Games that would benefit from modern remake

[yellowcake]

One of my favourite action games of all time is original Magic Carpet. I've been waiting many years now for someone to get the idea to remake it with modern graphics (and leaving all other things intact hopefully).

The game has fairly complex tactical gameplay (for an action game):
- you have to tend to your base - the better it is the more magical abilities you have,
- you have to gather resources - kill monsters and gather mana released by them;
- you have to explore the maps in order to gain new spells and sources of mana;
- you have to tend to baloons that transport mana to your castle - protecting your baloons as well as destroying opponents' is crucial tactic;
- you can make NPCs your allies which raises your mana pool and grants you their help in fights;
- massive numbers of creatures to fight with greatly varying capabilities;
- 25 spells that you actually have to learn to use, sometimes in not obvious ways like using "build/expand castle" offensively;
- FUCKING SPECTACULAR, earth shaking and tearing offensive spells - you cast meteorites, tear valleys through mountains, raise volcanoes etc.
- absolutely HECTIC gameplay while you are still perfectly in control;
- great atmosphere of arabic legends, super good sound and music.
- you fly on a fucking magic carpet and cast great balls of fire and thunder.

I would love to see this game redone with GRAPHIKZ.

 

[Ulminati]

It would be developed for XBone and re-titled Magic Corridor HD

 

[Astral Rag]

+1 for Magic Carpet, another game with same engine that I would like to see remade, (properly, not butchered) is Syndicate Wars.

Both games are still very playable to this day but higher resolution visuals and some tasteful tweaks wouldn't hurt.

Magic Carpet re-release

On Thursday evening I discovered, after being alerted by a Facebook 'mention', that Magic Carpet had been re-released for Windows on gog.com. As I hadn't played it for a long time I paid up the $5.99 and downloaded it. It turned out it was 'just' the original packaged up with DOSBox but the price was right and I was very unlikely to get round to setting it up myself. That would have required all sorts of hassle like trying to work out where my boxed copy of the original is for a start.

It was weird to be playing a game I wrote the graphic engine for seventeen years ago and once I'd checked the manual to work out how to turn all of the options on, several things struck me.

The reflections and animated water were pretty cool for the time.
Stereo 3D with red/cyan glasses was (and still is) cool.
Stereogram mode was a stupid idea, specially when I got the maths so very wrong (1/z not z you idiot).
Sean had done a pretty good job of moving all that stuff around at a decent speed.
What to do at the start is so much more confusing than games these days.
DOSBox emulation of the 640x480 Vesa mode we used for 'high' resolution is really, really slow.
The draw distance is pretty pathetic.


Sadly, that last one is the thing that strikes you the most as you try to play. The fog really does seem to start just in front of your nose. I think I should warn anyone reading this that most of the rest of this post is probably going to turn into an excuse for this pathetic draw distance.

I had been working the Graphic Engine for Magic Carpet for a while. In fact, for the a year or so I was the only programmer working on it. It was aimed at 50+ Mhz 486 CPUs and pretty well optimised when you consider it textured with gourad shading and translucency. In my prototype version the tiles/triangles that made up the landscape were about 20 metres across and it drew, I think, 20 tiles before the fog faded it out completely. This meant you could see 20x20 = 400 metres before the fog faded the 'horizon'. Characters, trees, the lumps in the landscape and the speed of the carpet were all scaled accordingly.

then some smart arse decided it would be cool to make castles and things out of the landscape itself. These looked kind of cool but suddenly the tiles had to be the width of a castle wall or the walkway that the archers patrolled to defend it. Now the tiles were only about 2 metres across. The engine still only drew 20 tiles to the 'horizon' (I couldn't up this number and expect a decent frame rate on the target hardware) but 20x2 is only 40. The fog now kicked in at just 40 metres. characters were scaled up accordingly, the landscape smoothed out and the carpet's speed scaled up by a factor of 10. Suddenly it only took about a second or so to fly to the 'horizon'.

This sort of thing doesn't happen when you code games on your own...

Since trying to play it I've downloaded the mac version of DOSBox but haven't got round to trying it yet. Hopefully I'll be able to play in glorious 640x480 'HD' when I'm only using one level of emulation*. I had previously been running DOSBox (an emulator*) on Windows7 running on VMWare (an emulator*) on my iMac.

*Is it emulation when it's all related Intel CPUs? I really don't know.

http://glenncorpes.blogspot.be/2011/06/magic-carpet-re-release.html

 

[Ulminati]

Another game with same engine that I would like to see remade (properly, not butchered) is Syndicate Wars.

http://satellitereign.com/

 

[MicoSelva]

I would love to see Gold Box games remade in ToEE engine.

