Reply To: Remastered edition

[f2bnp]

#4119

I see what you mean TigerQuoll. It’s certainly not without its detractors. When I first saw screenshots of the remaster, I too thought they had perhaps used some kind of upscaling filter like xbrz.

However, on closer inspection once it was released, it became fairly obvious that they actually did touch up on the visuals in significant ways and redraw details on characters and backgrounds, perhaps they even rescanned the originals?
I think it’s a testament to DOTT’s visual composition that it still looks so fantastic after all those years that we’re even having this debate!

I can’t recall where I first heard of it, it might have been in an interview or perhaps the audio commentary of the remastered version, but Monkey Island 2 moved away from the original’s pixel drawn backgrounds and instead used hand-drawn backgrounds from Peter Chan that were scanned in the game. Unfortunately, back in 1991, the technology wasn’t really there and while I love the look of Monkey Island 2, it is fair to say that the artist, Peter Chan, felt like his artwork got mangled in the process.
For the next game, he went ahead and studied the issue and decided to draw things in a way that would look much better on the 320×200 resolutions and 256 VGA colors of the day.

I think the wheel interface is fine. As much as I love the verb interface due to nostalgia, I think usability suffers a bit, although I almost always use keyboard shortcuts for the verbs these days.

DOTT Remastered has a few tricks up its sleeve though:

– First off, the audio commentary is superb and I recommend it to anyone that has a love for this game and other Lucasarts adventure games from that era, it is a curtain into how they went about developing it back then. Also, it can be pretty hilarious!

– Not certain on the music as I haven’t played it since release, but the voices are of higher quality than was possible on the old CD release. In the process however, they replaced pretty much every sound effect which really annoys me as they were iconic and came from sound effect libraries that have been used worldwide for decades (aren’t they royalty free by now?).

– The subtle hint system which definitely helps without having to resort to a walkthrough.

– The fact that you can, as you said, mix and match with original and remastered elements, something that was missing from their Grim Fandango remaster.

Overall, I think it is a more than decent effort. Double Fine really pulled it off with the Full Throttle Remaster however, that truly was a labor of love and it shows, one of the finest remasters I’ve ever seen.