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Remakes and Remasters
16 Plays1 month ago
In the first "proper" episode of our rebooted podcast, we take a look at the wild world of remakes and remasters. What's the difference between the two? Are they worth the time and effort? And is Gareth really named after a Welsh tv monkey?
Originally published: Sep. 19, 2024
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Transcript
Meet the Hosts
00:00:31
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Backseat Designers, I'm Trolls, aka the Space Quest Historian. And no, that's not a flesh-colored cucumber in my pants, I really am not happy to see you. With me, as always, are my two delightful co-hosts, the man who wishes he could reanimate Margaret Thatcher just so he can kill her all over again, Mr. Doctor Gareth Millworth. That's not entirely true, I would interview her first.
00:00:55
Speaker
just to just to see what her deal is like if she's really and and then would you would you sort to the face would you gunshot no i'm just let's let's not get into that um because we have another person in the house a man who wishes he could reanimate peter cushing just so he can plant a big fat wet kiss on his forehead mr freder golden i'm not saying i would stop it short at the forehead but hello just work your way down I like Peter Cushing a lot. He was a phenomenal actor who I could talk about for hours, but we're not going to do that here. No, we have a topic this time.
Life Updates and Anecdotes
00:01:30
Speaker
The topic. The topic. But first of all, how have you guys been been doing? It's been a couple of weeks since we did our introductory Rambly episode where you guys have been up to.
00:01:40
Speaker
Not much, huh? I think you're the only one who's been up to anything of note compared to our daily lives. Have I really? I moved house. ah was That was it. My life just sort of hit pause for a couple of weeks and now I'm in a new room. Was that like brick by brick or? Yes, we actually build it from scratch in a couple of weeks. Actually, one of the dudes who helped us move is like this um amateur carpenter kind of thing, bricklayer. He basically just built them his family a house out in like the woods somewhere, just scrounging up materials that they get for free. and we we We went out there one day. and We were used to them living in like this small cottage kind of thing. We went out there one day, and he's like built an attachment to the house the size of the original cottage, just glued it onto the
Welsh Culture and Humor
00:02:31
Speaker
other side. Like, oh, how long did that take? but Two or three weeks.
00:02:35
Speaker
Is this man's name Varek? No, he's Welsh, actually. So I don't know if ah Gareth has some perspective he'd like to throw in on this one. Well, my name is Welsh, but I have no...
00:02:50
Speaker
Opinions on the Welsh that anybody with this accent really should vocalize. Are we pronouncing your name correctly, then? Is it Gareth? No, no, it's Gareth. Oh, Gareth? In a Welsh accent, kind of Welsh accent. There was a puppet show on the Welsh TV channel, and this monkey is called Gareth. I'll have to dig out a I have to dig out a picture of it. it's It's quite entertaining. I've no idea what's going on because it's all in Welsh, but he's called Gareth. so It's so nice when you get the story of this is why we chose the name for you, dear son.
00:03:33
Speaker
I'm a monkey on television. I think the topic of of this podcast has just shifted entirely.
The Art of Story Remakes
00:03:39
Speaker
We're not going to cover what we planned. We're just going to talk about the monkey called Gareth. Apparently so. Apparently so. yeah To be fair, um there's only been one Dane that I've met so far that hasn't been able to pronounce my name. And he was a little bit worse for wear and he didn't speak English. so Well, that'll do it. yeah It's not too bad.
00:03:59
Speaker
Well, actually, this segue is nicely into our topic because you could argue that the Gareth with us is a remaster or a remake, as it were, of the Welsh TV monkey Gareth. Do you know what? I think we've just had the worst segue of the entire history of the show.
00:04:17
Speaker
I haven't done this for a few years, give or take. you give you know Give me a chance. Okay. I will give you a chance because we had a bit of a, a I wouldn't say an argument. It was more of a back and forth. You told me to eat your shit. That did culminate in in me telling you to eat shit. Yes. But that was mainly because I was eating dinner at the time and I couldn't be fucked to answer in a proper way. Were you eating shit?
00:04:41
Speaker
Um, no chicken burger, but uh, but nice name right my son in a bit of a mood at the time. So he did complain that it tasted like shit. Lovely. But he, he ate it. So it it was tasty shit. Dan lotta burger.
00:04:58
Speaker
like at god damn we should probably i don't know if anyone heard the previous episode all the way to the end but actually we should probably extend our thanks because according to the youtube stats a couple of hundred people listen to that uh to the end and knowing the way you handle maths you know that equals a couple of hundred thousand people listening ah to to the end so i just want to thank each and every person individually yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah expect a kickstarter by the end of the month
00:05:33
Speaker
don't get a big hit. All right. So I'm the only one who's actually done anything with my life for the past two weeks. So none of you jets wants to interject
Remasters vs. Remakes
00:05:42
Speaker
on that one. I'll just assume you've been sitting still staring at a wall for a fortnight.
00:05:47
Speaker
Pretty nurture has to be said. you know Being a father of two, I sometimes wish that was what my life revolved around, but sadly, oh it's been a but it's been a little more menial and work-life balance-y. That's your excuse for everything, isn't it? I have active semen. Anyway, I don't anymore.
00:06:09
Speaker
Well, I never did. So I win. Um, but still, uh, the, the, the topic of, of, good lord we're just going to let that, wait when wait we're just to have a sit in that. um Yeah. Everyone in here is officially sterile.
00:06:30
Speaker
I don't know. I just don't think Gareth ever has sex. and for Fuck it. oh well That does help, actually. it's It is the best contraception. Don't you remember? He he told us he'd had a vasectomy and he made a big number out of not carrying semen through customs. I thought he was just born that way. i thought i'll see people it It was an empty cup. Well, I got it i got the ah the the the procedure done before it was time to get it tested because then I needed to emigrate so I had to ah Yeah, find a way of getting that back to the UK. That's also how you got COVID. Let's let's move on. Shall we go with through the urinary check? I was just gonna say did you get it at the airport? Was this like a bunched full-body cavity search or was she surprisingly gentle?
00:07:20
Speaker
No, thankfully. Some people get a temporary passport at the airport, some people get a vasectomy.
00:07:29
Speaker
god that that one stumped both of us a 50-50 chance well look denmark is so racist it's giving vasectomies at the border post because it just doesn't want these boring children okay okay we should definitely move on definitely move on there may be a little bit of judicious editing so if you hear any voices overlapping or suddenly jumping around um no i'm just us that's just us being terrible but or labeling the foreign ministry, yeah. I just asked if you wanted to stab or shoot Margaret Thatcher. I don't think we can do any worse than that. um Yeah, she's already dead, so... We had a topic. Damage is limited. There was a topic discussed. ah we're We're now um almost eight minutes into the episode. Let's finally get around to the topic, shall we?
