Gallery: Videogame Remakes: The Good, the Bad and the Pointless
01leisure-suit-larry
"Remake" is a dirty word -- except in videogames. Rarely, if ever, do remade films and television shows garner even half the praise of the originals. Who'd want to watch Gus Van Sant's take on Psycho when Hitchcock's is next to it on the shelf? But videogames have been an exception. Taking the underlying game code and sprucing it up with modern-day amenities can, and often does, produce a superior experience. With game budgets ballooning and too much risk becoming a deadly proposition, high-definition remasters of the classics have become a doubly sweet proposition for game publishers. You don't have to spend much to make them, and the games have a proven sales record. So it shouldn't be surprising that this is the Year of Remakes. New games? Pah! Who needs 'em when you've got reloaded versions of Halo, God of War, Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, Sly Cooper, Metal Gear Solid, Silent Hill, Zone of the Enders, Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Star Fox 64 and Resident Evil? This recent run of remakes might be a (somewhat alarming) trend, but rehashed games aren't new. I've played many touched-up classics over the years and found the right enhancements can breathe new life into old favorites -- or tarnish their memory forever. Here are some of my favorites, and remakes I wish had never been remade. What are yours? __Above:__ Leisure Suit Larry ------------------ I, like all red-blooded American teenagers, thought Sierra's adventure game about a slimy loser trying to get laid was the best thing *ever*. You had to distract a pimp with porn to have sex with a prostitute! And that was just the first 10 minutes! The only trouble was the original was, like Larry, well past its prime by the time my generation found it. Having to make Larry walk around with the arrow keys and using a text-based parser to interact was *so* Atari. Fortunately for us and our hormones, the 1993 remake of [Leisure Suit Larry](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure_suit_larry) brought the game up to code with remastered graphics (in top-of-the-line VGA!) and a word-free point-and-click interface. Super-sexy artwork of the fine ladies Larry struck out with awaited the wannabe swinger, in two hundred and fifty six glorious colors. Click away, lads.
02super-mario-all-stars
Super Mario All-Stars --------------------- The four Super Mario Bros. games that made up this Super Nintendo collection (one of the earliest examples of such a remake) were fully enjoyable in their own right, even today. But [Super Mario All-Stars](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_All-Stars) used a simple feature upgrade to give the games significant extra value. A battery in the cartridge let you save your progress, something you could not do in any of the original games. Super Mario Bros. 3, in particular, was a vast, sprawling game. Eight worlds held dozens upon dozens of unique levels, each with buried secrets for master players. But unless you were willing to settle in for a marathon session, seeing every one of them on a single trip was unlikely. Being able to save your progress and complete Mario 3 in smaller chunks more than a convenience. It was an opportunity to fully appreciate the game. *Images: vgmuseum.com, Nintendo*
03final-fantasy
Final Fantasy ------------- Many fans of this role-playing game series discovered it with later iterations, like those of the 16-bit Super Nintendo or CD-ROM-fueled PlayStation. Curious, they went back to play a copy of the first [Final Fantasy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy_%28video_game%29), and were almost immediately stymied by the game's plodding interface. The difficulty of the early dungeons wouldn't have been so bad if Final Fantasy weren't so freaking *slow* -- walking was slow, buying things was slow, fighting monsters was *awfully* slow. The remake, for a nearly-forgotten, Japanese market portable gaming console called [Wonderswan](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonderswan) (Square was still in its legendary tiff with Nintendo and wasn't allowed to make Game Boy games) fixed all that. You could run across the world at top speed, hold down the A button to zip through battles and buy items a hundred at a time if you wanted to. The massive amount of grinding that you had to do to succeed turned a days-long chore into something you could do with half your brain while watching television. Of course, all these improvements made the game incredibly easy and short. (I should note similar improvements did not make series black sheep Final Fantasy II fun to play, though. That's just fundamentally broken.) *Images: vgmuseum.com*
04ace-attorney
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney ---------------------------- Capcom's brilliant series of adventure games about a plucky young defense attorney were some of the best on the Nintendo DS. But the [Ace Attorney](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ace_Attorney) games originally were released in Japan only on the Game Boy Advance. The quickie ports of these games to the Nintendo DS just a few years later might have been seen as a cheap cash-in were it not for the fact the DS' array of innovative features were perfect for the genre. I can't imagine playing these games without using the touch controls to investigate rooms and flip through menus, or without checking my case evidence on a separate screen while reading a witness' testimony. Not to mention the fact that the DS releases were the ones released worldwide, making Ace Attorney more than a Japanese cult hit. *Images: vgmuseum.com, Capcom*
05metroid
