#thisdorkyguyblogs

I think it all depends on the context.

And, I dunno, Sonic Lost World still doesn’t feel… I dunno if finished is the word, but it doesn’t feel complete. Like, that game shipped on Wii U with a bug where completing the game with all the Red Star Rings would show you a bugged out congratulation message. It has a lot of systems that don’t make any sense, and usually when that happens, it suggests a last-second change that wasn’t accommodated for. It may hide its unfinished-ness better than some, but it’s still there, if you look.

But I think generally speaking you’re probably right. Incomplete games do suggest that greater plans were waylaid by a lack of time or budget, whereas a “finished” game that’s bad is just that – it was always meant to be bad.

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I find them both to be kind of hard to control for different reasons.

Sonic Adventure 2 is way more twitchy. Once you get moving fast enough, you have to be real gentle with how you move the analog stick because Sonic tends to be a little over-responsive.

The opposite is true of Sonic Adventure 1. There’s one particular place in Windy Valley I think about a lot where you get pushed down a straightaway and Sonic kind of glides down the road a bit like his shoes are coated in butter. It’s very easy to accidentally slide in to a wall.

I don’t know if we know what the “true creative vision” is on this movie.

Because you have to remember, it was originally announced, in, like… 2013? 2014? With a totally different director, at a totally different studio. A lot of this movie’s identity changed multiple times over the course of production.

That’s the thing you have to realize with this kind of movie. It’s not that somebody comes to a studio and says, “I’d like to make a Sonic the Hedgehog movie, here’s my script, here’s my budget, let’s do this.”

When it comes to Garfield, or the Smurfs, or Alvin & the Chipmunks, or whatever, usually it’s more about a creative team looking at charts and mapping trends and saying, “If we spent this much money, what could we license to turn a profit?” That list is whittled down until they find what they want to license.

After it’s decided at this corporate level that they want to make a movie, they go looking for a director and a production team and whatever. It’s almost the inverse of how you’d think movies get made. It’s less “I have a good idea for a nice movie” and more “I have a profitable idea for a cash cow.”

So, you know, in 2014 or whatever when Sony originally greenlit this movie, Sonic was in a more interesting place. It was the beginning of a transitional period – Sonic Generations had renewed a lot of good will for the franchise, Sega was trying to revitalize the brand with Sonic Boom, they were signing exclusivity deals with Nintendo, the snarky social media was ramping up, it was all moving and shaking. Quality or not, a lot of people were talking about Sonic.

Sony’s executives saw a chance to work their way in to that chaos, and they took it. Unfortunately, Sony’s movie division was in the crapper back then after a never-ending string of failures (Ghostbusters, etc.) so they figured Sonic was a noose around their neck and sold it to Paramount. It was always just a piece of property; a machine that signs checks. When they began to doubt its ability to do that, they got rid of it.

That’s not to say these movies are staffed by people who don’t care. Nobody wants to do a bad job. Their ability to put food on the table every night hinges on them doing good enough work to be hired for the next five projects, so they WANT it to succeed. But there is still kind of an assembly-line nature to these sorts of things where an artist will pitch ten different versions of the way a character looks and the winning design will be the one that’s easiest to make in to an action figure. 

And at every public-facing level, people have to look totally confident in their work, even if market forces are conspiring against them. The artist might like Design C, but three groups of focus testers liked Design F. Maybe those focus testers are wrong! Sometimes that happens! But when you’re trying to gauge what will make the most money and appeal to the widest audience, you have to go with Design F. That’s the peril in all of this, but you can’t ever let the public know that.

Because there are so many layers of pretending everything’s okay when it might not actually be okay, it’s incredibly difficult to know just what the “true creative vision” for this movie actually was. That’s part of the reason it’s so interesting they allowed it to change at all, because this is very, very unprecedented.

Will it make for a better movie? I have my doubts. It will look less horrifying, sure, but what if there’s more wrong with it than just the way Sonic looks? I don’t think they’re doing reshoots or recording new lines of dialog, they’re just replacing Sonic’s visuals.

Let’s take, say, the movie Back to the Future 2. A studio can hire a production company that takes the original film negatives and scans them in to the computer. Because that’s physical film, they end up getting an incredible amount of resolution and detail out of those negatives that was not previously possible to display, leading to vastly improved picture clarity.

Oh VHS, you used to get this

And now on a Blu-ray, you get

Nothing about the movie had to be reshot. It was filmed in 1989, and you could probably get a crystal clear, razor sharp 4K image out of this film almost for free. (Comparatively speaking)

Let’s say you want to do that for Resident Evil 2.

That’s kind of as clear as it’s ever going to get. There’s no re-scanning negative film stock to uncover hidden detail. At best, you can run it through a filter, and while modern neural network filters like ESRGAN and Gigapixel are way better than the older filters like HQ2X or SuperSai, they still leave noticeable smears and artifacts:

Now, I get that the old visuals are fine. I don’t think it’s unknown that I play a lot of retro games. There’s nothing wrong with pixel art, there’s nothing wrong with low resolutions, there’s nothing wrong with chunky polygons. There is charm to be had in that aesthetic.

