I want games that build on the past instead of merely imitating it.
Ironically I gained this insight from Resident Evil 4 Remake.
The original Resident Evil 4 is one of my favorite games of all time, so I was skeptical of the remake. Overall it's actually very good though. I like the original's cutscenes more, but Remake's gameplay is genuinely an improvement on the original. And that's impressive for me, because the gameplay is what made the original so amazing to me, and I'm not easy to impress. Remake's combat is just as good in the same ways, but more expressive and interesting, you have a lot more decisions to make and it's faster, more exciting, more varied.
But playing it I realized, I had to wait 20 years for a game to improve on the formula RE4 invented. And it wasn't like a mindblowing improvement, if we're being honest it's incremental. I felt sad. Are we really still stuck on this?
Star Fox
Starfox 64 came out in 1997. that's 29 years ago at this point. Now they're doing another remake for it. Nintendo calls it a "reimagining", but it is a remake.
People have complaints about many specifics in the remake's execution, and it's valid to crit the character designs etc, voice acting whatever little details, but to me the problem is the fact that we're even doing this at all.
It's a "faithful" remake. All the same level layouts, enemy patterns, etc. And sure, but like...
OK, so I love Starfox 64, but the game is like an hour long. Yes there are multiple routes, but it's such a small game when you really look past your childhood nostalgia. It's basically an arcade game.
SF64 was made when developers were just barely learning how to put a textured polygon on the screen. It was a totally new field to explore. How is this exciting or impressive to be doing it again now? Nowadays a devoted solo indie dev could remake Starfox 64 in a year. This is a global, trillion-dollar entity we're talking about here.
Yes graphics are more complicated now but that barely matters, modern tools are so good that it probably genuinely did take more effort to make that 20 polygon enemy show up on the screen on the N64. Graphics today don't impress me. Neither do cutscenes, don't make me laugh.
IF you were going to remake Starfox, the game should at a minimum be like 10x longer, like to start with. It should have a big campaign with all kinds of branching paths and 20 different endings or something. It should have all kinds of crazy stuff, a dozen different new vehicles to pilot, idk man. Something new and exciting. This stuff is so easy to do now compared to how it was when they made the original game.
We should expect so much more than this.
Dong
When it comes to remakes, I always think of my first time playing Donkey Kong on the gameboy. Now that is how you do a fucking remake.
If you're not familiar, the original Donkey Kong looks like this. it's a four-screen arcade game. A classic of gaming. Your dad played this.
Donkey Kong gameboy looks like this, and it's on the Gameboy.
So okay, that's cool enough right? It's that old game you like but now you can play it on the go, right?
But no. It was not cool enough, not for 1994 Nintendo.
You beat the final screen, and then. It keeps going. Just look at the timestamps on those videos.
You find out, woah, this game actually has like a hundred levels. It has boss fights. Each level introduces new mechanics, new puzzle elements, new hazards and enemies and all sorts of stuff. A new area theme every 10 or so levels. It's a real game. And this was all on the gameboy so it's portable, you can play it anywhere. It completely and utterly mogs the original Donkey Kong in every possible way, except for the fact that the original came first.
In my mind this should be the minimum leap considered acceptable for a remake or sequel to an old game. We should be lightyears ahead of an old game. Anything less is just embarrassing.
Video Games
I feel increasingly distant from the gamer zeitgeist. Nobody even plays games now, they just buy them to have the thing everyone's talking about. People will argue about it but they don't actually care about the character designs or whatever, they just want to talk about the ongoing game they're spectating like a sports broadcast, the game which is "Nintendo marketing the game".
And this spectating is itself part of the marketing machine. Nintendo loves it, along with every other big publisher, and they all do everything they can to feed into it, because it's so, SO much easier than having to make something that's genuinely new and ambitious.
I would say people have low standards, but the truth is that standards are not even related to the game itself anymore. The actual video game is a secondary feature to the primary activity most people get involved with now.
We could be making art. No, that's not strong enough. We should be curbstomping the past. We should be annihilating it, by making stuff so much better that it makes our head spin, and we look back at old games in comparison and say "damn that old shit sucked".
This was how games used to be. It's how they could, should be. But we've all been collectively conditioned to accept so much less than that, to the point where a 3-decade-old game can now be presented again as new, and people actually like it instead of mercilessly mocking and disregarding it as the boring unambitious noise it really is.
I don't really have a conclusion here I'm just ranting like an old man. My God I'm turning into my Dad.
I guess I just wish we strived to make things that actually build and improve on what came before, instead of this endless loop of crap I played as a kid.
I already played that crap. Gimme something better.
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