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The Future of Remakes   by Sandra Prior

It takes a very specific kind of game to convince players to band together. For starters, it has to be original, and have some cult value. The games that get remade are inevitably the ones that started something new; the titles that every gamer of their era would know, if not actually have played, and know to be good if only by cultural osmosis. The most recent game to warrant the effort is the original Half-Life via the Black Mesa project (an attempt to outdo Valve's very half-hearted Half-Life remake, consisting of little more than the models and map data dumped into the new engine). It seemed a bit soon when the project was announced, but a billion delays later, who knows?

The second key factor is there has to be a genuine reason to put the work in. Remaking a game isn't that far removed from making a new one from scratch, except that most of the fun creative stuff has already been done, and you're not going to get much credit for it. If the original game is still perfectly playable and easily accessible, why not just play it? If you don't have anything to add, whether it's compatibility with modern systems, or something more cutting-edge, why bother?

Can it be Done?

Most important of all, the project has to be realistically doable. The more complex the core game is, the more systems that have to be implemented and important assets generated, scripts written, and consequently the less likely it is that you'll ever be finished. Retros are the most popular remakes, since the core mechanics can more easily be handled by a single programmer (the original probably was), possibly backed up with an artist and a musician to turn the old graphics into something stylish and new. Not needing a whole team, makes starting a remake project something that can be done on a whim, rather than requiring a huge time investment.

That's not to say it's necessarily easy; just more doable. Games like Tetris and Defender and Tempest make for good programming practice. Releasing a new version of Treasure Island Dizzy, crap though those games were (yes they were) is also far more likely to draw attention than some open source project about reticulating splines or controlling traffic lights. No nostalgia factor there, sadly.

Adventure games have become one of the most high-profile genres to be remade of late, thanks to a mix of the crappy state of most new adventure games to hit the shelves, and the availability of one tool in particular: Adventure Game Studio. This removes much of the pain of general adventure programming letting you focus on the game-specific scripting, with a massive community of developers ready to have you pick their brains.

Sierra's Quest series has received most of the love, with the anonymous team at IGDI producing comprehensive remakes of King's Quest 1 and 2, with Quest for Glory 2 on the way. Instead of simply updating the sound and art, both have been rewritten from scratch, adding extra puzzles and plot elements, redesigned maps, and full speech.

Another team. Infamous Adventures, kept closer to the original source, but otherwise gave the same treatment to King's Quest III, and is working on a similar project based on the ghastly Space Quest II. Infamous also remade Leisure Suit Lorry 2 with a point-and-click interface, replacing the original text parser.

What about the Rest?

The obvious question is what happened to Quest for Glory 7, Space Quest 2 and Larry 1? Sierra got there first. At the start of the 90s, it dug several of its most popular series out of the cupboard, most notably those three, and Police Quest. Each was given a complete overhaul to turn them into point-and-click games, using its SCI engine, given VGA graphics, extra jokes, and blessed with proper soundcard-powered music and whizz-bang effects.

For Larry, this was its second major upgrade. The original game was itself a remake (and to a large extent parody) of an earlier Sierra game, the 'erotic' text-based Softporn Adventure, widely regarded as being roughly as sexy as a wire pipe cleaner up the man tube.

The legality of remakes is pretty simple: a big red stop sign. In practice, it's up to individual developers - or to be more exact, publishers - whether or not they turn a blind eye. The older a game is, the more likely it is that nobody's going to wave a red flag. If they do, the remake creators have two choices: cease and desist as ordered; wasting all their work or release the game and face the possible penalties. The word for a license holder stopping a project is 'Foxed' named for Fox Interactive shutting down an Aliens mod for Doom.

Developers hoping to avoid this have only one real option - release the game and hope it spreads round the net fast enough to avoid any passing lawyers, while hiding behind pseudonyms and anonymous webpages.

While legally, and morally, a company is in the right to refuse permission to use its characters, it can come across as very petty. Selling a remake is a big no-no, both to the fans and the copyright laws, and the games chosen for remake are rarely likely to see another release.

