Remakes, Remasters, and Re-Whatevers | Semi-Ramblomatic

The term "remastering" seems to come from the world of music recording, i.e. you have the raw sound files and effects and you're now focused on compression, equalizing, and the like to achieve a balanced sound for commercial distribution. "Remastering" an album or song is essentially just redoing the mastering of the original, typically to take advantage of new technology that will help the track sound better -- there were a lot of remastered albums as music evolved from vinyl to CDs, for example.

As much as Yahtzee whines about graphical changes hindering game preservation, the fact remains that many people just won’t play unfamiliar games with graphics that look too dated. I don’t know who honestly likes pixel graphics below 16-bit or 3D graphics of 64-bit or lower.

Then there's exceptional weirdness like what CD Projekt Red has done more than once. Graphical overhauls for all the Witcher games, sometimes when they were barely a year old, plus the extreme overhaul CP2077 got in graphics, character building, and bug squashing. I only played the new version, but it sounds like the prior version minus bugs was a perfectly fine game and one wonders what the motivation was to upgrade the character development system. Can't say I've seen anything about that, but it must be out there.

I would assume the term "remaster" is borrowed from the record industry, isn't it? Mastering being the last step of audio engineering (both the last audio polish and creating a physical "master", from which all vinyl/laserdisc copies for selling are made), which was normally only done once and needed to be repeated when the audio should get a quality boost for future releases of that record (because e.g. more sophisticated audio tools became available) - hence the remaster (sometimes with a date stamp of the year when it was done) comes into existence. It's not necessarily a remix, because often the individual tracks (as in voice, guitar, bass, drums,...) are not available anymore so one could only remaster the existing pre-mastered / rough mix. And now I wonder what a "remix" for a video game would look like.

Black Mesa is on sale for $2 right now, btw.

I thought RE4 and SH2 remakes were justified cause the originals were good but kinda janky in a number of ways.