smoreon

@Serpenterror Surprisingly, this one is shaping up to be a considerable step up from the GameCube version: 60fps, most notably (where the original was only 30), and it looks like the graphics have been enhanced as well!

I'm going by the Nintendo Direct reveal trailer, if you want to see for yourself.

@Serpenterror If those job listings are for Metroid Prime 4, as they seem to imply, then the game is likely nowhere near beta yet.

Beta is the polishing and testing phase, not the time to bring in a bunch of new people to make the graphics- there's must be a lot of content that still has yet to be made, if Retro has to recruit a bunch of artists now.

PS: Oof, I just looked at their page, and they still want concept artists. I hope that's not for MP4.

@brandonbwii What if they make a Metal Gear Solid game where you don't play as a solid Metal Gear?

A "traditional" Zelda, whether 2D or 3D, is basically a Metroidvania, even if most people wouldn't describe it as such. That's probably where the descriptor of "linear(ish)" comes from- an attempt to pin down what OoT (etc.) does that separates it from an open world.

BotW was basically a western open-world RPG, with the typical Zelda trappings to give it a distinct flavour. Those things are welcome, but BotW is still fundamentally not a Metroidvania, and so it's not a traditional Zelda.

Mid 20s makes perfect sense:
(Insert tired joke about millennials and zoomers never growing up.)

It's interesting that, despite Nintendo's intentions, so many people (including those who made the live-action productions) have interpreted Mario as middle-aged, no doubt because we don't know a whole lot about him, and some imagination is needed to fill in the details.

PS: Besides the Smash Bros. trophy, there was also that comic where Wario accuses him of being a bully 20 years ago, when they were little kids.

Er... Rare already released some crisp gameplay footage of this and the SNES version years ago, in a YouTube video called "Rare Revealed: A Rare Look at Dream". (They did a series of bonus content for Rare Replay in 2015, and not all of it made it onto the disc.)

I don't think it ever showed a closeup of Captain Blackeye, though, so that's neat.

EDIT: Verified where you can see Dream in action.

@aaronsullivan So basically Steam Workshop, then?
Valve hosts a whole library of mods, while also selling the base game.

Yep, definitely crazy!
I'd love to see Nintendo start selling their ROMs again, though, especially if it's through a long-term shop on PC. And of course, celebrating their fans (and the fans' works) instead of hating them would be a bonus.

@Riderkicker Dolphin has supported online play for years, and it handles GameCube games really well, as long as you have a consistent internet connection. (Wii netplay used to be finicky, but I believe they recently sorted that out, too.)

I can't specifically comment on Steam/Retroarch/Steam Deck versions of Dolphin, but I'd imagine their netplay support is the same as the desktop.

@RadioHedgeFund If you still have SCII, take a look in the options: it lets you choose between English and Japanese voices.

Seems like about 90% of the people posting here never played Melee back in the day.

Melee (when played on a display with no lag) had some of the quickest, snappiest controls of any fighting game, and subsequent entries all feel like wading through molasses by comparison. It's great to have all of that new content in Brawl, Sm4sh, and Ultimate, but the gameplay just doesn't feel as good.

Speaking as a casual, I might add!

@blindsquarel Solid pick!

And no offense taken. I just found it strange that you were asserting that people would be choosing whatever era they started with, when that apparently didn't even apply to you!

@tseliot Yeah, it seems that a lot of people struggle to appreciate games from before they were born (VERY broadly speaking!), so there's definitely a generational aspect.

On the other hand, there is still a lot of variation in spite of that. A lot of people my age or younger will point to the 16-bit era as the golden age of gaming, despite being young kids at the time, while some who are my age and older prefer the Switch/modern era! Meanwhile, I'm in the middle: the games that launched around 2000 (+/- a few years: so late childhood to teens for me) tend to rank the highest on my list.

@blindsquarel How about your favourite era? Do you prefer DS, or modern games? (Or older games!)

Tough call, but I chose 1998. Besides the obvious, that was the year of F-Zero X (second-best racing game of all time) and of Sonic Adventure (admittedly a bit rough, but I still love it).
I also have a soft spot for the N64 in general, and 1998 was arguably when it really entered its prime.