00:08:13
Speaker
um remasters and remakes of games. And I had a whole list of, you know, just games we could talk about. Was this a good remaster or was this a good remake? Was this a good demake and all that sort of stuff. And then As we sort of alluded to earlier, over dinnertime, we got into this little discussion of, well, what's the remake and a remap? What's the difference? What's the actual definition of these two? So I think if we could just quickly recap how Frederick is wrong about this, and I'll ah jump in after that and correct everyone. Come at me, bro. No, no, you start, sir. Well, I mean,
00:08:54
Speaker
It's hard for me because i'm i'm I'm familiar with remaster as the musical term first and foremost and what you basically do with a musical remaster is you take everything that has been mixed you know like the guitar and the drums and blah blah blah bass guitar is all you know on two channels one per speaker that goes into like an EQ, a a compressor, whatever, audio, black magic, beady beady boo, and it it it comes out in something that sounds the same way across your big-ass 70s stereo and your shitty Bluetooth cans, you know, whatever. So not really a fresh coat of paint, more like washing the window, right?
00:09:37
Speaker
Yeah, and the same same kind of idea applies to films where you go back to the original footage and clean up the audio, maybe sharpen the picture. And yeah, it's it's essentially the same thing, but it looks better on a digital TV or on the big screen, better than it did when it first came out. On that point, I went to go and see the remaster of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre last week. So so um that was That had been remastered and was definitely a lot cleaner and easier to see some of the darker shots in the woods than it had been before. The blood was just and sparkling
Debating Game Revivals
00:10:11
Speaker
red. just
00:10:13
Speaker
Whereas if you went to see a remake, you might have seen, I don't know, the shittiest film remake of all time, I guess, is, is ah Gus Van Sant watching Hitchcock's Psycho and deciding, I can do better than that. And somehow hopefully realizing that he could not, in fact, do better than that. um So that's where you basically build, rebuild the whole thing from the ground up, right? You didn't know, and in an adventure game, the story would be the same, but everything is kind of redone.
00:10:42
Speaker
um I guess not necessarily close to the original product. like yeah well we what Well, this is where the things started falling apart. I mean, this is sounds like in the in the interim between me chowing down a chicken burger and us. Which tastes like shit. Which did not taste like shit. My kid's just an asshole.
00:11:04
Speaker
um We have apparently sort of met in in some sort of agreement, whereas there was an action and almost an argument erupting a few hours ago. see My contention was that, as as we both pointed out in in our own ways, the terms remaster and remake get conflated occasionally.
00:11:27
Speaker
for it my My example was the ah Silent Hill remasters that have come out are not actually remasters. They're remakes, but they get branded as remasters. There's probably going to be a Silent Hill fan in the comments going, whoa, actually. But that's that's how I remember it, at least.
00:11:43
Speaker
Their remakes, ah none of the original assets from the original games are in these new versions. They've just you know they've rebuilt the games essentially. um So that's where the term remaster and remakes kind of get mixed up.
00:12:01
Speaker
I sort of get the impression that we're at a golden age of remasters, at least for FPS games. I touched upon some of that in the last episode, but... Yeah, you got a restraining order, I know. Yeah, Quake 2, Doom 64. Oh, Lost Connections to Server. Oh, it says Lost Connections to Server, attempting to reconnect. What's the English Planke?
00:12:25
Speaker
No, I'm still here, but I've been told to go and put the kettle on, so I've been listening to you while I put the, uh, the kettle on on the other side. a What I was saying before Sancaster decided to emulate fucking Skype is that we seem to be having sort of a golden age for remasters presently. I touched upon it in the last episode, but FPS games like Doom 64, Doom 1 and 2, Quake 1 and 2, have all seen some pretty spectacular remasters. Now, I don't know how many years it was ago, but if you go to GOG and you play
00:13:04
Speaker
the phenomenal, by the way, game, the 11th hour by Tramabyte, the sequence of the seventh guest. That's the actual full title. Yeah, you'll get something that has a night dive studios who are very well renowned for the remasters, by the way, logo slapped in front of it.
00:13:23
Speaker
and that's basically it you know that's as far as the remastering goes uh well the options menu is dumbed down but the same bugs are still there the same up choose puzzles are still there um the mismatch in volume between the the voicing and the music that's still there so how I think we've moved on from a point where the in-game was to get these games on digital storefronts and sometimes they just did that with the least amount of effort they could possibly conceive to put into it. I will i will ah somewhat defend Night Dive Studios here because there is no way to remaster the 11th hour. All the original footage has been lost and what you get on GOG is the
00:14:09
Speaker
shitty windows version that trilobite themselves did back in in the 90s that just completely you know butchers the whole experience but why they would slap a night dive logo on the front of it and did did they do they actually call it a remaster i don't think they call it a remaster but you know here's the thing if if you slap the logo onto it you'll have expectations i remember actually when um When one of the... I don't know if he's a founder, so I gotta choose my words carefully, but one of the main guys behind the Kex engine that Nightdive has become famous for using, ah one of the first things he did that gave him some um notoriety was actually
00:14:51
Speaker
um deconstructing Doom 64 and doing a total conversion for a Doom source port, which meant then for the first time, you could play Doom 64 on a PC without having to emulate a Nintendo 64 and without having the original ROM in your possession. um So it's not as if these guys aren't used to reverse engineering. you know that They'll do that. And I think they could have done something for the eleventh hour at the very least turn the music down while the angry bald man is yelling in your ear you know that would have been a start but i don't think they were given the resources to do that i ah you know i you know entire speculation on my part i think the goal was just let let's get this piece of shit on steam and gog and conveniently forget everything about it
00:15:41
Speaker
But that emulation kind of issue, I think, is is really important because the there there's other changes that can be made to games that from a from the end user point of view, maybe they don't change the way the game plays a huge amount, but they they do in in subtle and not so subtle ways change what the original thing was. This is this has become ah much more of ah an issue for me and my in my day job because um For those of you who don't know, I'm a um a historian um and I i work at the... Actual historian. Yeah, yeah an actual an actual historian. Yeah, yeah I do ah do a podcast with the but the Space Quest historian it probably has more reach than I do as a professional historian. and My brother is now a... At times we're in... My brother now probably has ah as a bigger audience as ah as a motor racing historian than I do. But the point is,
00:16:31
Speaker
One of the things that I am interested in is and the archived internet and how you use those kind of websites and the way that they get sort of changed and mediated by the way that they've been they've they've been held. And and any it is it is tricky to work out when it when it comes to ah to a remastering. Is the remastering being done to make the game more palatable to a modern audience or is it just the bare minimum required to get the thing to work on a modern computer, and is that something we should be doing, or should we be leaving them as they are and doing all sorts of weird emulation stuff? I'm not entirely sure what the right answer is there. Oh, that that's and that's a very interesting point, actually, because i mean on on the whole,
00:17:16
Speaker
Having a remaster whose purpose it is to allow a game to play on modern system, which was previously outdated and and wouldn't work on modern system, Grim Fandango comes to mind. That thing was notoriously hard to get running on modern PCs because it was a Windows 95 or 98 game or whatever. and And you had to have a virtual machine to get that thing running.
00:17:39
Speaker
um that is and That's that's genuine genuinely noble ah attempts to to get stuff on. And also, you know they polished up some of the artwork made at high res, the original ran in 640x480. Now it's in full widescreen. They added a point-and-click interface, which occasionally works, but you know pay for effort.
