23rd February 2017, 12:38 PM
Quote:If it's a good remake, I'm fine with games that completely rework the source material into a new experience. There's nothing stopping me from just playing both. I usually will play the original before playing a remake when I hear about a good one, so long as the original is easy enough to come by.The original game is what it is, though. Saying "I can make a better version of this game from other people"... sure, I can understand why someone would want to do that, but I'd rather see you try to do your own thing, instead of a half-knockoff thing.
And on the note of fans v. creators, I can't help but think of Star Wars, where of course I do not think much of all the hate George Lucas and the prequel trilogy get; they're great movies! Sometimes fans do make something better than the original, such as QfG2's remake, but that's rare.
Quote:When you mentioned Quest for Glory 2, you should know that particular remake is a more subdued one. The game has pretty much identical design aside from switching from parser to cursor interface and updated graphics. The same goes for King's Quest 1. Those would be the "Metroid with a map added" sort of remake. King's Quest II on the other hand is a total reworking, and in spirit is more like what they've done for Metroid II. It really bears repeating that most people consider Metroid II the weakest in the series, so just adding a map was never going to be enough to make people say "okay, NOW this game is good". It really needed the Zero Mission treatment.I never actually played the KQ remakes, so I forgot that the KQ2 one changed things significantly... huh.
Quote:When it comes to fan projects, I don't really delve into that whole community too deeply. I wasn't even aware of this particular one until I saw an article on Polygon or something after it was completed. That works for me though, because generally the cream will rise to the top and I can generally be assured whatever I find out about is probably the best of the best. I do agree that most of these fan projects, until Nintendo changes their attitude, should probably differentiate their tributes enough to make them distinct properties. Some of them in fact do do this, and isn't it weird how that stigma over a "fan project" disappears the moment it gets reskinned into "original product".Yeah, regardless of what I said above, just on a 'do you really like the idea of having to abandon all your work when Nintendo/Square/etc. shuts the project down?' level, making something different instead of using a license from a company known to shut down fan projects doesn't seem like a very good idea. I wish everyone else would be as nice about such things as Activision is, but sadly they are not...
For another example of Activision being good in this regard, there was a fan project to make an addon to Netstorm, that RTS Activision published back in '97 that I love. Activision allowed the project to continue, with only the stipulation that they didn't charge for it. The project never completed, but there were some fan-made patches for Netstorm that fixed bugs, added some new map types, and such... and eventually this became incompatible with original Netstorm copies, and has to run via a downloader that downloads the full game itself. Activision must know about this, but they've never tried to shut it down. Yes, Activision did shut down the official servers back in the early/mid '00s sometime, but still they could shut that stuff down if they wanted, but thankfully they do not and that's awesome, because NS is still one of the best and most unique RTSes ever.
There is now another fan-made 3d Netstorm-styled game called Stratus: Battle for the Sky, which is currently in Steam Early Access, but it's carefully not using actual NS assets in order to stay legal. The gameplay is basically exactly the same as Netstorm though, just polygonal.
Quote:Another big project coming down is Mother 4. I was made aware of that one on an Earthbound fan site I frequent, and I've thought the same thing from the start. Firstly, calling it Mother 4 is a big no-no. Even if Nintendo were more generous about this sort of thing, they wouldn't accept naming the game something that would confuse people into thinking it's an official sequel. Secondly, near as I can tell it has nothing to do with the plot of previous Mother games. All I have is trailers, but if that's the case they really should rename it and strip out any direct references to previous games and release it as a standalone "inspired by" project, like Undertale. Heck I'd pay for it.I hadn't heard of that one, but yeah, that sounds like a really bad idea...