HUGE SCREENS TESTED–FROM £165! From 22” to 28”, these monsters have all your pixels…
ISSUE 218 OCT 2008
PERFORMANCE GEAR & GAMING
ESSENTIAL TECH SKILLS!
ISSUE 218 YOU CAN READ MINDS?
YOU CAN READ MINDS?
ULTIMATE MOBO GUIDE
Explained! Voltages,bus speeds, sockets, phase power, capacitors & more
The final showdown! AMD versus NVidia Definitive Crossfire vs SLI verdict! Plus overclocked 4870 and 280GTX tested THERE’S MORE… WWW.PCFORMAT.CO.UK
“IS THIS REALLY THE PINNACLE VIA’s Atom killer revealed OF HUMAN ACHIEVEMENT? Make your own laptop cooler YOU’RE DAMN RIGHT IT IS! ” Titan Quest
Set up home video streaming in 5 mins!
Top guide Issue 218 Oct 2008 £4.99 Outside UK & ROI £6.49
OBLIVION: AWESOME STALKER CLEAR SKY HACKS AND MODS EXCLUSIVE REVIEW!
PCF218.cover Sec1:3
7/8/08 18:57:07
The
Art of
Richard Cobbett introduces the gamers ďŹ ghting
128
PCF218.feat3 128
October 2008
11/8/08 10:48:04
remakes to keep your favourite games alive, long after the
Game Over screen vanishes from memory
sad fact of gaming is that the average release has a lifespan that’d make even a mayfly sympathetic. The average game hits the shelves on Monday, the bargain bin on Wednesday, and by Friday, it likely lives on as nothing more than a fond memory and a few references on the geekier online forums. Publishers rarely do more with their back catalogues than try to prevent anyone distributing them, stores don’t have the space to stock games that aren’t selling great guns, and gamers, well, gamers are fickle. Just a couple of years can be the difference between the Best Game Ever and outright torture on a neatly pressed CD. The absence of basic features like
A
high-resolution, mouselook, or the ability to jump can turn even an acknowledged classic like Doom into nothing more than a rose-tinted amble for old-school players, while newer players try to work out just what all the fuss was about. And then there are the remake projects. There are two basic types of remake; what you might call reconstruction and remastering. A reconstruction takes a basic game concept, such as Frogger or Space Invaders, and tries to modernise it. A remastered game focuses on keeping the core gameplay more or less as it was, but bringing the technology (and typically interface design) to modern levels. An example of the former might be a 3D version of Frogger, where the camera is in the frog’s mouth instead of hanging over the level, or where the frog
has to navigate a multi-level 3D world to get to its destination. A remastered version would simply swap out the old sprites for polished 3D models and leave the rest alone.
COMMERCIAL REMAKES Very few companies have bothered with either, for a number of reasons. Most notably, there’s not much money in it, unless you’re porting a game to a completely new platform and a new audience. Even if the game has been radically overhauled, the perception that it’s old can work against you, and the number of people desperately hankering for a second crack at one particular title is rarely going to match up to the potential audience of something shiny and brand new. Services like Xbox Live have shaken this up a bit, as happened when Prince of October 2008
PCF218.feat3 129
129
11/8/08 10:48:12
The art of remakes
Persia got both a shiny new game in the form of the Sands of Time trilogy, and a full remake of the original platformer, but this rarely happens. That said, there have been some high profile commercial remakes. Most recently, the heavy hitter was Tomb Raider: Anniversary, which took the original game’s plot and basic locations and rebuilt them. As well as having more polygons and graphical effects to splash on Lara and her environment, each area was designed with the idea of creating the game Core would have made, had they had modern technology and ten years of sequels behind them back at launch. This included far more intricate puzzles and scenery, a Lara capable of moving freely around the world (the original used fixed block units, and access to triangles didn’t occur until Tomb Raider III) and QuickTime events during cut-scenes and big boss fights. Most remakes aren’t lucky enough to have such major licences behind them, and the games that companies choose to grace with a new version can be… unusual. RealMyst – a 3D recreation of the original Myst game – is fair enough. The Journeyman Project? Not so much.
