously they did a great job, and have created a new audience as well as allowed people who might not have had a PS2 to play these games, but the time used to make these things happen could have been used to begin on a new game that will create an even bigger audience. Perhaps they could have even spent more time on God of War III, or InFamous, to make them even better. Perhaps the funds that went into updating the old games could have gone into marketing the new games better. In a way, a really good remake is even worse; when it’s obvious there was a lot of love in a remake, it just makes me feel bad that that love could have gone into a brand new game.
I’d like to reiterate just once more that I have played and loved a good number of remakes. In fact, almost every time Nintendo remakes one of their old games, I’m straight on them. However, as I play, the childlike glee that happens on the outside is undercut by a feeling that had the development time gone into something new, I could have eaten my cake and had it too. I could have been playing Mario 64 on my N64, and had a new Mario game to play on the DS. I could have been playing Pokémon Red on my Game Boy, and had a new Pokémon game to play on the GBA. I could even have been playing Monkey Island on the PC, and had a new 2D adventure game to sink my teeth into.