Never Say Never

That said, you can never know for sure. Square shut down a Chrono Trigger remake back in 2004, when the 1995-era game was impossible to get hold of. Just last month, however, it announced its own commercial remake for the Nintendo DS, and if only 1 per cent of the fans slavering over the prospect actually buy it, that's roughly a squillion dollars in the bank right there. Similarly, Sierra released several classic adventure packs (albeit so badly that several of them failed to include the copy protection codes and at least one was borderline unplayable) that didn't sell many copies, but undoubtedly shifted more than if they'd had to compete with far superior free versions. In addition, even if a game never sells another copy, companies are increasingly aware of the marketing benefits of releasing old games for free to help boost a future sequel, or just grab a few column inches. Sierra with both Betrayal at Krondor and Red Boron, and if you want a copy of either Grand Theft Auto or GTA2, just head over to Rockstar's website.

One way to bypass this problem is not to remake the game as such, but to create a new utility to play its files.

The most famous of these is SCUMMVM, originally built with an eye on early Lucasarts titles, but now capable of handling a number of other developers' back catalogues as well. Exult does something similar for Ultima VII. The downside here is that players have to (ahem) acquire copies of said files from somewhere, leaving them available only to devoted fans who still have those original game discs and disks safely held in a padded envelope somewhere - or anyone who has access to the net and a P2P program.

The other, even safer way, is to work with the developers directly. Sadly, most designers don't count, thanks to not owning the rights to their own titles and franchises, although many (if not the majority) are happy to see their games alive and played rather than forgotten or stuffed away in some vault somewhere.

The most successful of these projects is The Ur-Quan Masters, which began with the open-sourced code for Star Control 2 on 3DO, and became a full remake project The Star Control name wasn't available, but everything else - alien names, graphics, sound and all assets - was made available. The developers are independent, but don't need to worry about being shut down by act of lawyer. Moreover, the original creators were able to use the attention drummed up to try and persuade Activision to commission a proper sequel (replacing the widely hated SC3). It didn't work out, but not every story has a happy ending.

The future of remakes is hazy at best. It's likely that as long as there are gamers, there'll be updates of the cast-iron classics, such as Tetris, Qix, Space Invaders and Q-Bert. However, the more advanced games get, the less likely it is that any home developers will be able to match, never mind improve upon the phenomenal production values of modern titles. It's one thing - and not a small one - to repaint 50 backgrounds and create sprites, but quite another to not only recreate a modern world, but surpass it.

In all likelihood, people won't. Unlike the original 2D games, locked to the exact pixels drawn by their artists, there's a lot that can be done to make even simple 3D shine that little more, whether it's replacing the textures (as seen in Deus Ex: Invisible War and System Shock 2) with something more detailed, or creating a new engine to parse the original files and add proper shading colored lighting or other such effects.

Other projects will continue on keeping the games playable in their original form, as seen with DOSBox (the heart of many classic games on Steam, and the forthcoming Good Old Games service). Graphics and sound have long since reached the point where if you want to play these games, the original appearance isn't going to cause much trouble. Good art direction trumps high technology every time.

In some ways, that's a sad state of affairs - but it's one with a positive side. With virtual machines and emulators and computers powerful enough to cater to older games' every whim, we're leaving the world where games can 'die'. They'll just no longer be easily available, which isn't the same thing as gone forever. So long as there are some fans still flying the flag for specific titles, the classics of today and yesteryear could potentially live on forever.

And if humanity ever creates some universe-spanning supercomputer with a million terabytes of data in an area the size of your fingernail, capable of rewriting the laws of physics itself with a simple flick of its electronic brain... you can almost guarantee that someone, somewhere, will have released a version of Dragon's Lair for it.

About the Author

For all your Discount Computer Parts, Notebook and Games requirements visit us at http://sacomputers.rr.nu and http://usacomputers.rr.nu.
Thank you for visiting our search page to discover the best offers for Sexy Retro Mod.Sexy Retro Mod

Christmas is in the air!
Wishing you all the joy, hope and wonder of the season.
May your home be filled with the love of Christmas!
"Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childish days; that can recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth; that can transport the sailor and the traveller, thousands of miles away, back to his own fire-side and his quiet home!" - Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers, 1836 Discover the lowest price and the best deal for Sexy Retro Mod today.