130
PCF218.feat3 130
Above and right King’s Quest II, dragged into the 21st century by an anonymous team
Below and right Lefty’s Bar as portrayed in the 90s remake of Larry and the original, Softporn
Westwood called in outside assistance for Dune 2000 – easily its most forgettable RTS. Sid Meier’s Pirates! travelled from 1987 to 2004 and picked up nothing but new fans. And of course, some games should just have remained buried. Any good feelings people had towards Defender of the Crown went right down the privy after actually playing it in the cold light of good gaming. Goodness only knows who was clamouring for an update of Bad Mojo, the cockroach simulator/adventure in gross-out graphics, where dead rat and chopped up catfish backgrounds were lovingly reintroduced to our stomachs. Arguably the most impressive commercial remake of all time was Tex Murphy: Overseer, released in 1998. This was based on the 1989 adventure, Mean Streets, although about all they had in common was the basic plot framework. Mean Streets was an odd mix of side-on adventure, flight simulator bits, and very primitive attempts to get actors (or to
be more accurate, employees of Access Software) into a game. Overseer‘s story was completely re-written, setting it in a full 3D world that could be explored at will, with all the characters and cutscenes handled by some surprisingly good full motion videos. It was one of the last interactive movies. It didn’t so much bomb as nuke itself – the UK release going straight to budget.
PLAYING ALONG AT HOME It takes a very specific kind of game to convince players to band together. For starters, it has to be original, and have some cult value. The games that get remade are inevitably the ones that started something new; the titles that every gamer of their era would know, if not actually have played, and know to be good if only by cultural osmosis. The most recent game to warrant the effort is the original Half-Life via the Black Mesa project (an attempt to outdo Valve’s very half-hearted HL remake, consisting of little more than the models and map data dumped into the new engine). It seemed a bit soon when the project was announced, but a billion delays later, who knows? The second key factor is there has to be a genuine reason to put the work in. Remaking a game isn’t that far removed from making a new one from scratch, except that most of the fun creative stuff has already been done, and you’re
August 2008
11/8/08 10:48:12
The art of remakes not going to get much credit for it. If the original game is still perfectly playable and easily accessible, why not just play it? If you don’t have anything to add, whether it’s compatibility with modern systems, or something more cuttingedge, why bother?
HUNTING FOR REMAKES
CAN IT BE DONE? Most important of all, the project has to be realistically doable. The more complex the core game is, the more systems that have to be implemented and important assets generated, scripts written, and consequently the less likely it is that you’ll ever be finished. Retros are the most popular remakes, since the core mechanics can more easily be handled by a single programmer (the original probably was), possibly backed up with an artist and a musician to turn the old graphics into something stylish and new. Not needing a whole team, makes starting a remake project something that can be done on a whim, rather than requiring a huge time investment. That’s not to say it’s necessarily easy; just more doable. Games like Tetris and Defender and Tempest make for good programming practice. Releasing a new version of Treasure Island Dizzy, crap though those games were (yes they were) is also far more likely to draw attention than some open source project about reticulating splines or controlling traffic lights. No nostalgia factor there, sadly. Adventure games have become one of the most high-profile genres to be remade of late, thanks to a mix of the
Above Bad Mojo Redux. For those who wanted to see the dead rat in high resolution – sickos.
