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Comment by cloudking | Hacker News Reader

Wow this looks impressive, I hope it starts a trend of remastering older games into the modern era. Many games like this from the 80s to 2000s were masterpieces in their time.

I've seen an official example with Blizzard and Diablo 2: https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/diablo2/23658118/diablo-ii-r...

Any other old games being remastered officially or unofficially?

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The Final Fantasy VII remake on PS4 is literally the (only) reason I own a PS4... I'm a big fan of remakes of classics as long as they stay true the original. Playing the FFVII remake has been beyond magical for me, it's like playing the original how I remember it (for the most part) instead of how it actually is (which is dated). How often in life do you get the chance to (re-)experience something like that? It's pretty freakin' awesome. I really hope some other classic games get the chance to shine again...

Amazing, looks like they completely rebuilt the game, thanks for the callout https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luIUJ5sgT1I

Honestly, I played the original FF7 for the first time a few years ago, and it still holds up pretty well.

There’s something about graphics that are deliberately not photorealistic that makes them easy to accept.

The FF VII remake is, in my opinion, one of the best games I've played in decades. With the understanding that I'm biased because I also loved the original... everything about the new game was done amazingly. The story was well told, the characters were engrossing, the combat was extremely fluid... Heck, even the game play was visually like watching a cut scene. I adore this game.

Games remade that come to mind, some from the same people or reusing the old codebase:

* Warcraft 3 remastered

* Theme hospital -> TwoPoint hospital

* Dungeon Keeper -> War for the Overworld

* Jones in the Fast Lane -> No time to Relax

* System Shock

* Descent -> Overload and also Descent Underground

Nice to see Descent getting remade. I remember the extra DoF (and later, indoor / outdoor environments) blowing my young mind. Also, TIL Volition was a spin off / successor of Parallax Software.

Descent is still one of my favorite 90s-era boxes.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/5f/Descent_cover...

One of my favorites as well. To clarify, it was remade. Overload is a remake of Descent all but in name. Mike Kulas and Matt Toschlog, the original Descent programmers, lead the effort along with a number of other Descent 2 and 3 veterans. The story even carries a lot of references to the original game. As I understand it, Parallax lost access to the title, but retained all of the other IP, including the story. It's an excellent game, and plays very much like the original, just updated. There's a very active community for it on Discord.

Unfortunately, as the team said themselves, Overload didn't do too well in sales, and so they've largely ceased development. The game had a number of patches though and it's quite stable. The community still runs frequent events and new levels are being made for it. The creators are active in the Discord as well.

"Descent Underground" took a much different path, and bore little resemblance to the original except for 6DOF and the name. It was going to be a team shooter as I recall, but after their kickstarter, they missed release dates and never went into early access (that I recall). The title eventually was pulled from Steam and last I heard, was still in perpetual limbo.

Descent would be so crazy as a VR game... I remember being getting lost pretty much all the time...

Descent launched in 1995 with support for stereo displays (or maybe it was added in a patch, I can't find the patch notes, anyway it was supported within the support window) I'm not sure if there's good support for the modern crop of stereo displays though; I think Overload does have VR support though.

Warcraft III Reforged (not remastered) is one of the biggest tragedies. It was released completely buggy, without about half of the promised features, featured an IP restriction that any map made using their map editor is Blizzard's to own (see: the entire MOBA genre that was created only due to blizards map editors).

The worst part was this: Warcraft III Reforged was made into a PATCH for the original game. So if you had the original game, and perhaps STILL PLAYED the original with all the mods that made it so continuously popular in the first place, you don't get a choice, you had to upgrade to their new buggy experience.

https://www.fanbyte.com/trending/warcraft-3-classic-owners-a...

So they literally replaced the old, extremely beloved game, with a new buggy engine and pretty much destroyed the entire community built around the game.

Blizzard has been dead for years and the remaining shell is just trying to beat the last few gold coins out of the corpses of their titles.

Total Annihilation, a classic, has been remade under the TA Spring RTS engine project: https://springrts.com/. It's pretty fantastic.

Blizzard remastered the original Starcraft (and made the original free to play): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ypU9j4w3_w

There's also a cartoon version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCcg8XUh3tY

Btw, I just found out that they're making SC2 free to play too.

Edit: checkout this replay with commentary in a custom toony skin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoxcPwUnVuc

Original SC is free, but doesn't look good on HD screens.

But SC remastered with HD graphic will cost you $15. Or 15 Euro.

Many, including most of the LucasArts adventures like Full Throttle, Monkey Island 1-2, Day of the Tentacle. Also strategy classics like Command & Conquer and Red Alert. For some reason, they still manage to feel old.

On gog.com, remakes and updates come out pretty regularly. The quality varies wildly. But there's definitely an enthusiastic market for them.

Freespace 2 (available on gog) has a big community behind it that's rewritten the engine, modernized assets, and created new missions/campaigns.

Half-life -> Black Mesa

Age of Empires (all of them).

Like this Super Mario World modded to widescreen

https://github.com/VitorVilela7/wide-snes

Original Metroid 2 was remade (see AM2R). Nintendo had it taken down though because it completed with their own remake.

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