Abhinav pivoted from a career in banking to pursue his first love in writing. Even while working full-time, he continued contributing as an editor-at-large, a role he has held for more than 7 years. A lifelong tech enthusiast who has built three gaming and productivity powerhouse PCs since 2018, his passion for technology keeps him closely following the semiconductor industry, from NVIDIA and AMD to ARM. His MSc dissertation explored how artificial intelligence will reshape the future of work, reflecting his curiosity about the wider social impact of emerging technologies.
Over the last couple of weeks, I've taken to revisiting some of the greatest releases of the N64, PS2, and pre-2010 PC era, specifically the titles that defined what a great gaming experience is for me, and probably for many others like myself. Most of them were products of their time, and running them on modern hardware often tends to expose traces and hints of the various "optimizations" that stayed invisible on the hardware they were built for.
In the pursuit of preserving these games (and to possibly cash the nostalgia cheque), developers try to make them accessible on marketplaces like Steam, Xbox, and the PlayStation Store by developing "remasters", but the problem is that, in doing so, it often happens that they end up changing the very things that made the originals so great in the first place.
There's always going to be exceptions to this, but three releases from the past decade have made me hesitant to reach for a remaster when the original, lightly upscaled, still does the job better. Here are three such examples that might just make you skeptical about remasters, too.
Konami's HD Collection turned Silent Hill 3 into a parody of itself
The scariest thing was how the game world was "reimagined"
Silent Hill 3 is one of the games from the PS2 era that I'll take any excuse to go back to, and one of the reasons why every PC I own has a PCSX2 emulator installed. It is also one of the reasons why I've never felt the need to play Konami's HD Collection, even though it can often be found at a discount on the Xbox Store, ready and optimized for my Xbox Series X.
The list of reasons why not is quite long, although I bet if you were to ask a fan of the original games, the reasons would be quite similar. If you ponder hard about what imparted the eeriness to the original atmosphere of the game environment, chances are, the characteristic fog would be on the list of the top three reasons. It was an integral aspect of the setting and the ambiance, and it also happens to be one of the things that the HD Collection completely butchered. I'd even argue that the fog is to Silent Hill what Master Chief is to Halo, and cars are to Forza.
The rest of the port had its own problems, from re-recorded voice acting to re-introduced bugs the original team had already fixed. All of those issues tell me that the best way to revisit the games may just be to take the old PS2 disc off the shelf, get the latest build of PCSX2, and let the emulator take care of the rest.
Rockstar's Definitive Edition shrank the San Andreas I grew up with
This Grove Street isn't home, but at least it was before Rockstar...
GTA San Andreas was the game that taught me what an open world was supposed to feel like. The last time I spent any real time with the game was through the Definitive Edition as I tested the leaked DLSS 5 build, and I wrote positively about it. What I didn't say there, because it took me another week of playing to notice, was that DLSS 5 was doing the job Rockstar should have shipped the Definitive Edition with.
If I just turned off the neural rendering layer, I'd get a glimpse of the remaster that sits underneath, which launched in 2021 to one of the worst receptions a Rockstar game has had. The character models looked funny if not grotesque, poorly proportioned, and a caricature of the originals.
With the original, Rockstar built a world that you could lose yourself in, and one of the most defining aspects of that world was the radio. If you don't believe me, you can visit Tom Petty's Runnin' Down a Dream on YouTube and find at least four top comments stating, "GTA San Andreas brought me here."
And so, one of the most unforgivable problems, though, was the fact that the game had missing content. A lot of the songs defined certain moments in the game, be it driving from Los Santos to San Fierro, running from the police in a hot pursuit, or just casually exploring the countryside. About 16 licensed tracks didn't make their way from the original game to the remaster. That really isn't something my DLSS 5 layer can fix.
This made me question. For someone who is looking for a nostalgia trip back to San Andreas, does the Definitive Edition provide the best way for it? Considering all the aspects that I mentioned, it certainly isn't providing the complete experience. The version that does offer the complete experience, however, happens to be the one Rockstar pulled off Steam the week the remaster hit the marketplace.
Is it really much of a remake when most of it wasn't remade?
On the subject of beloved content from the game that never made it to the remasters, the Resident Evil 3 Remake is something that cannot be left out of the conversation. It hurts to see it affect one of the most distinctive and visually important aspects of the game, and RE3's case makes it painfully clear. Saint Michael's Clock Tower was cut as a playable location, the Raccoon Park was reduced to a short connector area with no content, and the Dead Factory as well as the Grave Digger boss were completely absent.
If you want to get a sense of just how badly this landed with the fans, all you have to do is search for "Resident Evil 3 Remake" on YouTube and watch the first few results come up with walkthroughs for installing a mod that restores the cut content. Of course, that's one way to get that content back, but if you don't have a proclivity towards modding, the GOG re-release of the 1999 offers a rather frictionless way to experience Raccoon City the way it was first envisioned.
Upscaling respects the original; remasters rarely do
There's a fine balance between optimizing a game to meet the visual polish that modern players expect versus deconstructing and reconstructing it altogether to suit modern audiences and their gameplay habits. Clearly, one of those approaches turns the game into a different product, while the other just enhances the original vision. Until developers learn the difference, I'm happy to just reach for the original disk.