Remasters-Rereleases

King of Posters
#1

Is this a full topic I don’t know yet maybe it will go straight into obscurity. But a thought entered my head and now it won’t leave.

We got some screens coming for Shenmue I and II. They will be circulating tomorrow probably. An article in Famitsu. I will buy it and read it and try to recapture the fire of 20 years ago.

When a film or a TV show is re-released an important factor is in the modern day it is presented in it’s original aspect ratio. With the re-release of an old album if it was in mono it is still in mono.

Not that they aren’t cleaned up or put into Dolby Digital 7.2 YouLiveInTheSoundNow. Just if the presenters of the new release care the work is presented in it’s original form.

In emulation we are getting into this with trying to replicate many different types of CRTs and Monitors because that’s what the games actually looked like at release.

So the Shenmue re-releases are widescreen. And that seems wrong. I get it. Gamers would take a dump on their own cat and blame Sega if it was just in 4:3 or whatever native Dreamcast resolution is. We need it wide and not a single wasted spec on our 72" 4k TV as I steal fish from a shrine to feed a stray cat. But there is a lack of respect for the original work there. That the game was framed in a certain way the environments layed out to inhabit a 4:3 screen. I keep thinking how walking around the Suzuki household or KowLoon isn’t going to feel cramped or right in widescreen.

There is one shot already of the forklift races and it looks gross. It looks like they stretched the image like animals. Or just showing all this environment you weren’t meant to see. I can’t decide which outside of being wrong.

Shenmue II Xbox might have been widescreen I am trying to remember but I only played it for 5 minutes before the English dub made me scream in terror and rip it out of my xbox. Also I was playing on a CRT then.

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#2

I think with video games there is that constant, rapidly progressing arms race for More Graphix that gets people all excited, and with the games industry being more inclined to appease ‘The Fans’ lest they get the pitchforks out if a game is not 4K / 1080p 60FPS etc.

Movies aren’t immune from similar expectations from The Fans though, just check any classic movie trailer on Youtube and you will see a tonne of comments all like “They should do a live action remake of this, imagine all the amazing CGI and Dolby 7.2 TrueHD sound, it’ll be totally epic come on get on it Hollywood”. The difference is that the movie industry mostly just ignores them unless they smell a significant amount of money.

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#3

I loaded up the REMake remaster recently on PS4, and all my previous huffing at it kinda vaporized. This might just be my love for the series classics and the GC version in particular but damn its still one of most gory gorgeous games! Even with some extra muddy upscaled prerenders here and there. I never really made a big opinion on pan and scan back in the day but actually really like how its done here in widescreen format. That new cheesy easy control scheme can get Brad Vickers-ed though.

More remasters to higher def should utilize things like that, which don’t distort framing of the original environment, perspective so much. There might be more but I’m not aware of em.

#4

Shenmue is framed perfectly in 4:3, I couldn’t agree more.

Also looks like part 2 is using the unfinished Xbox textures :frowning: I hope they at least get the shadows to work again because they broke completely in 360 backwards compatibility and never got patched.

I will buy these games for a third time though because thinking about them makes me grin like a kid.

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#5

So, if I believed in Sega anymore (which is not to say I don’t, but just not in this way), I would hope the Shenmue port team talked to the Yakuza 6 team about this. I was playing the demo for 6 yesterday, when I was supposed to be playing the real game but Amazon’s distro center near Cleveland got jacked and now I am supposed to get it some time like next week even though it would somehow actually be quicker to order from Amazon right now (no I am not making this up)…and man, the Morning Glory Orphanage feels cramped as heck and it is lovely.

This is my post to get mad about not playing a videogame because I am an entitled shithead.

But yeah, as a dude who rejoiced about DVDs happening because letterboxing is wonderful, I really wish gamers would learn to deal with it (by it, I mean letterboxing to preserve the original aspect ratio).

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#6

Shenmue widescreen means you are going to see a lot of the environment you weren’t supposed to.

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#7

Yeah, this just feels weird:
image

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#8

Exactly - gamers actually buy this stuff. With movies it might not be worth it to make a whole updated version of an old thing to trick a few kids into repurchasing it, but games are so easy to retrofit with new standards.

What I think is interesting is the music industry does this, too! It’s easy to take old stems and remaster them for a more modern and boring sounding production. But new music is always being made, so the only communities that have to tread water on repeated re-re-releases are based around specific artists or styles that aren’t productive anymore. With games being developed so slowly in comparison, the whole professional industry is stuck in that position. All the classic series are the game equivalents of Queen - their creative rudders died in the 90s and now we’re all just recycling their old hits and copying them forever.