And in the context of contrasting with movies, there’s a lot here to liken to Ted Turner’s efforts to colorize old black and white movies. Sometimes, old things are best left in their original, untouched formats. But that limits the audience to people who understand the intended historical context, which might be difficult to come by.

And then there’s the control aspect. You don’t steer a movie with a remote control, but you do use a controller with video games, and sometimes that controller looks like this:

Sometimes you can remap things to work with modern controllers, but some would argue that remapping the C-buttons to an analog stick doesn’t always work out properly.

Or what about the case of a game like Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3, where they use features that modern game controllers don’t even have anymore, like pressure-sensitive face buttons?

Not everything can be fixed by a port, and often things are lost in translation.

And so the solution becomes to remake the game. To go from this:

To this:

Preserve the spirit and the intent but give everything a makeover. Tighter controls, better inventory management, shorter loading times, more visual detail. Make it look new again, but don’t change what it was going for.

And that’s the thing with Resident Evil, right? It’s been a lot of things. When you say you’re remaking Resident Evil 2, there are a lot of directions you can go in. You could remake it in the style of the Resident Evil 1 remake, seen above, where you preserve the fixed camera angles and pre-rendered backgrounds. You could remake it in the style of Resident Evil 4, where it’s more of a pulpy summer blockbuster full of flashy moments and action movie one-liners. You could remake it in the style of Resident Evil 7, where it’s a tense, deliberate first person game.

They didn’t do any of that. Or they did all of it all at the same time, depending on how you view things. But it is still identifiably Resident Evil 2, just now on Blu-ray. See more and experience more than ever before.

But in being a remake, it leaves the door wide open for it to become something like Turtles in Time: Reshelled, or Super Mario 64 DS, or that bland Activision Goldeneye remake where they put Daniel Craig in it. 

But even those games still stuck to their original genres, and their original concepts. The Final Fantasy VII Remake is a completely different game that they’re retelling the original game’s story through. That’s not a remake by any definition of the word, unless your whole definition is just “it is also a video game.”

I started writing a script for a video about this, but I dunno if I’ll finish it.

I think modders have an innate need to fix things like this. Sonic 06 is far from the only game to receive this treatment. I’ve played tons of Codemasters’ FUEL through a mod called ReFueled, which attempts to patch up that crummy game in to something a little more enjoyable. There’s Sikkmod for Doom 3, which in addition to adding tons of amazing modern graphical effects, also enables tons of quality-of-life stuff, like adjusting movement speed, weapon damage, and adding multiple types of persistent flashlights (head mounted, weapon mounted, etc.).

The big one of course is the Knights of the Old Republic 2 mega-mod that restores cut story elements and is so popular that it’s straight up included in the official Steam version of the game by default now.

I think there’s a sense that people like the game, and want more people to be able to like it, too. That was my reason for the knock-down, drag-out arguments behind The Unleashed Project’s S-Ranks, which eventually lead to my own fixer mod, S-Ranks Unleashed. I just wanted people to love Sonic Unleashed like I did, so I fixed it.

The problem with Sonic 06 is that I personally think significant portions of the design document need to be rewritten from scratch. There is no easy bandaid that is going to fix Sonic 06.

In theory, it’s great that there’s so many projects straight up recreating the game in Unity, because it means having the chance to rebuild core elements of the game. But the next problem there is it stops being, like, technological work that a programmer could do and starts being, like, actual game design. You aren’t plugging holes in code, you’re making changes to the user experience, which is a whole separate job.

Which is where the problems arise, I think. Not only are these guys fighting against the innately buggy nature of Sonic 06, they’re creating new problems of their own that they have to solve in tandem.

You move pretty fast when boosting, I don’t know if you’d even really be able to tell what was going on a lot of the time. There are middlegrounds, where you could slow Sonic down, but…

I dunno. The parkour system is a cool idea from a certain perspective but most Sonic games don’t have any problem just making Sonic run up walls and stuff without needing to push a special button for it.

In my head, I’ve always wondered if it would be possible for… like, you know the little air dash you get when you don’t have a homing attack target and you push the jump button a second time in the air? I’ve wondered what it would play like if you did one of those in to a wall and it had Sonic attach and run up it.

Hulk: Ultimate Destruction kind of does this. Hulk gets an air dash in that game and if you dash in to a vertical wall, he just starts running straight up it. A system like that might work better for Sonic than a dedicated parkour button.

The closest I’ve ever been to VR was owning a Virtual Boy for about two weeks back in November 1995.

I had a dream about trying VR for the first time a few weeks ago, but I almost instantly woke up after putting the headset on.