crappy state of most new adventure games to hit the shelves, and the availability of one tool in particular: Adventure Game Studio. This removes much of the pain of general adventure programming, letting you focus on the game-specific scripting, with a massive community of developers ready to have you pick their brains. Sierra’s Quest series has received most of the love, with the anonymous team at IGDI producing comprehensive remakes of King’s Quest 1 and 2, with Quest for Glory 2 on the way. Instead of simply updating the sound and art, both have been rewritten from scratch, adding extra puzzles and plot elements, redesigned maps, and full speech. Another team, Infamous Adventures,
Dirk the Dying-All-The-Time from Dragon’s Lair II ,the most remade game series in history
As with anything requiring a long list, which is handily kept methodically up to date by people, who appear to have far too much spare time on their hands, Wikipedia is a good starting point. At en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_game_ remakes, you’ll find a collection of all the major project remakes out there, including the majority of commercial ones. What you won’t find are the smaller, arguably more interesting (if only by dint of being more freely available) freeware ones. Abandonware site, Abandonia has a sister site, Abandonia Reloaded, which supposedly specialises in remakes, but has increasingly spread out to general freeware too. Either way, you’ll find it at www.reloaded.org. To stay up to date with new releases as they happen, your best bets are the indie game blogs, notably www.tigsource.com and www. indiegames.com. In both cases, you’ll find prominent remakes listed among the new titles, but the tag system will help you zero in on games of interest. More specialised sites include the Flash collections at www.newgrounds.com/collection/ videogameremakes, handheld specific games at handheld.remakes.org, and keeping its eye on the classics, www.classic-retro-games.com. For more classic games, the Showcase at www.retroremakes. com is your friend, whether you’re up for some Ant Attack, Alien8, Manic Miner, or… Power Rangers: Dino Thunder? As ever, if there’s a particular game you’re desperate to give another spin, Google is still your best friend. You never know what shared interest you might have with some bloke in Norway…
Above Keep an eye on the latest releases at both dedicated retro sites, and the general indie game blogs
October 2008
PCF218.feat3 131
131
11/8/08 10:48:14
The art of remakes
Developers hoping to avoid this have only one real option – release the game and hope it spreads round the net fast enough to avoid any passing lawyers, while hiding behind pseudonyms and anonymous webpages. While legally, and morally, a company is in the right to refuse permission to use its characters, it can come across as very petty. Selling a remake is a big nono, both to the fans and the copyright laws, and the games chosen for remake are rarely likely to see another release.
NEVER SAY NEVER
“Softporn Adventure: regarded as about as sexy as a wire pipe cleaner up the man tube” kept closer to the original source, but otherwise gave the same treatment to King’s Quest III, and is working on a similar project based on the ghastly Space Quest II. Infamous also remade Leisure Suit Larry 2 with a point-andclick interface, replacing the original text parser.
WHAT ABOUT THE REST? The obvious question is what happened to Quest for Glory 1, Space Quest 2 and Larry 1? Sierra got there first. At the start of the 90s, it dug several of its most popular series out of the cupboard, most notably those three, and Police Quest. Each was given a complete overhaul to turn them into point-andclick games, using its SCI engine, given VGA graphics, extra jokes, and blessed with proper soundcard-powered music and whizz-bang effects. For Larry, this was its second major upgrade. The original game was itself a remake (and to a large extent parody) of an earlier Sierra game, the ‘erotic’ textbased Softporn Adventure, widely regarded as being roughly as sexy as a wire pipe cleaner up the man tube. The legality of remakes is pretty simple: a big red stop sign. In practice, it’s up to individual developers – or to be
PCF218.feat3 132
more exact, publishers – whether or not they turn a blind eye. The older a game is, the more likely it is that nobody’s going to wave a red flag. If they do, the remake creators have two choices: cease and desist as ordered; wasting all their work or release the game and face the possible penalties. The word for a licence holder stopping a project is ‘Foxed’, named for Fox Interactive shutting down an Aliens mod for Doom.
Above Once played, never forgotten. The Ur-Quan Masters isn’t just cult gaming; it practically has one
Below Note to aliens. If you’ve got to come kill us, please, do it like this. Go on…
That said, you can never know for sure. Square shut down a Chrono Trigger remake back in 2004, when the 1995-era game was impossible to get hold of (and was never released over here). Just last month, however, it announced its own commercial remake for the Nintendo DS, and if only 1 per cent of the fans slavering over the prospect actually buy it, that’s roughly a squillion dollars in the bank right there. Similarly, Sierra released several classic adventure packs (albeit so badly that several of them failed to include the copy protection codes and at least one was borderline unplayable) that didn’t sell many copies, but undoubtedly shifted more than if they’d had to compete with far superior free versions. In addition, even if a game never sells another copy, companies are increasingly aware of the marketing benefits of releasing old games for free to help boost a future sequel, or just grab a few column inches. Sierra with both Betrayal at Krondor and Red Baron, and if you want a copy of either Grand Theft Auto or GTA2, just head over to Rockstar’s website. One way to bypass this problem is not to remake the game as such, but to create a new utility to play its files.
