Tendo City

In recent years, the HD remake (not to be confused with a real remake) has become very popular. We've seen such HD remakes of Kingdom Hearts, Metal Gear, and Banjo Kazooie. In all those cases, the switch to wide screen was fairly easy to accomplish. Since everything's rendered in real time, simply extending the viewing area does the job just fine. There are some cases (such as cut scenes) where trouble can come up (Silent Hill HD, I'm looking at you), but generally it works well.

Not so much for two HD rereleases I recently picked up. I'm talking about Resident Evil Rebirth (PS4 version) and Grim Fandango (PC version). Two already great games with some minor visual enhancements, but notably they both are defaulted to wide screen. That's the biggest problem. Both of these games use entirely pre-rendered backgrounds. As a result, there's no way to "extend the viewing area" because those pre-rendered assets were never designed with that in mind. So, they did the only thing they could, they stretched out the 4:3 image to fit a wide screen ratio. All those graphical enhancements, but with an ugly stretched out image. It's clear they put it that way purely because new gamers might not accept an "update" with "those black bars".

Now the good news is I'm not really mad at all. I'm just saying it doesn't work, and clearly the developers agreed. They've put in an option in both of these remakes to switch the game to it's intended 4:3 (with all the other visual enhancements intact), and I'm certainly glad of that. My main reason for this is to say that going forward, remakes of games with prerendered backgrounds all need to have this option. These two shouldn't be lone exceptions.

Seriously, they default to stretched? They should default to 4:3, with an option to stretch it for people who like that (not-good) look...

They didn't stretch, they cropped and then made it so that, in rooms where it was important to see everything that was displayed originally, the camera will do a subtle pan move. I guess that still sucks a bit, but I honestly never noticed while playing it on PS3.

I see. I did the comparison using the first room there, so I suppose I didn't notice. Grim Fandango on the other hand certainly goes for the "stretch" route.

Either way, I just switched it over to 4:3 and it's been smooth sailing.

The 4:3 picture there definitely looks better, yeah.

It's not a great picture, unfortunately.

To be perfectly honest, I think the original looked so amazing that the HD remaster, by comparison, just wasn't different enough to be amazing on its own. I much prefer the PS controller for tank-style gaming, though.

On that, we can agree. HD remasters are all the rage now, and it's getting rather ridiculous. It's such a minor update, and so cheap to make, that it seems the moment they realized that people were buying these things, they went nuts. Now we've got ports of HD remasters on the newer consoles, and it's getting insulting. Final Fantasy X HD made some sense. It was not just an HD remaster, it also used the international versions of the games, so I was getting content I'd not had the chance to play before. On PS4? It only makes sense in terms of making it available to people who don't own a PS3, except, they are charging full price for that version. $20 for PS3, $50 for PS4, even though the games are identical. That's a rip off no matter how you slice it.

For my part, I've been buying HD collections of A: games I never bought originally (the Jak & Daxter collection) and B: games that actually have significant added content (Kingdom Hearts HD collections). I made a few exceptions for some very exceptional games, such as REbirth, Grim Fandango, Wind Waker, Metal Gear, and Silent Hill. Hmm, I'll just give those some mini-reviews while I'm at it.

Resident Evil "Rebirth" HD: They never used the Rebirth subtitle in the US, but they really should have. It's a slight enhancement of a total remake. The closest comparison I can think of would be the Super Mario Advance games on GBA. Aside from the aspect ratio thing, which they let you easily resolve, the only complaint I have is the "loading" bar that pops in and out as I'm playing the game. The original had a very nice and moody loading screen. This one still has that, but covering it up is a big ol' PS4 style loading bar. Very distracting and totally unnecessary... It also comes up during saving, so it's especially annoying. I feel like the game should be saying "We're trying to DO something here!".

Grim Fandango HD: It's an amazing game made exactly perfectly better. I can't think of a single fault here. They've fixed old timing issues and glitches, it looks amazing (after the aspect ratio fix), and the controls are as good as they've ever been. There are achievements, but you can hide the messages indicating that you got one, so it works out fine. I actually much prefer using the mouse for this game, but they left in controller support (with the old tank controls AND a more modern control scheme, similar to the options in the older style survival horror games). In fact, both mouse and gamepad controls work simultaneously, which is convenient.

Wind Waker HD: Yeah, it's too easy, and yeah I still think Link's legs are too stubby, but I still loved this game. I love the remake as well. The "message in a bottle" system is a nice way of interacting with other Zelda fans while playing. They've gone and streamlined the hunt for triforce pieces even more, showcasing just how much of a letdown that particular part of the game was. Downsides? Well, they really didn't bother adding much beyond the message in a bottle thing. They even took out the original Tingle Tuner, even though the Wii U gamepad would have worked perfectly with that mode! That said, it's not MUCH of a loss, just a confusing one. Miyamoto's threats never came to pass, this game didn't force motion controls on us this time around. Having gotten over the glamour of it all, I recognize that motion controls were a mistake in Twilight Princess. The biggest change though is a visual one. The cel shading got a strange alteration from the original. This has nothing to do with the upgrade to HD, but everything in the original had a "flat" hand-drawn look. That's a lot less apparent now. The HD version looks a lot more "3D", meaning everyone in the game looks like a ceramic doll. It's not a bad look, mind, it's just not what the original had. It's a good update in a lot of ways, but I feel like if you collect Zelda games, you'd need both versions for the complete experience.

Metal Gear HD: This collection's got MGS2, 3, and Peace Walker. It's also got emulated versions of the original Metal Gear 1 and 2 (via MGS3's inclusion). It's a rather incomplete collection, actually, as it's missing MGS1 (either version) and Portable Ops (which, while "canon", wasn't made by Kojima, just his team). This is a very well done update, so kudos to the team. The biggest update was to Peace Walker, which in addition to controls that actually work got all it's textures and sound files upgraded rather significantly. The biggest issue with it is that all 3 of the "main" games have had game modes stripped out of them entirely. MGS2 is missing skateboarding. I mean, not that big a deal, sure, but hey, it's weird that it's gone. Peace Walker has had it's weirdly named "vocaloid" text to speech synthesizer removed. That one just confuses me. Did they just not think it was worth it to port the code over? To be fair, it used some sort of online database in the PSP version to do the converting before you redownloaded and saved, but I'd have thought the PS3 powerful enough to do that by itself. MGS3 had by far the most taken out. Not only was "Snake Vs Monkey" and a bunch of bonus cutscenes removed, they even took out a dream sequence from the middle of the main game. Snake vs Monkey made sense, since Sony owns Ape Escape, but Konami owned the rest. I can only assume they just decided the other features weren't "worth it".

Silent Hill HD: The company that did this one was working off outdated beta code from the original release of the game and had to re-debug the whole thing AND work in the bonus campaign with assets ripped from a Greatest Hits disk. Even then, the beta they were working off of was using outdated texture assets and so the streets are a LOT cleaner than they were originally. These problems run deep too. They put in wide screen, but various cinematics weren't designed with the extra viewing area in mind, so you see things like the world suddenly dropping off on a side or James suddenly popping into existence before walking to the center area. Patches resolved a number of issues, but many and more remain. It's considered the worst of these HD remasters for a reason. I bought it before I learned the terrible truth.

In retrospect, those last two were signs of where Konami was heading as a company. One could blame the company that did SH HD's port, but ultimately Konami screwed that up way more than that company ever could have. Konami failed to preserve their own legacy code, forced the company to essentially redo already done work, and, in the end, made the call to release the game for sale.