<Snipped quote by Sombrero>
I never heard either of the remakes until now.
...Yeah, neither does justice to the original. The first remake is a little disappointing, but the second remake is just downright upsetting and has now hurt a part of me I didn't know could be hurt. Why did you do this? Why did you link this?
I do get the feeling that if I ever became an H.P. Lovecraft protagonist, I'd end up linking to the horrifying information on Facebook and being very vocally upset about it rather than going bonkers and killing myself.
On a related note: how about them song, video game, and movie remakes / rebirths in general? It's nice when someone loves the classics, but are we trying to BE the classics too much in our culture nowadays? (And missing the mark?)
As a broken idealist who's been burned by poor quality one too many times, I feel like there's a more cynical answer to the question, in that no one at all is really trying to remake the classics so much as they are trying to get money from fans who're foolish enough to have hope left in them. I mean, sure, that may have been the intent of a lot of developers involved, I'm sure, but the corporations that own them measure their success in money, not fun. I can say that's the deal with the new Mortal Kombat, Syndicate, and virtually everything Konami's ever made since it was bought out. Other times, the devs try to do too much, and then the reboot arrives 100 years late and it's a shittier version of its past selves. (A-la Duke Nukem, Fallout 4
kind of, most of the Sonic games, though I'm more willing to blame that on the fact that Team Sonic are mostly idiots.) Sometimes, quality pushes through, and something fun happens, like the new Wolfenstein, or the new King's Quest, or the new Tomb Raider, but they (Or at least the two M-rated titles) miss the original tone.
Wolfenstein becomes a grayish brown war movie about a burly, soft-spoken everyman fighting the kraut menace, just like every archetypal World War Soldier movie ever, rather than the comically "edgy" shooter with scifi involved because its additions made the game awesome, not because it's a gritty, alternate-history game. Tomb Raider ceases to be a tale of adventure and asskicking and instead decides to be... I dunno, it just feels like a bizarre "apology" on behalf of the series for creating a sex symbol. She's no longer a femme fatale with jugs you could drown in, but rather a more realistic-looking character. There's nothing wrong with that, I'm all for it, but I still like the first version better, because she was a video game protagonist and not a squeaking, quivering waif. Way back then, she developed her character like the other protagonists, through adventure and charming conversation. She got new equipment by killing a bad guy and looting him, or finding it somewhere on her mighty quest for ancient treasure. In this game, she does the same thing, but not without 10 minutes of "tension" and "grittiness" before that show you just how much she has to struggle to do it. In the older games, sure, she was unrealistic-looking, but she held her own with all the other game protagonists. I think they're sending a much more poisonous "message" by saying, "look, guys! We just made a realistic girl!" and then having her progress through the game by getting the crap beat out of her at every turn. I mean, goddamn, the rich kid from Far Cry was even
less qualified to screw around in the wild with guns and terrorists, but he only got in-cutscene bruises as a diabolus-ex-machina, and he sure as hell wasn't making scared moans and squeaky noises the entire time... Kinda got sidetracked there, nevermind.
Anyway, yeah, it's
very difficult to properly pay homage to or revive the original, but it has been done before, and I doubt that's the motivation behind
most reboots. Personally, I blame the fact that we live in a world where Hollywood writers and other powerful creatives in the entertainment and music industries are indoctrinated with the belief that humans don't spontaneously come up with completely independent thoughts means that nothing remotely original will ever be produced for all the sequels, reboots, and adaptations we're getting these days. Well, that, and the fact that it's a lot cheaper to hire writers to edit and adapt a pre-existing work, (and programmers to edit and adapt pre-existing gameplay/animations, artists to edit and adapt pre-existing artwork, etc.) than it is to create something entirely new.
Simple Unicycle