Div:OS engine would do too, I guess. Hell, I would even take them as a NWN module.

 

[Outlander]

First it should be established which games have actually benefited in the past from a modern remake.

Since there aren't any, OP question is easily answered.

 

[Astral Rag]

Satellite Reign

It's no remake, I was also not 100% convinced last time I read about Satellite Reign, have they shown fully destructible buildings yet?

 

[DraQ]

Depending on used definition of "modern" - either none or quite a lot.

 

[yellowcake]

Well my point is that if someone released Magic Carpet (a very gamey, mechanical game) today with pretty visuals it would sell like hot cakes and rightfully so.

Plus, the gameplay is heavily influenced by the engine and technology behind it. The looks is the game to some point. I would like to see modern interpretation of this.

 

[Gragt]

First it should be established which games have actually benefited in the past from a modern remake.

Since there aren't any, OP question is easily answered.

The Wizardry remakes, starting with Return of Werdna, feature a better interface. That was used for the basis of the PC versions.

The PSX Wizardry remakes are pretty good with some nice additions like monsters and item lists. Most of the extra content is Japanese, but still.

The Refine versions of Princess Maker and Princess Maker 2 feature enhanced graphics and musics, and of course native compatibility with a modern Windows OS.

DuckTales: Remastered is pretty, has a little bit of extra content, and great voice acting.

Super Mario All-Stars looks pretty!

The Shivah has enhanced graphics.

So does Police Quest.

The SNES remakes of the Dragon Warrior games are prettier and are easier to use thanks to a few additional functions. The DS versions have better translations and extra content, like a new epilogue in one case.

The Binding of Isaac got rid of Flash, same for VVVVVV.

A great improvement of the C&C remake for Windows was the ability to display more terrain in one screen.

Myst: Masterpiece Edition looks prettier and got rid of some Win3.1 idiosyncrasies.

Metroid: Zero Mission is a nice upgrade of the original.

That’s from the top of my head. Whether some of these should be considered ports instead of remakes is debatable, but in most cases they were released some time after the original release and feature some sort of enhancement, if only better compatibility with modern systems. Some remakes may dumb down aspects of the original, but there are cases where you can get an improvement, however minor. I do not believe that it was always better in the past.

 

[Ninja Destroyer]

Magic Carpet is one of my favourite action games. The first part is good, but it has too many levels, where you just repeat building your own castle, while keeping other wizards from you, and later on destroying their own ones for some additional mana. They can't cast spells too many times, because of that and finally you defeat them one by one. MC could have a half of the levels, and it would be better.

The sequel really given the player more variety - there are diffrent tasks to do, and diffrent levels where you need to do them. The underground ones can end really quickly if you aren't cautious. And of course the best part - 3 level spells, plus new ones. Just like in Bethesda newer games, you just need to use a spell to gain experience in it. So, a first level meteor transforms into a really big one when you master it. Gathering mana too is easier later on, thanks to the magnetic, leveled spell.

Too bad EA just rushed the release of the game, and you can easily get "Divide by Zero" error. So actually, I would be glad if someone just took the source code, fix the problems with the error, give some nice frontend, plus a level editor. That would be all I've need.

 

[Outlander]

First it should be established which games have actually benefited in the past from a modern remake.

Since there aren't any, OP question is easily answered.

The Wizardry remakes, starting with Return of Werdna, feature a better interface. That was used for the basis of the PC versions.

The PSX Wizardry remakes are pretty good with some nice additions like monsters and item lists. Most of the extra content is Japanese, but still.

The Refine versions of Princess Maker and Princess Maker 2 feature enhanced graphics and musics, and of course native compatibility with a modern Windows OS.

DuckTales: Remastered is pretty, has a little bit of extra content, and great voice acting.

Super Mario All-Stars looks pretty!

The Shivah has enhanced graphics.

So does Police Quest.

The SNES remakes of the Dragon Warrior games are prettier and are easier to use thanks to a few additional functions. The DS versions have better translations and extra content, like a new epilogue in one case.

The Binding of Isaac got rid of Flash, same for VVVVVV.

A great improvement of the C&C remake for Windows was the ability to display more terrain in one screen.

Myst: Masterpiece Edition looks prettier and got rid of some Win3.1 idiosyncrasies.

Metroid: Zero Mission is a nice upgrade of the original.

That’s from the top of my head. Whether some of these should be considered ports instead of remakes is debatable, but in most cases they were released some time after the original release and feature some sort of enhancement, if only better compatibility with modern systems. Some remakes may dumb down aspects of the original, but there are cases where you can get an improvement, however minor. I do not believe that it was always better in the past.