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Top ten pre-season classics   by Vincent

Global warming is not the only thing playing havoc with our seasons - fashion is too. Once upon a time shopping for anything other than a bikini in July was impossible. Now, thanks to the phenomena of 'pre' collections, shops no longer resemble the Mary Celeste at this time of year.

Ever since the July summer sales shifted to June, the high-end clothing market has been working on a strategy to entice the sort of wealthy customer who might otherwise spend July twiddling her thumbs waiting for the mainline range to arrive in August.

What are the pre-fall and resort/cruise collections?

Thanks to the success of pre-collections, or 'pre-colls', which give a diluted taster of the new season in easy to wear pieces, we are all changing the way we shop to suit a pattern once reserved for globetrotting fashionista-types.

"Today's international and multi-tasking lifestyles means that the traditional 'seasons' don't really hold any value for customers," explains Patrick Couderc, UK managing director of the Herve Leger by Max Azria boutique in London. "Pre-collections reflect that in their versatility, and their ability to easily blend in to your wardrobe."

Resort 2012 collections in pictures

"Pre-collections have evolved to become a formidable area of the business," agrees Averyl Oates, the esteemed buying director of Harvey Nichols, who puts it down to their 'buy-it-and-wear-it-now' option. Ruth Runberg, buying director of the London boutique, Browns, believes you can be the success of the pre-collection down to our very modern need for "instant gratification. Customers are less willing to wait. If a piece proves irresistible, even the heaviest coat will sell in the dead of summer."

So who buys pre-colls? Yvan Mispelaere - the Frenchman at the helm of Diane von Furstenberg, one of the standout pre-collections of the moment - believes their appeal stretches far wider than the stressed-out executive or bored, rich housewife.

"Pre-Fall is indeed for a woman on-the-go who travels a lot. But it's also about the balance of practical and glamour - it is absolutely not 'just' a "pre-collection" but a real collection with a strong identity. As Diane often says, 'When you open your closet, you have to feel that your clothes are your best friends.'"

"The importance of pre-collections took off just prior to the recession," says Browns' Ruth Runberg. "There was a demand for luxury-price products in very commercial, easily digestible styles. Post-recession, pre-collections offer more wearable, lower-priced products and, for those reasons, have become big business."

"Catwalk shows provide the brand with its dynamic aesthetic and creativity," agrees Harvey Nichols' Averyl Oates. "This leaves pre-colls to demonstrate how individual pieces can be worked into an everyday wardrobe."

Here's our compilation of the top ten pieces Pre-Fall pieces that should be in yours.

Top ten hot pre-season pieces

1. Midi skirt

The longer length skirt kicks off the the most important trend of the season This either has a nipped in 'hobble' feel evocative of the Forties, or is high-waisted and flares out Seventies style. Watch out for pleats, which can be unforgiving. Fenwick are eagerly awaiting delivery of a Paul Smith floral style, whereas Harvey Nichols are touting a canary yellow knife-pleat midi by Chloe as a possible best seller.

How to wear : Team with a loose silk blouse or cropped leather jacket; clumpy ankle boots and bare tanned legs.

2. Caped outdoor jacket

An update on the trench - having a cape on your jacket, coat or see-through 'pac-a-mac' shows the world that you know what's hot. Diane von Furstenberg has some stunning lightweight pieces that work as an alternative to a coat and have the required slouchy feel. Many caped jackets have an equestrian-vibe but come in glamorous colours like saffron or eggplant to stop them looking like a Barbour.

How to wear : Layered over jeans and a loosely fitted long sleeve t-shirt (James Perse has a perfect one for such a task) or over a midi skirt and 'flatforms'.

3. Curvy dress

The return of the clingy herve leger dress is imminent, with or without sleeves and not just for eveningwear. Azzedine Alaia is back on the fashion radar bringing with him a new curvy mood. Herve Leger Pre-Fallarrivals include the famous bandage dress, with a much longer length than "Footballers Wives" might approve of, in shades of icy blue, silvery grey and black.

