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Comment by mrcarrot | Hacker News Reader

In a similar space, I'm pretty sure the recent remake & remaster of the two System Shock games were really well received, so that's hardly a given.

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The System Shock 1 remaster in particular is excellent. It's not just a graphical improvement, they improved the controls and inventory interface and a host of other legacies from from DOS-era gaming that did not age well.

It's well received after launch, yes. There's been plenty of screeching about "not being true to original" and "this looks ugly" and "this looks wrong" on the way there though. Just like for this.

Especially for the first remake.

This is why I say the screeching right now based on a trailer means nothing. "Fans" always get mightily offended if someone touches their childhood favorites.

You don't have to be a fan of the game to see the trailer and think it looks bad. I'm certainly not a Deus Ex fan. I played it just once, years and years ago. Yet when they showed the trailer during State of Play I was shocked at how bad it was. It's clearly just some texture upscaling and an update to the lighting. The original looks ugly and this remaster manages to look uglier.

An example of a remaster done right was Halo 1 (which is actually quite an old remaster at this point). They threw a new graphics engine on top but also remodeled and retextured everything. That's what I expect out of a proper remaster.

While I enjoyed CE:A, it had issues. The big one was the loss of bump-mapped textures making everything look flat. They only show up when you use a flashlight.

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