Metroid: Zero Mission --------------------- Like some Final Fantasy fans, I came into the Metroid series of action games long after the original's release. I'd given the Nintendo Entertainment System game a shot back in the day, but quickly fell victim to its brutal difficulty and confusing map layout. After falling in love with later games in the series, I steeled my reserve and vowed to finally tackle the first Metroid, armed with a FAQ and an adult's patience. I still couldn't keep myself playing. That's why I was happy to see [Metroid: Zero Mission](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_mission), a full-on remake for Game Boy Advance with all the modern-day accoutrements like mini-maps and game saves. Then again, by the time they were done with it, Zero Mission was such a fundamentally different experience than the source material that it's not at all like playing the first Metroid, which I'm pretty sure will forever remain in my Pile of Shame. *Images: vgmuseum.com, Nintendo*
06lunar-the-silver-star
Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete --------------------------------- Many remakes, even the good ones, have an off-kilter feel to them because of their very nature: Grafting new features or high-res graphics onto old game design creates something that feels neither nostalgic nor innovative, making it a game out of time. [Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar:_Silver_Star_Story_Complete) didn't feel that way. The role-playing game, with its detailed animated sequences and cartoon characters, felt like it had been created on the PlayStation to begin with. I think this is because the designers of the original game, Lunar: The Silver Star for the [Sega CD](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_cd), were pushing against the constraints of the hardware, trying to make a game they couldn't really pull off on the primitive 16-bit console even with the extra storage of the CD-ROM drive. The original game was expansive enough that the overhaul for the PlayStation didn't feel like an old game with new graphics. It felt like it was always meant to be on the more powerful system and the game we'd played before was merely a work in progress. *Images: [Lunar-Net](http://lunar-net.com/)*
07super-mario-64
Super Mario 64 DS ----------------- And then there are the remakes that just don't fly. [Super Mario 64 DS](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_mario_64_ds) is one of the original 2004 launch titles for the Nintendo DS, and it still sells well. The 1996 Nintendo 64 original was a landmark in game design, one of the first proofs-of-concept that polygonal 3-D action games could be just as fast-paced, vibrant and exciting as their 2-D predecessors, if not more so. What dragged Super Mario 64 DS down is the original was built around an analog joystick, which the DS lacked. So you could use the digital D-pad (awkward) or the touchscreen as a virtual joystick (somewhat less awkward but still imprecise). Upgraded graphics and a few new features didn't change the fact that the original was simply a much better game. *Images: vgmuseum.com, Nintendo*
08crazy-taxi
Crazy Taxi ---------- God only knows how many hours I spent playing [Crazy Taxi](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_Taxi) on the Sega Dreamcast. When I fired up the recent port of the game to Xbox 360 on the Dreamcast Collection disc I remembered why. It's fun and addictive, although the interceding 10 years have brought us games that are just as fun but significantly more polished. Crazy Taxi is a bit of a relic now, mostly good for a bit of nostalgia. But it would have been significantly more fun had Sega included the original game's musical tracks. Two songs each from punk bands [The Offspring](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Offspring) and [Bad Religion](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Religion) comprised the entirety of this game's soundtrack, and they *made* the game, imbuing its frantic cab-smashing action with a sense of urgency and insanity. Sega couldn't or didn't want to license the music again, and so replaced it with unmemorable junk. Actually, I take it back. Crazy Taxi isn't even good for nostalgia. *Images: vgmuseum.com, Sega*
09castlevania
Dracula X Chronicles -------------------- [Dracula X: Rondo of Blood](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rondo_of_blood) was, for a long time, the white whale to Castlevania fans. Released only on the PC Engine Super CD-ROM system in Japan, it was purported to be the best entry in the action game series. Years of petitioning Konami to release it in the United States went nowhere, until the company finally said that it would release... a 3-D remake for the PSP. Well, *that's* not what we asked for, now is it? If you worked hard enough at it, you could unlock the original game plus its beloved sequel Symphony of the Night on the PSP disc, but all anybody really wanted at that point was to play the original without having to jump through hoops (or carry around a PSP, for that matter). Eventually it was released as an $9 download for the Wii's Virtual Console and all was right with the world. *Images: vgmuseum.com, Konami*
10sword-of-mana
Sword of Mana ------------- The game that kicked off Square Enix's once-great Mana series of action role-players was first released in the United States as [Final Fantasy Adventure](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy_Adventure). It was one of the best games on the old black-and-white Game Boy, and its Game Boy Advance remake should have been awesome. Instead, it was overloaded with extraneous crap that worsened the experience instead of amplifying it. The weapon forging and character upgrade systems were difficult to understand, the puzzles were nonsensical, all the extra weapons and magic spells the game added were useless, and the boring dialogue went on forever without actually saying anything. [Sword of Mana](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sword_of_Mana) was the first entry in a multi-game revival of the classic series, and sadly all the rest of them were crap too. *Images: vgmuseum.com, Nintendo*