Ok, I'm going to dismiss all the JRPG and console-only stuff (post PS1) due to my admittedly narrow-mindedness regarding those.

Also the old VGA remakes such as Police Quest, Larry, etc since those remakes, although very good, are pretty old themselves. Examples that fit the OP criteria, as I understood it, would include the new Gabriel Knight remake, Baldur's Gate EE, Flashback, Chaos Engine and so on, you get where I'm going: those are all utter shit.

So that leaves us with:

DuckTales: Remastered, Super Mario All-Stars, Shivah, Binding of Isaac and Metroid. Yes, those are good, however they are mostly platformers and adventures, a genre that it's easy not to fuck up when comparing them to other genres. Even then, there are plenty examples of fuck ups such as Bionic Commando: The Remake, Sonic 2006 (not on PC but holy shit worth to mention), Monkey island 1 and 2, Alone In The Dark, the aforementioned Flashback, Gabriel Knight, Chaos Engine, etc. Not to mention other various cross-genre aberrations such as the Shadowrun and Syndicate FPS.

C&C, you mean the HTML5 browser version? In any case I don't know if the ability to show more terrain on screen is enough to be labeled as a 'remake'. Unless there are other enhancements that I'm unaware of?

Myst, ok, but the Masterpiece Edition was released back in 2000, as in, if a remake were to be released in these dark times it would most probably suck. Also, IP is owned by Ubisoft - good luck with that.

Sadly, in my opinion, we live in a time where I wouldn't want any of my favorite titles to be touched by almost any developer, be it an enhancement, reboot or spiritual sequel. Exceptions include The Brotherhood Games (Stasis) and maybe Inxile. Good luck to those whose favorite genre is FPS

 

[sser]

Crusader.

 

[Gragt]

C&C, you mean the HTML5 browser version? In any case I don't know if the ability to show more terrain on screen is enough to be labeled as a 'remake'. Unless there are other enhancements that I'm unaware of?

Nah, just the Windows version. It came out 2 years after the initial DOS version and it used the improvements of Red Alert.

Reminds me that Blizzard also released the Battle.net edition of Warcraft II later.

Anyway, the way I wrote this, a remake is a remake, whether it came out recently or not. The plan is still to go back to an earlier product and try to improve it in one way or another. My point is that, while I agree that many remakes are superfluous, especially with the advances in emulation and source ports, a remake is not necessarily a bad thing, despite many holding the opinion that a remake is always inferior to the original.

 

[DraQ]

First it should be established which games have actually benefited in the past from a modern remake.

Since there aren't any, OP question is easily answered.

That's a wrong question to ask. The right one is - which games failed to benefit after being remade by non-retards?

 

[DragoFireheart]

- which games failed to benefit after being remade by non-retards?

I am so horribly confused. Modern games are made by non-retards?

 

[DraQ]

 

[Outlander]

Anyway, the way I wrote this, a remake is a remake, whether it came out recently or not. The plan is still to go back to an earlier product and try to improve it in one way or another. My point is that, while I agree that many remakes are superfluous, especially with the advances in emulation and source ports, a remake is not necessarily a bad thing, despite many holding the opinion that a remake is always inferior to the original.

Didn't know about the difference between DOS C&C and Win version.

I agree that a remake is a remake regardless of the time it was produced, however I believe the timing (?) is terribly relevant to your interests if you want to have a remake of one of your favorite video games. Example: Magic Carpet remake done by Bullfrog in 2001? YES PLZ!!! Magic Carpet done in 2015 by one of EA's AAAAAAAAAA developers?

 

[shihonage]

Crusader.

Crusader needs to be an FPS. This is the one isometric game I want to see remade that way.

 

[Astral Rag]

ban shihonage

 

[Tehdagah]

Super Mario 64 with good camera placement.

 

[octavius]

I'd like to see a remake of Darklands, with unique cities and a more robust quest system.

NWN1+2 without the added challenge of constantly fighting against the camera.

First it should be established which games have actually benefited in the past from a modern remake.

Since there aren't any, OP question is easily answered.

Ultima 6 Project using the Dungeon Siege engine is far superior to the original.

And how about the X-Com remake? It seems to have been well received. Haven't played it myself yet.

 

[deuxhero]

Fallout 1/2.

The interface is totally fucked (you can have hundreds of items, but the inventory only shows like 5 at a time and just scrolls up/down) and combat moves too slow, even with speed at max. Also better moding

It's a good game under it, but damn does has the shell it's in aged badly.

 

[retardation]

Mafia, it needs grind, taking out bases and microtransactions.

 

[A horse of course]

Fallout 1/2.

Anyway, Heimdall 1 or 2 could use remakes. I think 1 would work better due to the more consistent tone and setting.