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LucasArts Released: Grim Fandango remake... for PS4, Vita and PC.

m_s0

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Oh, and the sound quality isn't great. This includes the audio commentary which is baffling to me.
 

tuluse

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Serpent in the Staglands Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Shadorwun: Hong Kong
They re-recorded the music, the graphical alterations go beyond improving the visual quality via going back to the original assets... So not a remaster, and it isn't a preservation. Not much of an HD version, either, come to think of it.
You can play with everything set to original, so I think that qualifies for preservation.
 
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Divinity: Original Sin Torment: Tides of Numenera Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath
They re-recorded the music, the graphical alterations go beyond improving the visual quality via going back to the original assets... So not a remaster, and it isn't a preservation. Not much of an HD version, either, come to think of it.
You can play with everything set to original, so I think that qualifies for preservation.
AFAIK there's no way to play with original music.
 

m_s0

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They re-recorded the music, the graphical alterations go beyond improving the visual quality via going back to the original assets... So not a remaster, and it isn't a preservation. Not much of an HD version, either, come to think of it.
You can play with everything set to original, so I think that qualifies for preservation.
AFAIK there's no way to play with original music.
Yup. It doesn't matter whether the new music is better or not if we're talking preservation.
 

taxalot

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I remember being stuck in the game... in the third act or so, at the part where you have to spin cog/wheels and I couldn't seem to do it precisely enough. That sucked. But I think I should give it a try once again. Have the prerendered cutscenes been rerendered too ?
 

m_s0

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Which is why I'm thinking someone really didn't want that score in this version. I'm guessing Peter McConnell couldn't stand hearing it and begged for a re-recording.

Worth a try, I guess.

I remember being stuck in the game... in the third act or so, at the part where you have to spin cog/wheels and I couldn't seem to do it precisely enough. That sucked. But I think I should give it a try once again. Have the prerendered cutscenes been rerendered too ?
From what I can tell they're re-encoded from whatever source video files they had so don't expect anything remarkable. The textures in those cutscenes look as low-res as ever, but the video quality is better.
 
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RPGMaster

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They re-recorded the music, the graphical alterations go beyond improving the visual quality via going back to the original assets... So not a remaster, and it isn't a preservation. Not much of an HD version, either, come to think of it.

The new music is great, though, and I appreciate the concept art and the commentary. So, mixed bag as far as the quality is concerned, but the bonuses might make it worthwile if you're crazy about the game to begin with.
I don't get terribly happy when my favourite classic games gets re-remastered releases sometimes:

23tmih1.jpg
Agreed about the 4:3 complaint. Thankfully Double Fine thought of everything so you can play this film noir homage in glorous widescreen.

:retarded:

edit: read the actual review and at least the guy acknowledges that stretching 4:3 to 16:9 is not a good idea. Still, he does bitch about those pesky black bars so it's not much of a consolation.

These fucktards would demand Casablanca be shown in colour and widescreen. Gaming will always be culturally cretinous because of the wants of idiots.
 

JudasIscariot

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They re-recorded the music, the graphical alterations go beyond improving the visual quality via going back to the original assets... So not a remaster, and it isn't a preservation. Not much of an HD version, either, come to think of it.

The new music is great, though, and I appreciate the concept art and the commentary. So, mixed bag as far as the quality is concerned, but the bonuses might make it worthwile if you're crazy about the game to begin with.
I don't get terribly happy when my favourite classic games gets re-remastered releases sometimes:

23tmih1.jpg
Agreed about the 4:3 complaint. Thankfully Double Fine thought of everything so you can play this film noir homage in glorous widescreen.

:retarded:

edit: read the actual review and at least the guy acknowledges that stretching 4:3 to 16:9 is not a good idea. Still, he does bitch about those pesky black bars so it's not much of a consolation.

"Why remake a game older than my grandfather?"

Wut
 

Starwars

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I've been replaying this and while the story and characters are as charming as ever, the game features some pretty retarded puzzles. Fortunately I could remember parts of most of them, but yeah... The gameplay isn't great.
 
Unwanted

QuestionMan

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I've been replaying this and while the story and characters are as charming as ever, the game features some pretty retarded puzzles.

Grim wasn't the best LA game in terms of puzzles though it had some fairly clever ones too. Always liked the bit about figuring out the date at the races as that required some observation and logical reasoning rather than relying on the trope of your inventory being filled with oodles of random crap, which for some weird reason some developeres have deceided adventure gaming would have been all about. Currently replaying the GK games, and whilst they're still massively superior to most of the cookie cutter mystery games they spawned later, some of their overall design truly doesn't hold up much (and there are some particularly erronous puzzles beside the cat hair moustache thing, such as the cookoo's clock in part II).

Grim is still a great reminder and a warning though. There's nothing inherently fun in an adventure game. Inventory management isn't, and as proven by countless games, the formula of combining item x and y by itself isn't either. Even exploration is typically a very passive, sedated experience, in particular in the point&click format. It's an easy catch these days as the games are comparably cheap to develop. However it's hard to make a really good one. The genre's strength, that there's an author in behind it all who has a firm grip on everything, even the one solution to an obstacle he throws into your way, quickly fires back when all of that doesn't add up. Grim by and largue lives by its amazing characters, good writing, its understanding of narrative and the cinema it tries to ape (the transition scene in between chapter 1 and two is goosebumps all over), even the very hummable and vast soundtrack, everything else is almost secondary. To me it's adventure gaming's Torment moment, the unique outing that would never get a publisher funding today and was only made possible as very unique circumstances aligned, and very creative people who had years of experience doing this prior were given full control over everything and a budget to boot (in comparison, whilst a very very fun and beautiful game I wouldn't want to miss, Monkey 3 released a year earlier feels almost corporate sequel in comparison). Both games deal with death the one way or another, which may be a coincidence. They certainly both mark the end of an era though.
 