00:17:58
Speaker
and So since so so that's that's that's my idea of a good remaster. The day of the Tentacle remaster is even better um because it lets you switch between ah updated graphics, old graphics, updated UI, old UI, updated sound effects and speech, old sound effects and speech, like on the fly. You can customize that any way you want.
00:18:18
Speaker
that's That's like a proper remaster, but it also takes care of that thing you said about letting it run on modern machines, which was, you know, make it more accessible to people who want to play it, but don't know how to set up a virtual machine or run emulators or all that sort of shit. That's one thing. The other is the low effort, low hanging fruit, where it's perfectly possible to run this thing on modern machines. Maybe it's not even that old of a game.
00:18:45
Speaker
um i i don't particularly know how many people still have their old PS1s and PS2s and still play Silent Hill. I would imagine it's quite a lot of people. So I don't think the new remakes of Silent Hill were um had had much to do with
Challenges in Game Remakes
00:19:05
Speaker
garnering a new audience. I think Silent Hill has done pretty well in terms of audiences. I think that was more in the interest of, as you say, giving it a new coat of paint and going back in and just see, okay, what would happen if we
00:19:18
Speaker
you know, but remade this with all the bells and whistles we have at our disposal today. Well, I mean, you mentioned Grim Fandango, and then, you know, I'm tempted to jump back to that because I know a little bit more about Grim Fandango than I know Silent Hill. Now, I never actually played it through Grim Fandango, so the details are kind of lost on me, but as far as I remember, ah one thing they were able to do with the remaster is actually there was a bug in the code towards the end of the game where Manny runs into the big bat. I can't for the life of me remember the name of him, so I'm going to call him Senor Kaka.
00:19:56
Speaker
And you talk to him, but he's just sitting there. Now that's a buck. Originally, he's supposed to do a huge exposition dump that makes the whole story and and plot against many much clearer. But this thing did not occur in the original game because, I don't know, they they hit crunch time and they just baked this buck in and that's how it went. There are a lot of written and voiced lines that aren't fucked up, never made it into what people would play. So they went back and finished that and that's kind of a double-edged sword because, okay, Tim Schafer was able to deliver the experience that he wanted to deliver. Not all the story was actually there in the Grim Fandango that people remember from the late 90s.
00:20:43
Speaker
But in doing so, he also tampered with the experience and created something that wasn't there originally. ah Well, then and that's ah I would say going back and fixing something that was intended to be in the game but didn't trigger because of a bug. I think we can let that one slide. I think ah an example of what you are talking about that's a little more egregious is the Gabriel Knight's 20th century anniversary edition or whatever the fuck it was.
00:21:12
Speaker
where they not only change some plot points around, but also added a fucking squirrel and a sliding tile puzzle for some reason. That's a little more on the iffy side. And again, that's not a remaster, that's a remake, but where they go back and diddle with things like fixing stuff that isn't broke, essentially, and just adding more cock blocks. The broken sword,
00:21:36
Speaker
ah re <unk> him a jig what was it the director's cut is what they called it, which sort of toes the line between a remaster and a remake, I guess, because they added some stuff at the beginning, which was an entirely new chapter. So that's all new stuff. And I remember playing it on the Nintendo Wii, which was a big mistake because all the added Stupid puzzles that they did were with like motion controls. You had to sit there and wave the fucking Wii mode at the screen. I actually gave up halfway through the game because there was some shit um that I couldn't pass because of the fucking motion controls. So that sort of teeters between a remaster and a remake. That sort of meddling. Yeah, but that that kind of meddling, I think that this is one of the things that that has always interested me about computer games. And and ah one of the things, of course, that we are talking about as backseat designers is
00:22:27
Speaker
you You can't really do that with a movie, right? You can't 20 years later go and rerecord one of the scenes and seamlessly integrate it into the into the plot, right? But whereas with, I mean, okay, you might be able to say that the sliding puzzle did not seamlessly go into the the Gabriel Knight re-edition, but you you can introduce new elements, you can expand things, you can take things away. I mean, obviously, there's always been sort of the director's cuts where stuff that was left on the cutting room floor has been reintroduced to the film or or or you cut it in a different way to slightly change the tone or the the form of the story. I guess it's technically possible if you've got a classic album to maybe rerecord one of the parts with a new musician or something and try and ah try and blend it in if if if necessary.
00:23:16
Speaker
yeah but But there is something that's possible with computer games, which is both very cool. but also a little bit worrying because it becomes then difficult to ah to to think about. Okay, so so what is the what is the not not necessarily the definitive edition, but what is the game? And um what is this stuff that's been sort of this kind of Frankenstein monster thing that comes afterwards.
Industry Trends in Remakes
00:23:41
Speaker
And I feel like it's it's on some kind of spectrum. And I'm not entirely sure where the line is between adding something that was always meant to be there or or making sure UI actually works. And
00:23:51
Speaker
Just adding new material and pretending that everything's fine. Yeah. Well, I think I think Fred's example about fixing the Grim Fandango bug of of something that was meant to be there and it's it's just a technical error that it didn't show up that one gets a free pass for me, but I mean I need it's I mean When you were saying that i was i kept thinking george lukas george lukas george lukas cuz yes man will just not leave the fucking star wars movies alone and he keeps saying no this is the definitive version of this is the no this is what i had in mind and he just keeps on and on.
00:24:25
Speaker
can Can we think of any and like like game franchises where they just keep rolling the same shit out and they either tweak some stuff or they make changes where it's just of universally panned by everyone and they go and they keep going, fucking, the original was better, come on.
00:24:42
Speaker
It's difficult because I think that the kind of games that we're into that are based on narrative and are based on um on on plot and story, it becomes much more difficult to do that kind of thing because you're not necessarily reusing assets. I mean, it's it's this whole thing, right? That one of the reasons why we moved away from or why the the the industry moved away from adventure games is because a first person shooter is far, far cheaper to produce and you can make it longer and reuse the assets and all of that kind of stuff.
00:25:09
Speaker
So I've absolutely no doubt that there are there are first-person shooters where there's a yeah know but a new thing that comes out ah every every ah every free few years and is basically variations on a theme. But I think you can get away with it more because there there are there are a lot more themes that you can put onto the same game, right? Whereas if you you can't really remake some of those classic adventure games, and it'll either have to be like completely from scratch, but at which point you are doing something new, or really, really badly hacked together. Yeah. And I'm not entirely sure how that would work. I mean, that there are there are lots of complaints always about the sort of the electronic arts, various franchises, especially the sports franchises, like there's always this sort of
00:25:57
Speaker
this criticism that they've just added one new feature and pretended it's a new game and broken what didn't work in the previous one. yeah um And i think I think there are some similar criticisms about some of their first-person shooters, but I don't really pay much attention to that. maybe Maybe the two of you have got some better examples. I mean, I will say this. It's not really the same thing, but Did we really need two different ah remakes of leisure suit Larry one is there really enough story to do that when the game itself is a remake right oh yeah the game yeah yeah so actually three different read that we ever need three different remakes of soft porn adventure.
