Games That Never Die: Backwards Compatibility That Makes Games Young

[MelFet Wart]

This is an interesting article. (http://nintendo.about.com/library/procedural/blprocedural1.htm) Imagine putting Halo 2 into your Xbox 360 only to have it look as good as Halo 3. The article talks about how Procedural Synthesis could be used to make games automatically improve as they go from old systems to faster CPUs, kind of like Halo 2 did on the Xbox but way more. Interesting idea.

As programming methods like procedural synthesis become more standard, the future of backwards compatibility could make old games look new again as they move onto faster consoles. In other words, you think Halo 3 looks good? Wait until you play it on the Xbox 720.

Ah, makes me long for the good old days... I'd love to have a version of Diablo that looked brand new... high rez graphics... oh yeah...

[kraemer]

When the presentation was made for the 360 they said it could do real time tesselation and the models would be represented as vectors (think autocad drawing) and not fixed polygon counts. The box could then tesselate (convert the vectors) into polygons in real time. Now if a game was made this way, it could be forward compatible with xbox5000 and look even better than ever.

But most titles are hand optimized for speed and models represent the utmost in polygon count optimization for frame rate budgeting.

[emperordahc]

Ah, makes me long for the good old days... I'd love to have a version of Diablo that looked brand new... high rez graphics... oh yeah...
Diablo on my PS1. *Kisses it*

[EvilBob46]

Speaking of making old games look better, check out this forum (http://www.emutalk.net/forumdisplay.php?f=110) and this post (http://www.emutalk.net/showthread.php?t=33667&highlight=ocarina+time+texture+pack) as an example.

There is a Nintendo 64 plugin called Rice's Video Plugin (http://www.zophar.net/utilities/download/RiceVideo6.0.0c.rar) that let's the emulator automatically load hi-res textures instead of the original low-res ones.

Put the rice video files into the plugin folder of your emulator (also change the default graphics plugin to Rice). Create a folder called hires_texture in the plugin folder of the emulator, and extract the Zelda: OoT files from the post to that location.

To check if everything extracted correctly, you should have ...\plugin\hires_texture\The Legend of Zelda and then in there 3 folders called Pack One, Pack Two and Pack Three. Then, in the Rice Video plugin settings in the emulator, enable load hi-res textures when available (under the texture filters tab). Load Ocarina of Time.

Enjoy Ocarina of Time looking twice as good. This needs a lot of Ram to run smoothly though. If you have questions, you may want to direct them to the EmuTalk.net forums.

[torrefaction]

Diablo on my PS1. *Kisses it*

Holy fucking God NO! Diablo on the PS1 suffered the worst load times in ALL OF EXISTENCE.

[timmyd]

I wouldn't mind paying for reworked games. Same game, just better textures.
Also in the case of like Halo, it would be fun to have Halo 1 but with maybe:
Halo 2 weapons
Dual wielding
AI can drive Warthog etc.

[Heretic Machine]

Holy fucking God NO! Diablo on the PS1 suffered the worst load times in ALL OF EXISTENCE.

Ya, it also took up a WHOLE GOD-DAMN MEMORY CARD TO SAVE!

[torrefaction]

Ya, it also took up a WHOLE GOD-DAMN MEMORY CARD TO SAVE!

That's right. I forgot cuz I had one of those fancy "multi-page" memory cards, if I remember correctly. I had a page for each damn game.

Stupid Diablo.

Loading...

Loading...
LoADDing...

[Steele Johnson]

I would love to see some games with updated graphics:

- System Shock 2
- Starsiege: Tribes
- Thief 1
- Balder's Gate 1/2

and the list goes on. I don't know why the owners of IPs don't remake their original games. I would definitely buy them and replay them all the way through. In fact, I would buy them over their sequels. I think a lot of gamers would buy them too.

I'd think that the development costs would be fairly low considering that the design, story, musical score, etc, etc, is already complete.

Why would developers/publishers think that no one would buy a remake? Most games just have a different skin wrapped around standard gameplay anyway. They might as well remake a game that gamers loved.

They could call them the Anniversary Edition. ;)

[OUX]

Final Fantasy Tactics.........

[PanasonicYouth]

Diablo II.

And i think I speak for all when I say Final Fantasy VII...

[random johnald?]

I would love to see some games with updated graphics:

- System Shock 2
- Starsiege: Tribes
- Thief 1
- Balder's Gate 1/2

and the list goes on. I don't know why the owners of IPs don't remake their original games. I would definitely buy them and replay them all the way through. In fact, I would buy them over their sequels. I think a lot of gamers would buy them too.

I'd think that the development costs would be fairly low considering that the design, story, musical score, etc, etc, is already complete.

Why would developers/publishers think that no one would buy a remake? Most games just have a different skin wrapped around standard gameplay anyway. They might as well remake a game that gamers loved.

They could call them the Anniversary Edition. ;)

Most people wouldn't buy remakes. You might be willing to plop down $50 for a FFVII remake with the same voices, characters, plot, enemies, ect. But most people wouldn't buy it when the original is available for $15. Not unless it had a reworked plot, new and exciting enemies, better voice acting, better bg music...you get the point. So reworking the games for the companies costs much more than expected, and takes more time than expected. Which is why we still don't have a FFVII remake.