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The eleventh Electric Challenge asks us what game we want to see re-made. For a lot of people, they're going to get their wish, with the Final Fantasy VII remake scheduled to drop in April, which has transformed the turn-based RPG of the Playstation era into a stylish action kind of game in the same vein as Kingdom Hearts.
When we talk about remakes, presumably, we're talking about more than a graphics upgrade to get into higher definition or 4k territory, or something that's been shifted from one platform to another. But we also don't mean a thing that happens to have names and places but is an entirely different story in its entirety, either. Something that's changed enough to be different, but the same enough to be familiar.
Remakes often take the opportunity to make things that were entirely terrible about the original and make them less painful. Or, in the case of things like Metal Gear Solid, to explicitly tell the player characters that they're not allowed to take advantage of things that would make the game easier now, rather than having to do it the bad way of the original. (Metal Gear Solid has always insisted the fourth wall both exists and doesn't exist simultaneously.)
So a game that was enjoyable enough in a previous generation, that we could pull forward, make prettier, possibly fix a few of its flaws, and then present a better version for everyone going forward. And that hasn't already been remade, now that I think about it. There are a lot of people who have grown up with certain games and want to play them again, and so we've been seeing a lot of remakes coming through for older games, like Gianna Sisters.
I think I know exactly what I would like with regard to that. Back in the days when dialup was the way you connected to everything, and that one might dial specifically into certain servers, rather than dialing into one's own ISP and then connecting from there, Sierra On-Line created a graphical online space to be in, which was first "The Sierra Network" and then became "The ImagiNation Network" or INN, before its eventual acquisition by American Telephone and Telegraph, then subsequent rolling into America On-Line, before being shut down for good in the 1990s. The point of INN was to be able to play various Sierra and Hoyle games online with other people, with avatars, chat, e-mail, and other BBS-type functions. INN divided itself into various "Lands" that, at least initially, I think were separate fees paid to access, before INN as a whole became a singular subscription to access, and then, because the model it was based on was not the way that Internet and online games went, eventually folded up. In MedievaLand, a tile-based MMORPG appeared called "The Shadows of Yserbius", which had a character venture into a palace and dungeon carved out of a volcano to try and piece together what happened to its King (dead), the wizard who caused the calamity, and the elemental that he summoned and tried to bind and defeat for the chance at immortality. Eventually, Yserbius made it to a standalone-ish game, with its sequel title, "The Fates of Twinion," which used the same idea, with different dungeon designs and some reworked mechanics. But because the game itself was a port, basically, it could still be played online for at least some of the tine that it was available, before INN got yanked, and therefore it carried a big problem with it - once a character reached the 20th experience level, they had to decide as to whether they were going to only play the game online or only play the game offline - no mixing and matching there.
The game is beastly hard for a solo player once the first main major quest line is completed, and it only gets more sadistic the farther into the second half you get. Of course, the enemy groups scaled to meet whatever party was encountering it, so it wasn't possible for someone to round up a group of adventurers to go beat on simpler opponents - instead, that group would find themselves with tougher monsters to splat. (Online, there was PvP as a possibility, but your adventuring group had to explicitly turn it on and accept an invitation to fight other adventurers.) So, unless you really liked to grind out experience levels in repetitive battles against things you could actually handle, for the eventual problem of maxing out your statistical categories several experience levels before you could have used the boosts (and then having to deal with an increasingly smaller pool of spell and skill points gained with each experience level, which meant that sometimes learning the rest of the spells and skills meant you lacked the points available to make them properly lethal in a hurry), the player was not going to get to the bottom of the volcano without the help of some cheat engines or otherwise.
I would like to see an overhaul and remake of these games, to give them code that would allow them to be played with friends in the same way that games are played now. Possibly even with people able to host their own instances of the game, based on the progress made by their current avatar. Better graphics, perhaps, some refactoring to make them work better on modern machines (or wrap them properly in DosBox, as I suspect a lot of old games are), and reworking the game balance so that whether a player tries to play it by themselves or with a party, the difficulty is set correctly and players don't have to waste days on the grind just to be able to move forward to the next small piece where they will have to grind again. Or change the curve such that it doesn't take a million (or more) experience points to go between levels after the 20th. And/or uncap the statistical categories so that a character can continue to improve their initiative so that they have a chance of surviving by themselves by always being able to go first. Basically, rebalance the game so there's a lot less of tedious backtracking and cursing every time you get to the last phase of a quest and die, necessitating you to go back through the entirety of the quest to reclaim the things that were taken and then try not to die again, possibly having gained a level or two in the process. (For both games.)
As an information professional, of course, when I go "there ought be a remake of this game," I know that there are probably people who are working on just such a thing, and a few search queries later, I am not disappointed in this. To be clear, I still think an official remake of this game would be excellent, but in the meantime, to experience the thing itself as it would have been online, or something reasonably close to it, The INN Barn has found some code and stood it up appropriately to give people a reminder of what they were playing when they went online to INN, and MedievaLands has done some significant amount of work to build the game into an online standalone client that works quite well and has very helpful tips and other things to make the game experience better. I did a little adventuring in that and went from level 1 to 16 without too much trouble in a few hours of play, with some help from another player in a party, which was something I hadn't been able to experience with the initial sequence.