00:26:36
Speaker
Well, i I do think we needed the first remake, and at least Sudler is a classic. I can't say the same for soft porn. And we didn't need the first one. Well, what we sort of did, and in the way that it inspired Al Lowe to actually go, dude, this game is weak. What can I do to ah spice this up? Oh, it's as dead as disco. I'll make the lead character a disco kind of guy.
00:26:56
Speaker
um and all all the while but When were you're saying thinking of examples, like so like saying rolling out a new version of an FPS, I keep thinking of how the fan community have kept stuff like Doom and Quake alive, especially Doom. like You could run Doom with an RTX now and it's got all the ray tracing shit. and and and colored lighting and all that sort of stuff. It looks like an entirely new game. And it's fantastic what the fan community has done with Doom. And like you said, you can't really reuse as, well, you can technically with a story driven adventure game, but there's only so much you can do where the narrative is the focal point without completely messing the whole fucking thing up. So well what I was thinking, no, no, wait a minute. Sorry. Oh no, he's off again. No, it's my turn to talk.
00:27:40
Speaker
No, no, I just wanted i just wanted to bring up... I'll throw this one out there and and I'll shut up and you guys can take over. they're They've been doing the new Final Fantasy 7 thing, which is so far removed from the original game to be like almost a completely new game just set in the same universe with the same characters and has gotten a lot of flack for that, but it's also gotten a lot of praise for not just being a straight up remake.
Broken Sword: Versions and Remakes
00:28:10
Speaker
Right, I'm done. You guys take over. Yeah, well, I think one game that I was actually hoping we would get to discuss with one of the megas, Charles Cecil, is Broken Sword, Shadow of the Templars, um because they, you know, obviously there's the original version from, when is that, from 1993, 94, something like that. 95. Then there is a director's cut from, like, I think the early 2010s,
00:28:39
Speaker
which not only attempted to visually remaster the game and add new portrait art, stuff like that, but also interjected new material. And now they're doing, from what I can tell, a more faithful remake of the original without the new director's cut material, but with more you know visual remastering and and sonic remastering done to it.
00:29:06
Speaker
um So I think that's interesting because here we actually have a game that it has had both perspectives applied to it. The first time around they tried expanding the story and I never actually played through the director's cut version but in my opinion what what little I saw of it throws off the pacing badly. For one the game no longer starts off with the Paris in the Fall monologue. It starts off with the with Nicole, ah George Stilbart's partner in crime, finding a dead body related to the main story of Broken Sword, but not present and in the original game. And it was shit too. I think the idea is noble, but... I think the reason that revolution are trying to do it all over again and and they'll have to correct me one day and hopefully they'll want to, Charles or someone else would want to be on the show, um is that they realized that what they were doing didn't quite work. It was a good good idea that wasn't executed properly and and and i and I'm not sure you could execute that probably if you are to
00:30:16
Speaker
mess up the narrative to such an extent and jumble things around and which things in that basically. You wound up messing up one of the the most iconic openings of any adventure game.
00:30:31
Speaker
well ge he was a sorry trolls you go Well, I was just going to say counterpoint. There is a way to do that. um The Seventh Guest VR ah remake slash inspired by whatever has garnered almost universal praise.
Innovative VR Remakes
00:30:46
Speaker
And it does take a bit of a detour as far as the source material goes. so It's still the same characters. It's still the same overarching plot, but everything else has changed dramatically. And it's got it's garnered almost nothing but praise for what it's done.
00:31:02
Speaker
It looks really interesting. I'll give them that and um it does something else, which is, of course, I don't think you could do a so a proper seventh guest remake without the technical innovation in the forefront, you know, because Yeah, the original was a powerhouse the seventh Yeah, the seventh guest is is a bunch of puzzles with a framing story, but focus as you play it is on the puzzles, not on the story. ah And of course, focus being on the ghosts actually appearing in FMB form, which was something brand new, never really seen before to that extent, ah CD-ROM streaming, CD audio quality music at certain points.
00:31:44
Speaker
And now the time is finally ripe for being able to do something thing equivalent to that only with VR you know you you don't just have flat footage appearing in front of you as the ghost you can actually walk around them you have like real life footage superimposed on the 3d model and it looks impressive as all hell.
00:32:05
Speaker
yeah i think I think one of the one of the things that that's a sort of a um ah the the the game is ah is a bit of of a victim of, what you're going back to this so the idea of adding more plot, or it's those two things, isn't it? The idea of all all new content, which you kind of need to slap on a box if you're going to resell something.
00:32:23
Speaker
and And this obsession, which we have talked about before with other game developers, they're just obsession with and playing hours, yeah as if the amount of time that you play a game equates to the worth of the price tag that's on again on the but the virtual box. We don't sell anything in a box anymore.
00:32:42
Speaker
But why so difficult with most adventure games is the fact that you have some kind of most of the time some kind of linear plot, and therefore if you try and insert anything, as Fred says, you kind of you you mess around with the pacing. But one one game that recently that has been able to do some of that kind of stuff is Hypno Space Outlaw.
00:33:02
Speaker
on which has been able to introduce new content because it's not really a linear game in the same way that a lot of narrative-driven games are. So you can add more characters and add more sort of depth to that world um constantly without necessarily having to completely remake the game or or remaster it.
00:33:20
Speaker
Oh, that's that's a good point because Hypnospace Outlaw is one of those outliers where the the gameplay itself invites new content constantly being updated. It's not a traditional point and click. You're basically playing in a 90s web browser. ah that's That's the interface. So it's that that lends itself to, well, um we'll just add more web pages for people to go to. will We'll make the lore deeper and deeper.
00:33:45
Speaker
ah whereas if if you want to do that with a traditional point and click adventure the yeah go to strategy was always okay we've covered the first game and now we're gonna do the sequel and the sequel and the sequel and the sequel if you want to tell more of the story.
00:33:57
Speaker
If you go back into our archive, we interviewed the yeah the dev that that did Hypnospace because we interviewed him about his his game, Dropsy. He's a genius. yeah He thinks about these things in a completely different way to everybody else, and his games are fantastic. You should go out and play them. He also gives great hugs and has amazing musical taste. Yes, and and scars.
00:34:17
Speaker
Beautiful scars. He always wears a scar for some reason. Oh, I thought you said scars. Scars, yes. Oh, beautiful scars. He gets he gets he gets in bar fights regularly. It's beautiful scars all over his face. No, actually, he's a very good boy.
00:34:32
Speaker
But, um yeah, yeah that's that's that's a good point. But you don't seem to go back to to Dropsy, for instance, and adding more and more content to that because that was, for all intents and purposes, a linear point-and-click adventure game. Yeah, it was. I mean, you could add some more side quests, I guess, if you really wanted to, but it it didn't need it, I don't think. And also, you know that's a sort of like an older older the project but again I mean that that's also not necessarily fully a linear thing you could add those kind of side questy kind of things into it but it definitely doesn't fit um Broken Sword or any of those kind of things and ah yeah I wonder whether this is it's not just the sort of the design of the games
00:35:12
Speaker
um that affects this, but also, you know, time has moved on the way that we design games has moved on. um And there's lots more playing around with with narrative forms and those
The Importance of Game Archiving
00:35:24
Speaker
sorts of things. I'm just thinking about the kind of stuff that Grundislav has been putting out and obviously the last ah last um ah Dave Gilbert one had sort of multiple endings and all this other kind of stuff. So maybe we're getting to a point where that kind of thing could be done if everybody needed a quick mummy grab.