@JayJ Oof, that's a dangerous thing to say on a site that's all about Nintendo Switch! You got a chuckle out of me, though.

I wonder how many of those who said "2017" are actually zoomers, versus geezers who are just less grumpy than I am (than we are?).

@blindsquarel I really doubt it. Definitely not true in my case, at least!
I'm curious, though: what was the year that you really got into gaming?
And were the games that you played then actually from that year?

I started gaming 30 years ago, but neither the games of that day nor the games that I was actually playing (early/mid NES stuff) sit as high on my list as my all-time favourites.

@Spider-Kev It's a shame that Rare didn't have the time to flesh things out as planned. Those space sequences were gorgeous, if a bit simple.

Also, have you seen much of Dinosaur Planet? It was about twice as big as the game we got, with a mix of familiar, expanded, and all-new (from our perspective!) regions. Definitely check it out, if you haven't already- but be warned that it may hurt to see what we missed out on!

@Spider-Kev I recently replayed The Hobbit, and while it was still fun, it definitely had its rough edges! Just refining the collision detection (put in a few invincibility frames after Bilbo gets hit, for example) and adding auto checkpoints when you walk past a save point would go a long way, but it would probably take a full remake to really make the game palatable for modern audiences.

If you're considering going back to the game, I recommend save states. I got in the habit of just saving every time I walked past a checkpoint: it doesn't offer any gameplay advantage, but it does avoid the lengthy memory card writes!

So you'd lean further into the Star Fox brand for a hypothetical SFA remake, rather than removing it! If it was remade as a Star Fox game, then those are all ideas I can get behind (including a sequel!). After getting a good look at Dinosaur Planet, though, I think I'd still prefer to see it remade as it was intended, with Sabre and Krystal retaining their backstory, and with the world all in one piece. But it's kind of a tough call: if it retained most of DP's content, but added Star Fox space combat on top of that, then I'd find it hard to complain!

@Spider-Kev Just one post would have been enough (there is an edit button if you need it)!

I'm glad to see some love for The Hobbit, though.
What would you want to see in a remake of it?
Or in a remake of Star Fox Adventures, for that matter?

@-wc- Eternal Darkness actually came out a few months after REmake!
ED plays a lot smoother than any of the old RE games, including the GameCube version of REmake- though the PC version of REmake closes the gap a bit with its non-tank controls and 60fps.
But ED's graphics have aged a lot worse, at least in screenshots.

PS: I swear I'm not following you!

@Xiovanni @MythTgr @Serpenterror
I'm intrigued. What would you guys want a Star Fox Adventures remake to look like? Because now that you mention it, it might be one of the games that needs it the most!
(I mean, the graphics hold up great in 1080p, so a straight port would look fine. But gameplay/content-wise, there's tons of potential in a remake.)

I think the main thing that's established here is that the GameCube had an amazing library, and basically everything deserves to be brought back in some capacity (at least as a 1080p "remaster").

@ArcticEcho The PS3 version runs at 30fps, and I believe it retains all of the small graphical downgrades of the PS2, like missing shadows and outlines.
Going by a comparison video I saw, though, it has faster loading than even the GameCube, and it doesn't run in slow-mo like the Switch, so it's probably the best bad port of ToS.

@Horace Good catch. We're having to choose between covering up the dragon, or covering up the eagle. Not a good situation.

@kurtasbestos Bonus points if the text is in English, and serves little purpose beyond being there!

@BenoitRen Exactly. Namco (et al.) put a lot of effort into downgrading Symphonia to make it run on the PS2, because they knew it would bring in lots more sales that they'd be missing out on otherwise.

But now, it runs (or should I say crawls?) on the PS3, PC, Switch, etc., and it's already raking in tons of money as-is, so there's practically zero motivation to put in any budget or effort. There's the bad press it's getting, sure, but this already happened with the last couple of ports, and it didn't stop everyone from rushing out to buy the Switch version just now!