I think somewhere in here is the key to the problem, because video games require music and drawings and everything else to work together to be good, so how do we encourage and support independent combinative novelty instead of squeezing novelty out of art that should just be left alone?

The rest of this post is just bitching.

It’s the audience’s fault this works. How many people here are going to buy the new Shenmues anyway because they decided they would ten years ago. You can find it all the time: Aw, this sort of looks like a thing I liked when I was a kid, but shiny and $60 again. TAKE MY $$$$ HEE HEE (And that’s why no one’s getting Shenmue 3 or Half Life 3 or whatever other sequels to bullshit you still care about. They realized they can just wait two years and people will buy the first one again. The people who actually remember there was going to be a sequel gradually stop caring and die)

I’ve seen people here get so fussy about internet decorum and so passionate about not encouraging awful, regressive trends in their hobby they’ll claim (apropos of nothing) they’re NOT EVEN A GAMER. Just an innocent liker of games who talks about playing games on a forum called Select Button. Gimme a fuckin break! Because when Lame Shit 6 comes out for the fourth time and it’s down to the actual money vote, they always find space in their budget. And that is the one thing that really makes you a scum-ass gamer. Unforgibeable

edit: LOL sorry Annetts, I’m not calling you out specifically or anything for wanting to get this. I didn’t read the thread before posting. But it just proves my point. People will complain about this and buy it anyway, and that’s WHY it happens

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#9

You got some opinions! I am not above or against keeping games in circulation or in-print or available digitally.

I am not a huge Kubrick fan, but hearing that the official special Bluray release of Full Metal Jacket was the wrong ratio was horrifying. Like art should be treated with respect and any change you make to it’s presentation does change the art. For games and movies and music there is the march of progress and it is difficult to argue to a greater population that changing it is wrong.

Hopefully it will come with a original aspect ratio option and get over myself. Also Hi Pie!

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#10

A lot of ps2 / dreamcast games def tend to look really sterile upscaled to 1080p / 4k, itd be nice if they had some options to keep things fucked up and fuzzy.

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#11

The Wire was rereleased in HD and David Simon complained about it

I definitely agree with the sentiment but at the same time can barely stand 3D games in 4:3 anymore now that I’ve experienced widescreen TBH. I’d definitely prefer widescreen turbojank Shenmue over original actually good Shenmue. Sorry

#12

They also keep talking about modern control scheme and boy howdy what does that mean and how is Ryo not gonna look goofy as heck with it?

#13

I’d assumed that just meant the camera would be less awful.

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#14

widescreen Shenmue is something new and valuable that did not previously exist & in no way alters the existence of the very readily available and easily playable original releases that will mostly likely be preserved for remainder of contemporary civilization

continuing modifications enabled by advancing technology/trends are the reason videogame re-releases are interesting, and a reason video games in general are interesting. particularly polygonal games: not a painting, configurable but specific phantom realities.

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#15

but ryo looks goofy as heck anyway. giving people a new control scheme makes sense so long as they keep the original as an option. it’s 2018, shenmue was a weird game in 1999 and now you’re going to tell people to play it anyway and also control it like the dude is a race car.

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#16

looks like you can run this new thing in 4:3 anyway

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#17

All truths are real and I am just gonna have to sit here and deal with it.

I don’t know if I would even play it.

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#18

This sort of fits with the spirit of the topic? Wasn’t sure where else to post it.

A year ago Nvidia released the Shield TV in China. Exclusively to the region a few Wii-era Nintendo games like Twilight Princess and Wii Punch-Out were playable in a legal and official way on the device. Recently Nvidia has started updating these games (only Twilight Princess for now?) by enhancing the texture using DEEP LEARNING ALGORITHMS. The results actually look pretty good?

Anyway, the reason for this post is actually that while these updates look nice enough I thought it seemed somewhat unnecessary to start with TP of all things since that one actually already had an HD update that nobody seemed to have had any complaints about? That was before I actually looked at some comparison shots though:

Original Nvidia Shield release (still playable by changing the options)

nvidiatwilight5.jpg1200×675 138 KB

Deep Learning texture pack patch. Both positives and negatives here

nvidiatwilight6.jpg1200×675 129 KB

And… Wii U remaster? Why would they do that to a bridge? Reminds me of some of the worst looking areas in Dark Souls 2

nvidiatwilight7.jpg1200×675 146 KB

I haven’t played a lot of them but is this just what most HD remasters these days end up looking like when they want to tout “enhanced HD textures”?

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#19

Games are big and massive enough that it’s almost impossible for a port team working on 2% of the budget to not accidentally break things. Many things.

The they get to learn about it when tens of thousands of people play it and generates hundreds of thousands of hours of playtesting over what they could afford