00:35:41
Speaker
I mean, it was done for a game like Mass Effect 3, which was extremely controversial upon release because everyone thought the ending was underwhelming. And I've never seen the original ending, but they actually went back and patched it and and did an extension of it to make it a bit more narratively satisfying. That sounds like a movie reshoot kind of thing. It's like, oh, this did not test well. We're going to go back and fix this shit.
00:36:03
Speaker
Basically, yes, and you know that's where the whole archiving thing and the problems surrounding that come in, because unless someone actually took time to archive a playable version of it, the original Mass Effect 3 with the original ending would be incredibly hard to get running today. I would imagine it's probably all sorts of DRM you know demanding that you update the game or else as soon as you put in the disc.
00:36:30
Speaker
Well, yeah, but but heres here's the thing. like ah This happens in movies all the time. Something tests bad, they go back, they reshoot the thing. A very famous example is the first Men in Black movie which where where the ending was completely reshot because it was originally just them standing around talking for 20 minutes and it turned into an action thing. There was a whole third alien race that was in you know the the plot that got taken out during editing.
00:36:54
Speaker
um that that original version never saw the light of day. This happens in movies all the time. And I would assume in in games during the QA stages or or even the first beta testing, outside beta testing, early access, whatever you have, people but the the devs keep going back and and you know fixing stuff that doesn't test well. And I think if we expect people to archive all of those iterations of the game instead of what the devs considered the final project, at least at that time, then we but that's that's sort of ah a weird position. I know that's not what you're arguing, but that is sort of a weird position to take. Yeah, but but you're also you're also wrong, trolls. Yes. Well, often, yeah yes. Well, well you're you're wrong. that That original version of Men in Black did come out, but then they wiped all of our memories. Oh, fuck off. oh
00:37:45
Speaker
not ah good night now all right that's enough out of you it did the same thing to exorcist two only it didn't act actually help it didn't make a difference horrible film incidentally never watch it no matter how much you like especially if you loved the first one never watch it skip to the third one I mean, ah not not that this is a movie podcast or anything, but there's there's been scores of um examples in movies where something was originally shot one way and then went into some sort of studio meddling situation. And then the
00:38:23
Speaker
ah some sometime after the fact the director gets called back into the studio like twenty years later and said okay will now let you cut the version you always imagine played runner of course comes to mind but then there are other films like event horizon which it originally had a like a was even more fucked up than the original version, but the original data you know roles of film that this thing was shot on burned in in some warehouse somewhere, so we'll never see a director's cut of that. And I would imagine the same thing the same thing actually applies to the 11th Hour, where all the original material has been lost, all the 3D models, all the FMV stuff. What a shame. No, it's it's it's all gone.
00:39:04
Speaker
ah so well if If someone wanted to remaster it for whatever purposes, they would be unable to. The closest we've gotten is the ScumVM guys who have gone in and fixed some of the shit in the code, um added some you know quality of life things, added subtitles, and all that sort of stuff. They did the same with the seventh guest.
00:39:26
Speaker
ah But as far as actually remastering the the video and and all that sort of stuff, all we have is whatever AI upscaling can get. And we actually did a few tests with that. And it turned out... I mean, it's decent. And and that's and you know that's going over the broken sword again, because again, I would imagine that we would cover this on a subsequent episode in greater detail. but Revolution is in the same position ah for reasons unknown. ah Lots of the original Broken Swords assets in high-res are apparently lost.
AI in Game Enhancement
00:39:59
Speaker
So what they are doing is going to the stuff that went out into the game and upscaling it.
00:40:06
Speaker
with some manual labor but also with some AI and um I guess you know AI is hugely controversial but I think it's it's a real silver lining honestly that in spite of the ethical problems with this technology we can actually remaster stuff that we couldn't remaster before, you know, in in terms of music, in terms of films, what the Beatles have been doing is just mind blowing to me and um not something I expected to be able to see in my lifetime. And if we get something similar to that with games, Trolls is Yellow again, you may have to edit this, um then you know, I'm all for it.
00:40:49
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I have my i have some major issues ah with AI and the way that it's trained and also the sort of the the resource hog that it is. But I think there is, if you can you can set all of that stuff aside, I think there's a massive difference between a a a company and a group of artists who have produced the stuff themselves using it as a tool to help them transform it into something else. And they're still the ones in control of that process. And people just using it to produce their own images and their own assets and not paying the people who actually do that kind of stuff and making a not just a substandard product, but also a a morally um dubious one.
00:41:31
Speaker
Well, I really want to interject here because I share your concerns about generative AI and entirely. that That whole thing is a mess. But as far as upscaling algorithms and yeah you know all that sort of stuff, i'm as far as being a ah environmental resource hog, I completely get that. But and and upscaling is is a different ballpark than generative AI. Also, I had a second point, but I sort of forgot about that one. Oh, no, the ah the broken sword, what they're doing with AI. but We talked to Charles Cecil at Adventure X, and he was
00:42:11
Speaker
First of all, he was he was very cautious about even telling us about the AI thing, so I don't even know if we're supposed to bring it up here. Well, i don't think it's I don't think it's top secret, but he knew that it would stir controversy, and I think that he meets a lot of criticism from a lot of gamers concerning this, because they do not necessarily understand how revolution are using it.
00:42:32
Speaker
No, they he is he told us very emphatically and explicitly that the algorithms they're using are trained exclusively on their own artwork. So it's not something that they're just pulling from a dream or of whatever the fuck we've got out there. um So yeah, that's that's the one thing. And I think if you can use it responsibly, then yeah and i i Other than the environmental concerns which are no small concern, then yeah.
00:43:04
Speaker
Yeah, and they're using um manual labor for stuff that AI has a hard time with. So they're not actually AI upscaling hands and faces. They've got someone painting those over the originals and in higher resolutions, but but the bodies of sprites and backgrounds and whatnot, that's done with the assistance of AI upscale, but it all goes through a human in the end as far as I understood it. Oh, yeah. And and listen' listen, this is not going to be the ah benefits and and problems and controversy. Controversy? Why why the fuck? Controversies? What the fuck have you done to my accent? That's my thought. English versus US pronunciation, you've gone for the worst of both. yeah I think we got a cunt with a controversy here. Oh, God. Yes. But anyway, this this episode is not about AI. but
00:43:54
Speaker
i I dimly recall the first time ScumVM came out and it allowed you to slap this Super Eagle filter on top and everyone was just like, what the fuck is this? This looks awful. um and and And AI upscaling sort of does the same thing if you leave it unchecked, which is thankfully not what the revolution guys are doing. I have ah i have an idea.
00:44:14
Speaker
Why don't we? Because we've got 15 minutes left if we're going to stick to our one-hour episode rule.
