Game Reviews Volume 2

Opinion Article: The Pros and Cons of Remaster Culture

If you've paid attention to the website, my personal blog or my PSNprofile over the last week or two you'll have noticed I've beenplaying a lot of BioShock. Why? Well it had been a long time since Ihad played any of them, and I had only played BioShock 2 &Infinite once each on release, never even touched Burial At sea untilrecently. So you can imagine when exactly a day after finishingBurial At Sea Episode 2 I was mildly irritated when 2K officiallyrevealed the BioShock Collection for PS4, PC and Xbox One.

I knew it was coming, after all the leaks and references that hadmade to it, it seemed kind of unlikely that it wasn't going to happensometime within the next year or so. Of course the internet lit upwith rejoice over the remastering of some of last generation's mostcritically acclaimed games, and arguably one of gaming's mostimportant franchises.

Myself however, I was much more excited about the launch of theSystem Shock Kickstarter. Now of course System Shock is the sci-fihorror series that BioShock became the spiritual successor of, butwhy was I more excited about System Shock coming to currentgeneration but not BioShock? Well it didn't have a huge amount to dowith having recently played BioShock, but it was to do withpreserving gaming history the only way we can, remastering andrebooting.

Unlike most entertainment forms, gaming is reliant on hardware thatbecomes obsolete every 5 years or so. As such we cart out a newconsole or operating system and leave the other ones to slowly diewith ever decreasing support from their creators. You could arguethat film has had a similar problem in the last couple of decades,transitioning from tape to DVD and now stuck in a weird three waybetween DVD, Blu-Ray and various digital only forms. But thesehardware changes in the film industry are relatively uncommoncompared to gaming; where this trend of every few years we welcome anew generation of console into our homes, or buy a new operatingsystem to keep our PC up to date, and be able to play the newestgames in the best possible way, is much more common.

As such for a long time we had no way of properly preserving the bestgames from our history. Games such as System Shock and Grim Fandangoare some of the more well known examples of games that were simplyunplayable for a very long time, until last year when both receivedsome form of remastering, allowing them to be played on currentgeneration machines.

Grim Fandango was given a full 1080p remastering and was available toPC and PS4 players, with the ability to switch between classic andremastered modes. System Shock was just given the ability to beplayed on modern PC's, but the game as a whole remained unchanged.

Of course now we have a full on System Shock reboot coming our way inDecember 2017, as well as System Shock 3 at some point in the nearfuture, with perhaps even a remastering of System Shock 2. This wouldbring two incredibly important games out of the dark ages along witha new entry to kick the series back into action again.

That is of course a wonderful thing that should be rejoiced andcelebrated by gamers everywhere. So why should the BioShockCollection not get the same? In my eyes it shouldn't, because it'snot preserving history, it's a cash grab from 2K.

The BioShock Collection is not preserving history like the SystemShock reboot, because BioShock hardly constitutes as history. Yes thefirst game will be 10 next year but the consoles it released on areall still fully supported, plus the PC version is handled by Steamwho generally do a pretty fantastic job of updating older games tokeep them playable on modern systems.

IfI was able to turn on my PS3, go to the store and download all theBioShock games, then play them after installing the updates withoutso much as a care in the world, I would argue they don't need to beremastered for current gen consoles. This argument is only made morevalid when you consider that the BioShock games are available acrossPlaystation, Xbox and PC and the first game is even available onmobile devices! They even had pretty solid sales figures, with thewhole franchise clocking in at 25 million copies sold as of May 2015!