How to wear : Under neatly tailored jackets or tasselled 'coatigans' (coat/cardigan hybrid), with glossy bare tanned legs and ankle boots with the new 'nail' killer heel.

4. Blazer

To compliment the new length longer skirt, your boyish blazer should be nipped in slightly to give you the required waspish waist, possibly with rounded sleeves too. Holli Rogers, Buying Director of Net-A Porter, hotly tips Stella McCartney's burgundy blazer and camel styles by The Row, designed by those trail-blazing Olsen twins.

How to wear : Look out for mid-priced ranges by American brand, Eileen Fisher, at Fenwick and fashion chains offering lighter weight 'power jackets' designed to be teamed with curvier skirts.

5. Leather

A leather (or pleather) bomber in a vivid jewel colour - amethyst, garnet, emerald, topaz - will instantly pull your wardrobe into shape. Leather trousers, pencil skirts, boxy t-shirts, shorts and sleek cut curvy dresses are winners too. There's a Sixties 'Avengers' Mod feel to a lot of the styles. Acne's pre-collection is a winner if you can afford to invest in any leather piece.

How to wear : Stop glossy and shiny patent leathers from looking too wintry by wearing sandals or shorts.

6. Trousers

High-waisted flares and "carrot tops" (that's trousers shaped like carrots) are taking over from skinny drainpipes, the latter being updated this season with a tunic. Holli Rogers believes Seventies high waisted flares such as Gucci's grey velvet-corduroy flares, which are currently one of Net A Porter's best sellers, are a perfect bridge to take you from summer to autumn.

How to wear : Trouser styles that taper and show a hint of tanned ankle can look very sexy worn with cropped tailored bomber jackets and silk shirts, worn tucked in or out. Update flares with a 'matchy matchy' style by wearing tops in the same colour.

7. Cocoon knit or coat

Ease yourself into the cocoon shape of Autumn/Winter 2011/12 with a coatigan or egg-shaped fealty jacket. Great for travelling (particularly air travel), in a shade of saffron or jewel red this can really jazz up wide leg trousers and stops a pencil skirt looking too retro.

How to wear : Lengthen the silhouette with something slimming like cropped drainpipes, high-waisted white jeans or a midi skirt.

8. Flat or heeled loafers

Bye bye brogues. The androgynous penny loafer with the snaffle is poised to become ubiquitous come September - although some kind designers (Acne) have given it a wedge and in some cases a heel (Marni). Mid-priced fashion-forward boutiques like Zadig and Voltaire offer some great styles. Look out for Topshop's velvet loafers with or without a heel.

How to wear : With a trouser that stops just short of the ankle. Also with shorts and midi skirts.

9. Equestrian-feel trench or parka

Heritage feels hip again: Harvey Nichols buyer, Averyl Oates, picks Celine's tan trench coat with its plaid lapels as one of her favourite pre-collection pieces. Go for styles that evoke the ladylike 'Park Avenue' vibe rather than the Sloane Ranger. An alternative is the parka, which has had an urban makeover thanks to popularity of quilted styles. Thakoon, one of Anna Wintour's favourite rising fashion stars, has done one in his pre-collection.

How to wear : Open and layered over tailored 'Townie' pieces, like a Alexander Wang midi pencil skirt and lace up boots. But the look should say 'high fashion' - not festival-chic.

10. Printed day dress

The long-sleeved silk shirtwaister, Sixties shift or Diane Von Furstenberg wraparound is a great transitional wardrobe favourite. DVF creative director, Yvan Mispelaere was inspired by American artists Edward Hopper and Alex Katz for his current American sportswear-feel dresses. Celine's pink long-sleeved pleated skirt dress was a favourite with Browns buying director, Ruth Runberg, along with Christopher Kane's short-lace bodice dresses. Harvey Nichols buyer, Averyl Oates picks a Proenza Schouler patterned silk shirt dress.

How to wear : With chunky heeled sandals, a statement necklace and hard-structure Seventies-feel handbag like the DVF 'Harper' handbag which comes in a wonderful eggplant colour. It's reassuringly expensive - and has a certain Miss Beckham's name on it we feel.