The Art of Demaking Games
00:44:21
Speaker
So i just want I just want to talk about the fan-make remasters, remakes, and especially demakes, which I'm fascinated by. You take something that was state-of-the-art at the time it released, and you intentionally make it not shittier, but you you you just de-evolve it into it. I mean, there's this one dude spends, I don't know, I mean, was it 10 or 12 years or whatever? 18 years or something. Yeah, that's right. So not 18 years, 18 years. 18, yeah. But it's he spent 18 years de-making King's Quest VI, which was arguably one of you know the most
00:44:59
Speaker
powerhouse fuck you games of of its time, like it required and an insane amount of computing power to run properly in the day. He demade that into Sierra's first engine, the AGI engine, the one that runs Space Quest I, Police Quest I, Legion Suit Larry I, all that shit. um and it will And not just in a sort of fake high that there's an adventure game studio and just downscaled all the graphics, no, he rebuilt it in the actual engine. It will run on a DOS machine, a period DOS machine.
00:45:28
Speaker
that's He did also make a story change in the scene where you show the mirror to ah to death and makes him cry. You now show him the original system requirements of King's Quest 6. I'm making this up entirely. that The story is one to one the same as far as I understand. It would produce the same results. I'm always fascinated by people that can go back to the... that that that that think in a way that ah allows them to be able to demake stuff because One of the things that i I really love about adventure games now anyway is the fact that we're not just making the the biggest thing that the latest computer hardware can deal with, we're making the things that we want to be made, I guess. I'm saying we, I don't know why I'm saying we, but I guess it's one of the backseat designers that tells everybody what they're supposed to be doing. there you go making Making the stuff that can be made
00:46:19
Speaker
because we have almost for as as far as adventure games are concerned we have almost limitless power so let's just do the point and click adventure that we've always wanted to have or artificially put in constraints on things in order to make them more artistic like saying okay well I'm only going to use 16 colors or I'm only going to be able to use AGI ah from Sierra's old old games that sort of thing i I have a lot of respect for the people who are able to do it because it's not easy to do you don't just sort of oh yeah I'll just redo it in AGI and then it's done. It takes a lot of work to be able to work out what you can take away and still retain the essence of what the original thing was. It's it's very very difficult to do and it's very impressive. Yeah and it's sort of a ah ah great litmus test for
00:47:05
Speaker
Just how good was the game? I mean, um if you if you play King's Quest VI, of course, you had the technological advancements of the time. It was one of the big ah games to like show off to your friends, look what my computer can do, that type of stuff. But if you if you boil it down to its essence, which I think is what this dude has actually done in the 18 years it took him to produce this,
00:47:27
Speaker
dma What he's done is he's boiled it down to its absolute essentials and said, we'll we'll strip away all the bells and whistles and we'll just see what what what is actually left. Is it still a good game? And I've always wanted to do the same thing to Space Quest VI and not just demake it in AGI. I want to go all the way back and like do a demake in a Commodore 64 kind of style. So it's like Roger's the sprite and you walk him around, you have one action button and and see if if that game still holds up.
00:47:57
Speaker
Well, that would be an interesting one to do because I think a lot of people's um issues with Space Quest VI are that it doesn't really feel like a Space Quest game in a lot of ways, partially because of the and the of that it's a one-off for that kind of ah full the-time, higher-res VGA graphics, but also the writing isn't white the two guys because it obviously because it's not um but it's it's not it doesn't quite fit at least that's what sort of the critics of that game would say so there's probably something that you could do in the demake that would maybe bring back some of those qualities that maybe got lost through the just the the production process of late 90s Sierra that sort of stripped a lot of that original stuff away and you'd get
00:48:41
Speaker
something that's different, but maybe something that is more true to the spirit of at least what the fans believe the Space Quest series always was. Oh shit, I lost you guys. Are you guys still there? I'm there, I think. Yeah, we're here. But I lost Gareth too, unless he just stopped speaking. Maybe I stopped speaking at an inopportune time. I don't know. maybe It just sounded like he just caught up there. um But yeah, um I'll just edit that bit out.
00:49:12
Speaker
um i've I completely agree. And and ah another thing I'd love to do is like take the much maligned Mask of Eternity King's Quest and remake that into a point-and-click adventure game and see if the actual story still holds up.
00:49:28
Speaker
Because it's it's one of those things where some games are so tarnished by the reception they got at release and one what went on during development. We all know Space Quest VI came out sideways and screaming, and Mask of Eternity came out with his feet first and bathed in its own blood. um And it's amazing that thing came out at all. um So it would it would be interesting to see, OK, if we strip away all the negative baggage that these games have,
00:49:57
Speaker
and try to reimagine them either by demaking them or remaking them in in ah in a completely different style and see if there was something there that actually merited some sort of goodness. Sorry, my vocabulary just ran out. so You know, I may be misremembering, but I think someone at some point was working on A Curse of Monkey Island D make and it probably floundered until it got canceled quietly because you know, the house People who will work for eighteen years on something like this, they're kind of rare and we should treasure them with everything they have. But but that would be it would be great to see if some of the concerns with regards to Curse of Monkey Island could be put to rest because
00:50:44
Speaker
I think it's a great game, but I'm biased. It's the first Monkey Island game I ever played, and it remains one of my favorite adventure games. But it's not quite the same as Monkey Island 1 and 2, you know, and that's understatement of the year. It's very, very different. ah It looks different. It feels different.
00:51:03
Speaker
And it's an interesting thought exercise to try to bring it closer to what Ron Gilbert originally wanted, you know imagining that he doesn't spectacularly return with Return to Monkey Island down the line.
00:51:18
Speaker
I think as in then that, no pun intended, that ship sailed and I i think curses anything to do with whatever he imagined. ah But yeah, that's that's an interesting thought experiment. Go back and like do a Monkey Island 3 that doesn't have anything to do with what we now know as Curse of Monkey Island. And interestingly,
00:51:37
Speaker
Let's stay on Monkey Island for a bit because there were two remasters. That's at least what they were called. And and they were remasters of the first two games released, which were very maligned until some genius figured out. And this is where we get into the fan community again.
Analyzing Monkey Island Remasters
00:51:52
Speaker
Some genius figured out how to strip all the assets from the original floppy versions.
00:51:56
Speaker
and strip out all the voice acting and all the good stuff in the ah remasters and sort of splice them together in ScumVM so you can now have the best of both worlds. You didn't have to put up with the shitty remastered graphics if you can play the old ones with them. Those are fascinating though, you know, let me let me preface this by saying that I didn't really have a problem with the remastered graphics But I do think where they wind up being a bit clumsy is that, as far as I know, the new graphics actually run on top of the old codes. When you're playing Monkey Island 1 or 2 Special Edition, you're playing Monkey Island 1 and 2. That's the original scum code from the ah late 80s, early 90s, running underneath with a new sheen to it, with a new coat of paint slapped onto it, yeah ah quite literally. um and And now that's... It's interesting that you can do it. It's amazing that the code still exists and that you can port it to modern systems.