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Lyric Suite

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Any explanation on how Tool Schafer managed to make a game like this? Or did he just took top billing while others did the actual work?
 

Gragt

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Serpent in the Staglands Divinity: Original Sin
They re-recorded the music, the graphical alterations go beyond improving the visual quality via going back to the original assets... So not a remaster, and it isn't a preservation. Not much of an HD version, either, come to think of it.

The new music is great, though, and I appreciate the concept art and the commentary. So, mixed bag as far as the quality is concerned, but the bonuses might make it worthwile if you're crazy about the game to begin with.
I don't get terribly happy when my favourite classic games gets re-remastered releases sometimes:

23tmih1.jpg
Agreed about the 4:3 complaint. Thankfully Double Fine thought of everything so you can play this film noir homage in glorous widescreen.

:retarded:

edit: read the actual review and at least the guy acknowledges that stretching 4:3 to 16:9 is not a good idea. Still, he does bitch about those pesky black bars so it's not much of a consolation.

"Why remake a game older than my grandfather?"

Wut

It’s a country thing.
 

Carrion

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The amount of bugs seems pretty shocking. Items turning invisible, Manny turning invisible, Manny somehow picking up items while standing five meters from them, crashes to the desktop,
the demon beavers in the Petrified Forest
getting stuck and therefore completely halting your progress... And I'm not even very far in the game. Not sure if the original render mode has something to do about the graphics glitches and the remastered one would work better, but I'd really prefer if you didn't have to save the game every five minutes or so just to avoid game-breaking bugs.

edit: Yeah, the remastered mode does solve the problem in the spoilers, at least.
 
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Vibalist

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So I bought this. I haven't noticed any bugs so far (I'm in the Petrified Forest right now). Game plays like you would expect. It's a (slight) graphical update with a much needed point-and-click feature that otherwise is exactly like the original. Don't know that it's worth 15 bucks, but whatever. I'm rich as fuck and don't care about money.
 

bertram_tung

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Insert Title Here
playing it again all these years later along with the developer commentary makes it worth the $15 bucks for me.

If they have a developer commentary like this for the day of the tentacle remaster I will be very excited.
 

Carrion

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Finished this. Kind of like the main game, the remastered version also feels slightly rushed towards the end, with an increasing number of bugs and parts where the point 'n click controls really don't work all that well. Combining the original tank controls with a mouse is probably the best way of playing the game. CTDs became a real nuisance in the latter half of the game, and even more annoying was that selecting an item from inventory often froze Manny so that you couldn't move him or even activate the menu and quit the game without violence. This happened dozens of times, sometimes even several times in a row in certain locations.

Grim wasn't the best LA game in terms of puzzles though it had some fairly clever ones too.
I think the puzzles in GF are generally rather logical compared to many other LucasArts games, and it rarely goes into the "use a random item with another random item to achieve a random effect that makes the story go forward" territory. There are a couple of puzzles that require a bit of experimenting, but even those are usually in situations where your options are very limited, so you'll probably stumble upon the solution sooner rather than later. I think GF actually finds a pretty fine balance in the puzzles, as it doesn't have anything outrageously illogical but keeps just enough craziness in the mix so that things don't get boring or too predictable.
 

Metro

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playing it again all these years later along with the developer commentary makes it worth the $15 bucks for me.

If they have a developer commentary like this for the day of the tentacle remaster I will be very excited.
What's the commentary? Tim laughing at people for continuing to subsidize his mediocrity?
 

Unkillable Cat

LEST WE FORGET
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Codex 2014 Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy
Slightly off-topic, but...I just watched a part of Day of the Tentacle on YouTube, and Double Fine will have one large problem on their hands if they plan to remaster it: The sound. More specifically, the voice-acting.

Some of the voice-acting is fine, but far too often I felt that the line delivery was flat. They really should consider re-casting the voice actors, or at least having them come in again for a do-over. Only problem with that is that the voice actor for Bernard is 75 years old, so he may not be capable of that. (Then again, Alan Young still voices Scrooge McDuck at 95 years old.)

Even worse, since this comes from the era of SCUMM games that focused on breaking up sentences, line delivery gets forced and skewered on far too many occasions. One brilliant example is the end cutscene where Purple Tentacle makes his evil villain "I'll be back!" speech shortly before being mailed to Siberia. The lines are delivered without a delay, which means the player is forced to sit and wait while the fragmented sentences are delivered on-screen by the game.

There's also a problem with them having a limited 'bank' of sound effects, so the "Ding!" sound of the microwave is also used when the shrink-ray is out of power. But that's easily fixable compared to the voice problems.
 
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Divinity: Original Sin
The lines are delivered without a delay, which means the player is forced to sit and wait while the fragmented sentences are delivered on-screen by the game.

Are you talking about the speed of subtitles on-screen? In all voiced Lucasarts adventure games you could set how long sentences would be displayed on-screen. If you set to maximum, there's no wait for the deliverances. It happened in the special edition of monkey island 1, which had all new dialogue and if you set a long time for sentences on-screen, you had to wait the next sentence to appear in order to have the next dialogue line. And default settings had it set with a very long time.

EDIT

Subtitles on (7:50):


Subtitles off (4:20):


If you speed up subtitles, you can have subtitles with the speed of the second video.
 
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Unkillable Cat

LEST WE FORGET
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Wow. How could I forget that?

Then the solution is simpler than I thought: Shorten the default display time.
 

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