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Re: Why retread perfectly-good tires? | |
Posted By: Cody Miller <cody@haloreachisnotcanon.net> | Date: 10/19/10 11:28 a.m. |
In Response To: Why retread perfectly-good tires? *NM* (Anton P. Nym (aka Steve)) This to me hints of Hollywood right now, remaking and re-imgining old works in order to capitalize on the nostalgia and familiarity of audiences. I think we can all agree that this is bad and that it in general is stifling creativity, but this does not mean that remakes are bad prima facia. There are many excellent reasons to remake something! Perhaps the technology wasn't present to tell your story the way you wanted. Perhaps your original vision was stifled by studio execs or pushy publishers. Perhaps you have a different take on the work, or otherwise see areas to improve or further explore. Cape Fear and it's remake Cape Fear are of course shining examples of what good remakes can be. Both are excellent films, but both are very different. The remake doesn't just replace or rehash the original, but takes it in a new (quite terrifying) direction. Of course, neither replaces the other, and we are left with two different works that have a very different interpretation of the same story. The original was a perfectly good tire, but that doesn't mean that one not explore other possibilities! Now, Psycho and Psycho are examples of very poor remakes. In fact, the new one was quite literally a graphical update of the old one. A shot for shot remake. One is quite right to wonder why they are even watching the remake, when the it is so caught up in recreating the original it doesn't at all take advantage of the new techniques and elements afforded to it (like color for example, which in some cases ruins the composition over the original black and white version even though the shot is framed the same). Why might one want to remake a video game? Are there good examples of video game remakes, and why are they good? The Lunar Series is probably the best example of an excellent video game remake. The remakes of Lunar and Lunar 2 for the Playstation changed the details of just about everything: the mechanics, the scenario design, the music, the graphics, the cutscenes, the voice acting. The Sega CD was the best tool at the time, but quite frankly was very limited you can tell where concessions had to be made. But at the same time, like Cape Fear, the versions are both good tires that don't need retreading. The playstation version is just a re-imagining, focusing on different things and changing things around to look at the story from a new angle, and these changes are enabled by the hardware update. With good remakes, I generally get the sense that the people doing them are doing them for a good reason, and to provide a new twist on an old story. With a lot of them though, I think it's obvious that they make minimal changes and put in little effort for the purposes of simply appealing to nostalgia and making a quick buck. In my mind, a straight up port of Halo to the Reach engine, which brings with it automatically all the benefits thereof such as theatre mode, live support, and shitty Temporal AA, seems like a quick way to make a buck and a waste. The new engine is DIFFERENT, so why not take advantage of that and redesign the game to take advantage of it? Why not make levels bigger and more complex since you can render more geometry? Why not redesign encounters to take advantage of the improved enemy AI? Why not re-imagine Halo in the darker and grittier light that the series has been gradually slipping into from it's space adventure roots? Why not redo the cinematics now that you have better tools? Why not add firefight maps? In my mind, unless you are going to go in and really make it your own, there's not much reason to make a new version.
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