00:52:54
Speaker
If it were me, I probably would have done it differently because there are very clearly limitations. you know Once you see Martin Guybrush walking around, his walk cycle does not match his movement speed in the slightest. It just goes wrong. I think that's where a lot of the grief comes from. you know they They made a very obvious choice in the art style that a lot of people would dislike. but you know monkey island fans are assholes look at how they receive the art style of return to monkey island you can fucking quote me on that that was a atrocious if you were part of if you were that part of that dog piling shame on fucking you go find such a beautiful day it's an amazingly beautiful game blood pressure fred blood pressure okay here's what i it was
00:53:39
Speaker
ah Monkey Island 1 and 2 remasters are, by for the reasons you just described, by definition, remasters. Because, like you say, they run on top of the old code. but Basically what they did was new code of paint. And you you can say what you want about the walking animation. I gotta be honest, I've seen a lot of modern adventure games where the walking is sort of floaty. and I think that's when i build when people build games in Unity, it always always looks like they're sort of floating on top, especially when you use 3D models. I remember playing The Longest Journey ah back in the day, which has pre-rendered backgrounds and 3D models walking on top of it. And it always looks like they're sort of ghostly gliding over the top of it. um And even
00:54:23
Speaker
Even the old LucasArts games, back in the old Scum ah days, Dave the Tentacle and among the first Monkey Island games, they actually do the same. But with the pixel art being what it is, it's harder to sort of detect that they're they're floating on top. my if If you notice, whenever characters in ah Scum games and old LucasArts games and and Sierra games as well, when they walk up and down stairs,
00:54:47
Speaker
they don't actually walk up and down stairs, they just sort of float an inch above the stairs. That's because they fall down and die. Well, yeah that's that's kings for three years, you're thinking of. Now, this this is true. The only game where i I sort of stopped in my tracks when I realized this, and once you see it, you can't unsee it. In Beneath the Steel Sky, Revolution's game,
00:55:09
Speaker
Every time he walks up and down a flight of stairs, they have carefully hand-animated it separately each time to make sure he steps on the actual steps going up and down. That's true. Goddamn. George Dopa does it too, doesn't he? Yes, they hand-animated all that shit. because they were and and and his like His turning animations and broken sword and and his walking animation perfectly matches what his feet are doing on the ground. It's really hard art.
00:55:38
Speaker
Ben Chandler does it really well in, um like, Shardlight and Unavowed and all the games he's worked on. He really works hard to make sure the movement speed and the feet touching the ground actually match. He is, however, ah sort of hampered by how Adventure Game Studios sometimes handles things, which is, when you move diagonally, sometimes it doesn't switch to the diagonal position of the sprite, so they do this little floaty walk up and down the screen. i he He does this that his damn best.
00:56:09
Speaker
I think my vote for a dmake is I would like quest for infamy dmake bundle.
00:56:21
Speaker
Actually, that's a good question. if if If we put this in the hands of fans, let's not wait around for nighttime studios or um the the studios themselves if they still exist to get around to actually doing either a remaster or a remake or whatever.
Fan Wishlist for Remakes
00:56:36
Speaker
What game would you like to see rebuild or remastered, what games had like a gem hidden behind a mountain of shit that needs to come out, what games just would just benefit from a coat of paint, or what game is just impossible to run on modern machines. Go for it. I think... ah Did we lose trolls again? No, I'm still here. We lost everyone. I'm i'm not still here. Yeah, he's still not to avoid there. I'm still here. You're just having a fit.
00:57:08
Speaker
oh yeah Yeah, okay. Okay, no, this does a good doctor. Are you pulling my leg? No, no, I'm still not. I don't understand what's going on. I thought I lost you guys.
00:57:26
Speaker
been the worst thing that's happened. um i can do this exercise because i thought of it earlier today and i didn't get to bring up this game during our conversation but we'll probably talk about it um another time space quest one bga is pretty controversial ah with some fans and also with at least Scott Murphy, I'm not sure if Mike Crowe has ever made any public remarks on it, but it changes the look and feel of the game considerably to make it into something else. Whether you like that something else is entirely on you, but it's different. Not up to you, it's on you. yeah i would I would like to see a faithful Space Quest 1 VGA or otherwise remake. I would like to see a high-res equivalent of the world that Scott and Mark designed in the late 80s rather than the forbidden planet colorized 1950 sci-fi thing that eventually went out there from Sierra.
00:58:29
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, interestingly, ah when I was and and in Tacoma at the fanfare and and I had tacos with Mark Crowe, I actually did briefly bring up space with one VGA and asked him if he was just as upset about it as Scott. And he sort of very diplomatically said, yeah, I wouldn't have done it that way.
00:58:49
Speaker
So yeah, neither of the two guys are particularly fond of that one. That's an interesting one. It's a very good backhanded compliment. i mean it is i mean they did do i mean TurboChimp did Space Quest III in a sort of modern Unity 3D kind of thing.
00:59:07
Speaker
which ah me and John Paul did the music for, so I'm slightly biased. but I think that one worked quite well, even though Roger has crone anime hair. He kind of looks like Sonny Bonds from the anime version of Police Quest 2. I've actually yet to play that, but but you know i'm I'm thinking more in alternate history lines. you know If Scott Murphy and Mark Crow were actually allowed to sit down and revisit Space Quest I, how would they have done that? I think that would have been really interesting.
00:59:37
Speaker
I mean, that's that's also an an interesting little side note. I promise, Gareth, you'll get to do your bit in a minute. But during that same taco dinner with with Mark, um he would not have remade Space Quest 1 at all because ah Chris Pope was also at the table. And he told me about how Mark used to have like old artwork, drawings, sketches and shit from from you know the Space Quest games. And he just tossed them. He's like, fuck it, I don't need this shit. ah So he he doesn't he doesn't keep archives. he doesn't He's not nostalgic for old shit. Once he's done with something, it's on to the next thing. um The only reason why we still have artwork from the Space Quest games is because some of the other artists held on to their artwork and sort of smuggled it home. but But Mark is not like that. He wouldn't have remade Space Quest 1 at all.
01:00:29
Speaker
I think the Sierra game that has aged the worst is nothing to do with the tech. It's to do with the way that the story is told and the way that it's written. And it is the police quest series. And I wonder whether there is scope for somebody to not necessarily use modern technology to ah redo some of the elements of those games, but I wonder whether there's something to be said about re reshooting them effectively, to bring in some of maybe the more, um hopefully more nuanced view of the beliefs that we have ah in our in our modern world. And i went when I think about sort of that the police procedurals still exist, and there's still plenty of stuff that
01:01:18
Speaker
Paints the police as the good guys and has them saving the day and all that kind of stuff I'm not against that kind of thing but I think even those have had to acknowledge the fact that not everybody in the police force is a shining light and that there are major problems with an idea of the the good guys versus the bad guys. And I wonder whether a redone police quest that takes into account the fact that we are now in a world that has had the wire and the shield and even Brooklyn Nine-Nine
01:01:50
Speaker
um and can maybe add some of those plot
Modernizing Police Quest
01:01:54
Speaker
elements. It would be a complete departure and it hasn't been the stuff that we've been discussing today because we've been talking more about tech. But I'd be very, very interested to see what a police quest in 2024 looks like versus one from the late 80s. That is a really, really good one. ah I recall ah Well, first of all, the whole you know cops not being a shining light in Police Quest 2, there's one dude who shows up completely baked, and and you look through his records, and he has been caught like smoking dope on the job, and you walk into his office, he's still there. ah such like he's It's on his record, but he's still there. He's just sitting around. He's still baked, by the way. um So so that's that's that's the extent of
01:02:38
Speaker
You know ah shenanigans going on in the precinct in the original police press games, but I really do like the idea We should bring that up as another topic for another show actually ah if we were to narratively Re-examine a game. I think that's a really really good one Well, I think even even Leisure Suit Larry has aged better than Police Quest because Leisure Suit Larry, but the the joke was always the fact that he was an idiot and his attitude towards women was ridiculous and it was ridiculous even then. It's even more ridiculous now and there is still, I mean, there's there's parts of it that really don't age well at all, but I think the general premise of it
01:03:13
Speaker
cam it needs some work on it but can kind of hold up a police quest it's just it's so painful now you know you could argue that some of the police quests even missed the mark at the time when police quest four came out that was against the backdrops of the l la riots and everything going on in the early 90s and Darryl F. Gates perhaps wanted to comment on it. Just not in the most prudent way, let me put it that way. No, because he more or less cost the fucking thing. um But yeah, that's... Oh, God. Yeah, that would that would really be interesting. Do you guys remember back in in the day after we finished Stair Quest and we were talking about what sort of game we would like to do next and it never came ah came to anything, we did have this idea of the reverse police quest yeah called called Bad Cop.
