With the announcement that Epic Mickey is being resurrected on modern consoles and PC as 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Epic Mickey: Rebrushed, I'm once again thinking, to borrow a phrase from the game, of the "forgotten things". Not old Disney characters like Oswald, though. No, I'm thinking about the games in a series that get passed over when others are selected for another moment in the spotlight.
This is an issue I've thought about a lot in recent years, as the games industry increasingly leans on remasters and remakes. When Nintendo announced that it was bringing 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Super Mario 64, Sunshine, and Galaxy to Switch, I was excited. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:I never finished Sunshine or Galaxy as a kid, so I was eager for the opportunity to play them (portably!) on modern hardware. But I couldn't help wondering… what about Super Mario Galaxy 2?
That question was worth asking because this September will mark four years since the release of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Super Mario 3D All-Stars and a Galaxy 2 rerelease is nowhere in sight (and neither is Super Mario 3D All-Stars itself if you didn't snatch it up during that initial release window, but that's another article). With the death of the Virtual Console in the Switch era, Nintendo has taken a piecemeal approach to remasters and rereleases. It similarly only remastered 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Metroid Prime f🍨or Switch, leaving the two other games in the trilogy unplayable on modern hardware ah💜ead of the upcoming sequel.
Contrast this strategy with Capcom's slow and steady work porting nearly the entire Mega Man canon to modern consoles. The publisher put out a high-quality port of the first six Mega Man games for 2015's Mega Man Legacy Collection, then did the same for the last four classic games in 2017. The next year, all eight Mega Man X games were rereleased, too, and all the Mega Man Zero/ZX games followed in 2020. The Mega Man Battle Network games got the same treatment in 2023. Over the course of six years, Capcom has made a huge swath of Mega Man's back catalog available for a new generation of players. There are still outliers, like the Star Force subseries, but if you want to get into Mega Man, you have hundreds of hours to play before you need to worry about that.
Mega Man Battle Network's Techno Dystopia Is Way Scarier Than Cyberpunk 2077's
Mega Man Battle Network paints a dark future where our daily l💮ives are made vulnerable by our reliance on technology.
168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Digital Eclipse, which worked with Capcom on the first of the Mega Man Legacy Collections, is uniquely good at ensuring that its rereleases are painstakingly thorough, bringing the games and a boatload of context to modern players. I'm currently playing its interactive documentary 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Making of Karateka, which includes several versions of the game plus earlier works by creator Jordan Mechner, and arranges them all on a chronological timeline with videos, Mechner's journal entries, his correspondence with publishers, and playable prototypes. It's the closest gaming has come to a Criterion Collection release.
DE's other releases are similarly thorough. Its Disney Classic Games Collection included both the SNES and Sega Genesis versions of the three games, so that players can study the differences between the versions, or just enjoy the one they loved as a kid.
Epic Mickey Rebrushed is a reminder that that painstaking approach is rare. The original Wii game got two sequels, The Power of Two on Wii and Power of Illusion on DS, but they haven't been carried forward. When this happens, when a remake of a single game in a series gets announced, the completionist in me bristles. But more importantly, the part of me that wants games to be preserved and readily accessible for the current generation of players, wants the less sexy games to get some love, too.
To point to the Criterion Collection again, this is what it does when preserving movies. It does release neꦏw movies that will likely sell well and help keep the lights on (see: its recently announced Blu-Ray for Anatomy of a Fall). And it also releas🐟es classic movies, like Citizen Kane and The Red Shoes, that are considered masterpieces and obviously worth preserving.
On the other hand, I just got Criterion's Jackie Chan: Emergence of a Superstar box set for my birthday, and that set is mostly made up of movies that aren't new and aren't Chan's canonized classics, either. The first one I watched, My Lucky Stars, has a terrific opening and an exciting conclusion, but is mostly boring and/or uncomfortable in the middle, with the supposed heroes acting pretty gross to a female cop they're working with. It's not a great movie. But Criterion has preserved it and presented it in the box set so that viewers can get a well-rounded sense of those years in Chan's career.
Game publishers rarely think this way, instead choosing games that are most likely to be profitable. That means that games with glaring issues are rarely remastered or remade, despite the fact that they're often the ones that would benefit most from some TLC. Maybe it takes a third-party, like Digital Eclipse or The Criterion Collection, to do this work, to recognize the merit in preservation for preservation's sake. But, Capcom's approach to Mega Man indicates that it doesn't. It just takes a company committing to treating its own history as worthwhile.
Pretty Soon You’re Going To Run Out Of Things To Reಌmaster
With so many remake🅺s, we're not leav♛ing enough room for new ideas