 

About the Author

Read More: Tory Burch Outlet and Uggs Sale

Thank you for visiting and using our search page to discover the best offers for Sexy Retro Mod.Choose the costume and accessories that is right to you among the best offers of Sexy Retro Mod.
Try broadening your search words if you see a few options. Use more exact search terms if you see too many offers below.

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The Future of Remakes   by Sandra Prior

It takes a very specific kind of game to convince players to band together. For starters, it has to be original, and have some cult value. The games that get remade are inevitably the ones that started something new; the titles that every gamer of their era would know, if not actually have played, and know to be good if only by cultural osmosis. The most recent game to warrant the effort is the original Half-Life via the Black Mesa project (an attempt to outdo Valve's very half-hearted Half-Life remake, consisting of little more than the models and map data dumped into the new engine). It seemed a bit soon when the project was announced, but a billion delays later, who knows?

The second key factor is there has to be a genuine reason to put the work in. Remaking a game isn't that far removed from making a new one from scratch, except that most of the fun creative stuff has already been done, and you're not going to get much credit for it. If the original game is still perfectly playable and easily accessible, why not just play it? If you don't have anything to add, whether it's compatibility with modern systems, or something more cutting-edge, why bother?

Can it be Done?

Most important of all, the project has to be realistically doable. The more complex the core game is, the more systems that have to be implemented and important assets generated, scripts written, and consequently the less likely it is that you'll ever be finished. Retros are the most popular remakes, since the core mechanics can more easily be handled by a single programmer (the original probably was), possibly backed up with an artist and a musician to turn the old graphics into something stylish and new. Not needing a whole team, makes starting a remake project something that can be done on a whim, rather than requiring a huge time investment.

That's not to say it's necessarily easy; just more doable. Games like Tetris and Defender and Tempest make for good programming practice. Releasing a new version of Treasure Island Dizzy, crap though those games were (yes they were) is also far more likely to draw attention than some open source project about reticulating splines or controlling traffic lights. No nostalgia factor there, sadly.

Adventure games have become one of the most high-profile genres to be remade of late, thanks to a mix of the crappy state of most new adventure games to hit the shelves, and the availability of one tool in particular: Adventure Game Studio. This removes much of the pain of general adventure programming letting you focus on the game-specific scripting, with a massive community of developers ready to have you pick their brains.

Sierra's Quest series has received most of the love, with the anonymous team at IGDI producing comprehensive remakes of King's Quest 1 and 2, with Quest for Glory 2 on the way. Instead of simply updating the sound and art, both have been rewritten from scratch, adding extra puzzles and plot elements, redesigned maps, and full speech.

Another team. Infamous Adventures, kept closer to the original source, but otherwise gave the same treatment to King's Quest III, and is working on a similar project based on the ghastly Space Quest II. Infamous also remade Leisure Suit Lorry 2 with a point-and-click interface, replacing the original text parser.

What about the Rest?

The obvious question is what happened to Quest for Glory 7, Space Quest 2 and Larry 1? Sierra got there first. At the start of the 90s, it dug several of its most popular series out of the cupboard, most notably those three, and Police Quest. Each was given a complete overhaul to turn them into point-and-click games, using its SCI engine, given VGA graphics, extra jokes, and blessed with proper soundcard-powered music and whizz-bang effects.

For Larry, this was its second major upgrade. The original game was itself a remake (and to a large extent parody) of an earlier Sierra game, the 'erotic' text-based Softporn Adventure, widely regarded as being roughly as sexy as a wire pipe cleaner up the man tube.

The legality of remakes is pretty simple: a big red stop sign. In practice, it's up to individual developers - or to be more exact, publishers - whether or not they turn a blind eye. The older a game is, the more likely it is that nobody's going to wave a red flag. If they do, the remake creators have two choices: cease and desist as ordered; wasting all their work or release the game and face the possible penalties. The word for a license holder stopping a project is 'Foxed' named for Fox Interactive shutting down an Aliens mod for Doom.

Developers hoping to avoid this have only one real option - release the game and hope it spreads round the net fast enough to avoid any passing lawyers, while hiding behind pseudonyms and anonymous webpages.