When we talk about remakes, presumably, we're talking about more than a graphics upgrade to get into higher definition or 4k territory, or something that's been shifted from one platform to another. But we also don't mean a thing that happens to have names and places but is an entirely different story in its entirety, either. Something that's changed enough to be different, but the same enough to be familiar.
Remakes often take the opportunity to make things that were entirely terrible about the original and make them less painful. Or, in the case of things like Metal Gear Solid, to explicitly tell the player characters that they're not allowed to take advantage of things that would make the game easier now, rather than having to do it the bad way of the original. (Metal Gear Solid has always insisted the fourth wall both exists and doesn't exist simultaneously.)
So a game that was enjoyable enough in a previous generation, that we could pull forward, make prettier, possibly fix a few of its flaws, and then present a better version for everyone going forward. And that hasn't already been remade, now that I think about it. There are a lot of people who have grown up with certain games and want to play them again, and so we've been seeing a lot of remakes coming through for older games, like Gianna Sisters.
I think I know exactly what I would like with regard to that. Back in the days when dialup was the way you connected to everything, and that one might dial specifically into certain servers, rather than dialing into one's own ISP and then connecting from there, Sierra On-Line created a graphical online space to be in, which was first "The Sierra Network" and then became "The ImagiNation Network" or INN, before its eventual acquisition by American Telephone and Telegraph, then subsequent rolling into America On-Line, before being shut down for good in the 1990s. The point of INN was to be able to play various Sierra and Hoyle games online with other people, with avatars, chat, e-mail, and other BBS-type functions. INN divided itself into various "Lands" that, at least initially, I think were separate fees paid to access, before INN as a whole became a singular subscription to access, and then, because the model it was based on was not the way that Internet and online games went, eventually folded up. In MedievaLand, a tile-based MMORPG appeared called "The Shadows of Yserbius", which had a character venture into a palace and dungeon carved out of a volcano to try and piece together what happened to its King (dead), the wizard who caused the calamity, and the elemental that he summoned and tried to bind and defeat for the chance at immortality. Eventually, Yserbius made it to a standalone-ish game, with its sequel title, "The Fates of Twinion," which used the same idea, with different dungeon designs and some reworked mechanics. But because the game itself was a port, basically, it could still be played online for at least some of the tine that it was available, before INN got yanked, and therefore it carried a big problem with it - once a character reached the 20th experience level, they had to decide as to whether they were going to only play the game online or only play the game offline - no mixing and matching there.
The game is beastly hard for a solo player once the first main major quest line is completed, and it only gets more sadistic the farther into the second half you get. Of course, the enemy groups scaled to meet whatever party was encountering it, so it wasn't possible for someone to round up a group of adventurers to go beat on simpler opponents - instead, that group would find themselves with tougher monsters to splat. (Online, there was PvP as a possibility, but your adventuring group had to explicitly turn it on and accept an invitation to fight other adventurers.) So, unless you really liked to grind out experience levels in repetitive battles against things you could actually handle, for the eventual problem of maxing out your statistical categories several experience levels before you could have used the boosts (and then having to deal with an increasingly smaller pool of spell and skill points gained with each experience level, which meant that sometimes learning the rest of the spells and skills meant you lacked the points available to make them properly lethal in a hurry), the player was not going to get to the bottom of the volcano without the help of some cheat engines or otherwise.
I would like to see an overhaul and remake of these games, to give them code that would allow them to be played with friends in the same way that games are played now. Possibly even with people able to host their own instances of the game, based on the progress made by their current avatar. Better graphics, perhaps, some refactoring to make them work better on modern machines (or wrap them properly in DosBox, as I suspect a lot of old games are), and reworking the game balance so that whether a player tries to play it by themselves or with a party, the difficulty is set correctly and players don't have to waste days on the grind just to be able to move forward to the next small piece where they will have to grind again. Or change the curve such that it doesn't take a million (or more) experience points to go between levels after the 20th. And/or uncap the statistical categories so that a character can continue to improve their initiative so that they have a chance of surviving by themselves by always being able to go first. Basically, rebalance the game so there's a lot less of tedious backtracking and cursing every time you get to the last phase of a quest and die, necessitating you to go back through the entirety of the quest to reclaim the things that were taken and then try not to die again, possibly having gained a level or two in the process. (For both games.)
As an information professional, of course, when I go "there ought be a remake of this game," I know that there are probably people who are working on just such a thing, and a few search queries later, I am not disappointed in this. To be clear, I still think an official remake of this game would be excellent, but in the meantime, to experience the thing itself as it would have been online, or something reasonably close to it, The INN Barn has found some code and stood it up appropriately to give people a reminder of what they were playing when they went online to INN, and MedievaLands has done some significant amount of work to build the game into an online standalone client that works quite well and has very helpful tips and other things to make the game experience better. I did a little adventuring in that and went from level 1 to 16 without too much trouble in a few hours of play, with some help from another player in a party, which was something I hadn't been able to experience with the initial sequence.
