Super Mario All-Stars for the SNES to me is the definitive way to play the original NES classics. For today’s gamers who’ve been exposed to constant remakes of today, remakes even happened back then, they just weren’t a regular thing. This is one example of them and Nintendo hit it out of the park with this. The visuals are crisp, you would almost not believe that it was originally released back in the early 1990s before its re-release later in 2020. Just everything about this package of games, is the gold standard of what remakes should be about.
Super Castlevania IV is another example and yet another game I put in high praise as a remake. This entry of the series, though confusing at first, is the re-telling of the very first Castlevania game released. They just wanted to do it on newer hardware at the time and do things they couldn’t with 8-bit constraints. That really showed here because everything about this game is nothing short but amazing of a remake from visuals to music to even the additions that might’ve not been possible the first round.
Both of these examples are a testament to their craft because to this day, nobody is touching them to remake them from the ground up. They may get repackaged, but it isn’t like anybody looks at them with the thought of an entire do-over.
There have been lots.
Some consider it to be sacrilege, but I think Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes is a fantastic remake. Yes, it makes parts of the game significantly easier, but they’re parts of the game that I would argue are more difficult due to unfortunately cumbersome controls that were outdated only a few short years after MGS1’s initial release. I think this one is a matter of which game you played first, because I played Twin Snakes first. It does have the unfortunate effect of making MGS2 far less impressive though, since all of the graphical and mechanical upgrades were carried over to the first game, so when you continue the series after Twin Snakes, it just feels like you’re playing that game two times in a row.
Then there’s stuff like the Baldur’s Gate enhanced editions. I’m sure I’m enjoying countless quality of life improvements over the original versions of the game, not the least of which is support for modern monitors, resolutions, and aspect ratios. I know of a couple that I’m quite thankful to have, like UI improvements for information display and inventory management.
Remakes like these really do breathe new life into old games, and the lack of one for something like Goldeneye 007 is a major barrier to me going back and playing a game like that. Maybe we were okay with 13 frames per second in 1997, but I can’t say I am anymore; I probably stopped being okay with it just a few years later. Then you’ve got the System Shock remake. It goes pretty far with how much they modernize that game, but I ran into a loop of dying, not having enough resources, and losing those resources again to respawning enemies. It would have been nice if they brought those quality of life features far enough that I could change the difficulty settings halfway through the game, but that’s not a feature it supports.
I have no idea why we’re remaking a game like Assassin’s Creed 4 or The Last of Us or Horizon: Zero Dawn already. That’s just going to make the market prematurely sick of something that has legitimate use cases, like what Hollywood did to 3D.