While legally, and morally, a company is in the right to refuse permission to use its characters, it can come across as very petty. Selling a remake is a big no-no, both to the fans and the copyright laws, and the games chosen for remake are rarely likely to see another release.

Never Say Never

That said, you can never know for sure. Square shut down a Chrono Trigger remake back in 2004, when the 1995-era game was impossible to get hold of. Just last month, however, it announced its own commercial remake for the Nintendo DS, and if only 1 per cent of the fans slavering over the prospect actually buy it, that's roughly a squillion dollars in the bank right there. Similarly, Sierra released several classic adventure packs (albeit so badly that several of them failed to include the copy protection codes and at least one was borderline unplayable) that didn't sell many copies, but undoubtedly shifted more than if they'd had to compete with far superior free versions. In addition, even if a game never sells another copy, companies are increasingly aware of the marketing benefits of releasing old games for free to help boost a future sequel, or just grab a few column inches. Sierra with both Betrayal at Krondor and Red Boron, and if you want a copy of either Grand Theft Auto or GTA2, just head over to Rockstar's website.

One way to bypass this problem is not to remake the game as such, but to create a new utility to play its files.

The most famous of these is SCUMMVM, originally built with an eye on early Lucasarts titles, but now capable of handling a number of other developers' back catalogues as well. Exult does something similar for Ultima VII. The downside here is that players have to (ahem) acquire copies of said files from somewhere, leaving them available only to devoted fans who still have those original game discs and disks safely held in a padded envelope somewhere - or anyone who has access to the net and a P2P program.

The other, even safer way, is to work with the developers directly. Sadly, most designers don't count, thanks to not owning the rights to their own titles and franchises, although many (if not the majority) are happy to see their games alive and played rather than forgotten or stuffed away in some vault somewhere.

The most successful of these projects is The Ur-Quan Masters, which began with the open-sourced code for Star Control 2 on 3DO, and became a full remake project The Star Control name wasn't available, but everything else - alien names, graphics, sound and all assets - was made available. The developers are independent, but don't need to worry about being shut down by act of lawyer. Moreover, the original creators were able to use the attention drummed up to try and persuade Activision to commission a proper sequel (replacing the widely hated SC3). It didn't work out, but not every story has a happy ending.

The future of remakes is hazy at best. It's likely that as long as there are gamers, there'll be updates of the cast-iron classics, such as Tetris, Qix, Space Invaders and Q-Bert. However, the more advanced games get, the less likely it is that any home developers will be able to match, never mind improve upon the phenomenal production values of modern titles. It's one thing - and not a small one - to repaint 50 backgrounds and create sprites, but quite another to not only recreate a modern world, but surpass it.

In all likelihood, people won't. Unlike the original 2D games, locked to the exact pixels drawn by their artists, there's a lot that can be done to make even simple 3D shine that little more, whether it's replacing the textures (as seen in Deus Ex: Invisible War and System Shock 2) with something more detailed, or creating a new engine to parse the original files and add proper shading colored lighting or other such effects.

Other projects will continue on keeping the games playable in their original form, as seen with DOSBox (the heart of many classic games on Steam, and the forthcoming Good Old Games service). Graphics and sound have long since reached the point where if you want to play these games, the original appearance isn't going to cause much trouble. Good art direction trumps high technology every time.

In some ways, that's a sad state of affairs - but it's one with a positive side. With virtual machines and emulators and computers powerful enough to cater to older games' every whim, we're leaving the world where games can 'die'. They'll just no longer be easily available, which isn't the same thing as gone forever. So long as there are some fans still flying the flag for specific titles, the classics of today and yesteryear could potentially live on forever.

And if humanity ever creates some universe-spanning supercomputer with a million terabytes of data in an area the size of your fingernail, capable of rewriting the laws of physics itself with a simple flick of its electronic brain... you can almost guarantee that someone, somewhere, will have released a version of Dragon's Lair for it.

About the Author

For all your Discount Computer Parts, Notebook and Games requirements visit us at http://sacomputers.rr.nu and http://usacomputers.rr.nu.
Thank you for visiting our search page to discover the best offers for Sexy Retro Mod.

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