01:04:03
Speaker
which is basically about an alcoholic ah cop who took down a drunk gang but not because he wanted to be the good guy because he wanted to be the leader of the drug gang. um yeah My main contribution was suggesting that we do it with anthropomorphic animals aren superana and I have the fondest memories of reading messages you know between us about that in the in the slack channel that no more for today games had at the time while out grocery shopping and just nearly pissing myself laughing and trying to hold it in and I kept the I kept trying to get the woman I was dating at the time interested ah it didn't last maybe because she thought it was an awful idea
01:04:48
Speaker
it honestly it kind of was but it was so awful it was funny like what animal are we going to make the corners like what the fuck um well i think we've got we've got plenty plenty of material there for a for a future podcast but even if you just want the technical answer let's say a police quest anyway i think it'd be really interesting to see a sort of a um in the style that sort of infamous quests have uh have done that sort of um you know, Space Quest IV kind of interface and graphics, but the original Police Quest game, that would be kind of cool, I think. Yeah. Well, they did do a VGA remake, but again, that was sort of just new coat of paints kind of thing. um Very interesting. let's let's Let's save that for another show, because I think the idea of narratively examining a game and perhaps a malign game and try to see if there was something cool underneath it, let's let's do that. um My pick,
01:05:43
Speaker
Oh, by the way, someone someone's going to bring up Precinct, like the Jim Walls Kickstarter that went nowhere. Yeah, we we know Jim Walls was trying to revive the Police Quest series, and unfortunately that failed. And there's another game out now called Precinct that has nothing to do with the Jim Walls thing. So yes, we are aware. You don't need to bring that up in the comments. Thank you. um My pick for this is actually, it's it's sort of a halfway between I would just like to see this with new tech and also I would like the story to, you know, come out even better than it did.
Improving Flawed Games with Technology
01:06:13
Speaker
um I had an amount of Namaskream is one of those flawed, deeply flawed games that has yeah a really, really good story in it.
01:06:23
Speaker
And perhaps even some of the puzzles are really good. I mean, obviously, Harlan Ellison's original story, he then fleshed out and and turned it into this adventure game. Some of the shit in it hasn't aged well, probably because Harlan didn't age well even during his lifetime. But um it's the but but the the actual tech around it, it's built on the same engine that ran Inherit the Earth, as in the very fantastic masterpiece of adventure games, was actually kind of a good game.
01:06:51
Speaker
if you don't mind my saying. But the engine is just not suited for the grim, dark, oppressive kind of story they want to tell. And I have no masanama scream. The artwork looks terrible. The music is even worse. Characters moonwalk all over the place because the engine doesn't know what the fuck to do with boundaries and shit like that. And it just ends up looking like a laughingstock.
01:07:14
Speaker
I would really like to see someone actually get in there and make it and in the same sort of... what What's that sci-fi horror adventure game? It starts with an S. They had a couple of them. ah Space Station, everything goes to shit. bloody Okay, I just described every sci-fi horror game of all time. God, it's it'll come back to me.
01:07:37
Speaker
um This is what the YouTube comments are for. yeah System shock, right? Not system shock. Death Space. not desperate but no no A genuine point and click adventure game. My browser just crashed. Come on, the different browser. that's That's a horror story. Yeah, that is a horror story. What the fuck is it? i'm I'm going to edit this bit out, don't worry, but I really want to find out what this game is called.
01:08:09
Speaker
Ahora, come on. Stasis! That's the one. Oh, right. Stasis, yeah. Do it in the in the in the same style as Stasis, which, if you haven't played it, is just... That that atmosphere is unbeatable. um Yeah, do it like that. like just Just make it good, because the story kind of deserves it, I feel. That's my pick. All right. Who wants to round this one out? Do we have a website yet?
01:08:40
Speaker
Well, we used to have a website. We don't anymore. Yeah. yeah Well, you can find us at Trolls YouTube channel, which you're probably already listening to this too. So, you know, we don't have an RSS feed yet.
01:08:53
Speaker
we We were working on, um, on the website thing, but it does seem like we have a, uh, a bit of a Facebook presence still at any rate, enough for us to actually put off deleting our open group. So yeah we were going to toss it, but yeah, someone actually commented in there and that's enough. One comment was enough for us to just fucking keep it. We are so desperate. people are so damn nice and you can look that up on facebook it's just called backseat designers ah you can also find us on trolls space quest historian discord server where we have a backseat designers channel and um
01:09:32
Speaker
We're not terribly good at soliciting input from these places. We weren't even in the show's heyday, but toss us a line and we'll snort it. I mean, see what happens.
01:09:45
Speaker
ah Very good. Damn, that was a cocaine joke and you guys lost the connection. My life just went into like like like, my voice just broke laughing so hard. um Yes, you are a funny man, sir.
01:09:59
Speaker
I shall endeavor to make your next introduction non-insultory. I almost said insultory. There's nothing insulting about wanting to kiss Peter Cushing. No. But that was the rewrite. You should have seen the first one. I'm just kidding. Yeah, whatever. of All that stuff. And if you want to get in on the Discord, there's and if you're watching this on YouTube or listening on YouTube, i don't you probably should be watching it because it's just a static background with three people talking over it. But if you are,
01:10:29
Speaker
perusing this on YouTube. There's an invite link to the X-ray's Discord in the description. um So cheers, everyone. Thank you so much. This was fun. Let's let's do this again. Yeah, see you on the Chrome stream. Hey, that's my lying asshole.
01:10:45
Speaker
say Oh, yeah. Say goodbye, Frederick. Bye. Say goodbye, Gareth. Talk for a day. OK. Thank you. This is how we used to do it in the old days. So let's just let's just pretend that's the tagline. And it's a goodbye from me. Goodnight.
01:11:08
Speaker
Nah, they're lekked.