My Cart - If you haven’t heard much about HD remakes before, you sure will soon. November will see the release of Rockstar’s GTA V on the next-gen consoles, followed shortly after by the criminally under-rated Sleeping Dogs.
Since neither the PS4 or Xbox One are backwards compatible – that is, you can’t play your Xbox 360 and PS3 games on the new consoles – HD remakes are a way to allow gamers to play the games they enjoyed on past consoles. Or they’re a capitalist curse, depending on who you ask.
Yep, remaking games is one of the many issues that divides gamers. Some see it as a money-grab from games developers and publishers who aren’t interested in the art of making good games. Others see it as an opportunity to relive some great moments from video gaming history.
In fairness, they’re both right. Sometimes a remake can be a pretty cheap conversion that the human eye barely registers. In other cases, the game is pretty much rebuilt from scratch for the newer hardware, like the Nintendo Gamecube’s update on 1996’s Resident Evil or the upcoming Sleeping Dogs Definitive Edition. The core game-play and story elements remain, but everything else evolves with the technology.
Remaking games certainly isn’t a new phenomenon – despite the hysteria in some circles. One of the earliest was arcade classic Space Invaders which was ported over to Atari home consoles two years after its 1978 release. And it’s continued on more or less every console since, from the Commodore 64 to the Amiga to the Game Boy Advance. With the advent of digital download games for consoles, the practice became a little more prevalent, and some might say the market was pretty quickly over-saturated – and perhaps it’s that which sparked the resistance to remakes by some.
And the evolution continues on November 18th when GTA V is re-released for the next-gen and PC. This is a relatively swift transition – the game was first released in September last year – and many in the industry believe that developer Rockstar was working on this simultaneously. And obviously told no-one so as not to hurt sales on the Xbox 360 and PS3.
Insiders who have seen the game comment on the enhanced resolution, the upgraded environment and weather effects. The animals now have real fur, as opposed flat textures. Traffic is denser, radios have more stations, the draw distance is wildly expanded – all of which should help you forget you’re playing a video game. GTA V pushed the very limits of the last-gen, and we’re excited to see what they can do on the technologically advanced PS4 and Xbox One platforms.
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