11/8/08 10:48:16
The art of remakes
Above and right Probably the most famous posterior in gaming history… and now a face
The most famous of these is SCUMMVM, originally built with an eye on early Lucasarts titles, but now capable of handling a number of other developers’ back catalogues as well. Exult does something similar for Ultima VII. The downside here is that players have to (ahem) acquire copies of said files from somewhere, leaving them available only to devoted fans who still have those original game discs and disks safely held in a padded envelope somewhere – or anyone who has access to the net and a P2P program. The other, even safer way, is to work with the developers directly. Sadly, most designers don’t count, thanks to not owning the rights to their own titles and franchises, although many (if not the majority) are happy to see their games alive and played rather than forgotten or stuffed away in some vault somewhere. The most successful of these projects is The Ur-Quan Masters, which began with the open-sourced code for Star Control 2 on 3DO, and became a full remake project. The Star Control name wasn’t available, but everything else – alien names, graphics, sound and all assets – was made available. The developers are independent, but don’t need to worry about being shut down by act of lawyer. Moreover, the original creators were able to use the attention drummed up to try and persuade Activision to commission a proper sequel (replacing the widely hated SC3). It didn’t work out, but not every story has a happy ending.
RETRO LIVES ON The future of remakes is hazy at best. It’s likely that as long as there are gamers, there’ll be updates of the castiron classics, such as Tetris, Qix, Space Invaders and Q-Bert. However, the more advanced games get, the less likely it is that any home developers will be able to match, never mind improve upon the phenomenal production values of modern titles. It’s one thing – and not a small one – to repaint 50 backgrounds and create sprites, but quite another to
not only recreate a modern world, but surpass it. In all likelihood, people won’t. Unlike the original 2D games, locked to the exact pixels drawn by their artists, there’s a lot that can be done to make even simple 3D shine that little more, whether it’s replacing the textures (as seen in Deus Ex: Invisible War and System Shock 2) with something more detailed, or creating a new engine to parse the original files and add proper shading, coloured lighting or other such effects. Other projects will continue on keeping the games playable in their original form, as seen with DOSBox (the heart of many classic games on Steam, and the forthcoming Good Old Games service). Graphics and sound have long since reached the point where if you want to play these games, the original appearance isn’t going to cause much trouble. Good art direction trumps high technology every time. In some ways, that’s a sad state of affairs – but it’s one with a positive side. With virtual machines and emulators and computers powerful enough to cater to older games’ every whim, we’re leaving the world where games can ‘die’. They’ll just no longer be easily available, which isn’t the same thing as gone forever. So long as there are some fans still flying the flag for specific titles, the classics of today and yesteryear could potentially live on forever. And if humanity ever creates some universespanning supercomputer with a million terabytes of data in an area the size of your fingernail, capable of rewriting the laws of physics itself with a simple flick of its electronic brain… you can almost guarantee that someone, somewhere, will have released a version of Dragon’s Lair for it. ¤ RC
GAMES TO PLAY RIGHT NOW Whether you missed them the first time, or just need to play them again, here’s our picks First of all, adventures. The Quest games mentioned elsewhere are perfect starting points, and you’ll find them at www.infamous-adventures.com and www. agdinteractive.com. If you’ve yet to play a Sierra game, King’s Quest II is your best starting point (at least until Quest for Glory 2 finally comes out – it was a fantastic game originally and the remake looks to be excellent). The plot’s simple enough that you won’t lose out by not playing the first, while the opening bits of KQIII are harder than diamond-coated nails in Glasgow. For a change of pace, Lucasfan Games’ Maniac Mansion Deluxe is an excellent straight conversion of one of the first graphic adventure games. The devs no longer have an official web presence, but google it to find a mirror. Star Control II (sc2.sourceforge.net) is one of the cult classics that fans absolutely rave about. Like a lot of old games, it’s tough to get into (unless you cheat and grab a walkthrough) but its mix of strategy and RPG is guaranteed to be unlike anything else you’ve ever played. Almost as beloved was School Daze, the original ‘naughty boy’ sim, available as Klass of ’99 (retrospec. sgn.net/users/rjordan/klass/), and almost everything at (www.auld-games.co.uk), from the original C64 Ghostbusters, to Monty on the Run, to… well, someone out there must like Hunchback. Right? Someone?
Really? Looks like a shiny new VGA one to us...
October 2008
PCF218.feat3 133
133
11/8/08 10:48:17