@Vexx234 At that size, you could just drop it on your neighbours (and their house) to shut them up.

By the way, the actual in-game stats for Wailord are:
14.5 m and 398 kg (47'7" and 877.4 lb)

I love how ridiculously light it is, considering its size.

@HammerGalladeBro Hah, I had to look up the Japanese boxes to see that for myself! Maybe they re-rated it because they thought an A rating was crazy. (Aren't these games a bit violent or scary for a typical 6-year-old?)

The ESRB, also, has raised some age ratings without the game itself being changed- either they became aware of something that was missed the first time, or the reviewers had stricter standards the second time around. (IIRC, Soul Reaver and one of the Shantae games had their ratings bumped up by one without any alterations to the game, while a few other titles have had the rating change upon being remade/remastered/compiled.)

EDIT: Forgot to mention the obvious one: GTA San Andreas!

@B3RTAY The original Metroid Prime let you fast forward and even rewind the credits, which was a great idea, and should be a standard feature in games. Do you know if the remaster carried that over?

The option to skip the credits entirely is good, too, but sometimes people want to see the credits without committing half an hour of their time (and it's all the worse if they were watching for a specific section or name).

@Jayenkai Normally, the alpha channel is part of the image (along with the other three channels: red, green, and blue). But this case looks like an exception.

In the remaster, the alpha starts solid at the edges of the door, then evenly fades out towards the centre. But in the original, it drops off rapidly, staying at 0% (i.e., invisible) for most of the door's surface, leaving only a blue glow around the edge. I admittedly don't know much about rendering alpha gradients in a game engine, but this seems less like the actual texture's alpha channel being changed, and more like a quirk in the materials or shaders, where the original GCN version relied on some very specific fading behaviour that the remaster team didn't quite replicate.

Considering this, and also that the underlying textures are so faithful, this does seem more likely to be a bug than a stylistic choice.

@nessisonett Dean Evans and Tim Follin came to mind immediately, so it's great to see you mention them! Those two have probably the highest ratio of music quality to game quality in the industry.

Even Eek! The Cat (a game entirely made up of escort missions) has some great stuff- it was done by Dean Evans and Barry Leitch (San Francisco Rush 2049).

As someone who only properly got into this game in 2008 or so (my friends and I barely played it in the '90s), I can attest to this game's quality, beyond nostalgia.

Newer games like CoD (or the 2010 reimagined Goldeneye on Wii/PS3/360) are slicker and more polished, but these have lost a lot of the heart that the early 3D games had: they weren't just shooting galleries, but places to explore and puzzles to unravel- with challenging situations to approach strategically.
I won't say that someone's opinion is wrong because they only like modern, usually streamlined games, but I will say that they're missing out.

Not that modern games are all CoD. They just tend to head in that direction over time: more streamlining, less jank... and less freedom, and less interesting design. But then you've got the likes of Dishonored, which captures a lot of what those older games did well- without feeling like a relic.

If you've ever pushed the camera inside Sonic's head in Sonic Adventure, he does clearly have a single, giant eyeball in there. (Or 1/3 of a giant eyeball, more accurately; the rest was trimmed away to save on polygons.)

This is definitely, 100% canon. Yep.

@NinjaNicky He can wink, and it looks weird: the one eyelid just slides down to cover one eye, with a clear-cut edge on one side (where it meets the other eye). I forget where/when Sonic himself winks, but I recall that Amy very clearly winks like this in one of the cutscenes in Sonic Riders. (Green Forest level?)

There's also that bit in the ending of Sonic Heroes, where Sonic's pupils slide around independently of each other as he looks around, though they fortunately never cross over!

@Nua Or the third 3D generation, maybe? (Less likely that this is what he meant, but at least it makes more sense.)

Kind of an odd way to describe it in any case.

This kind of sounds like an 8-bit demake of Hyrule Warriors, doesn't it?

@Savage_Joe Other way around, actually. Looks like a PS2 game, but runs at sub 30fps like a PS3 game. (A lot of the PS2's library was 60fps- I estimate around 2/3.)