why arent old games with bad gameplay fixed after many years

[flojocabron]

I've been thinking about this lately....

We have all played games with bad level design, bad camera angles, and/or lack of polish.
why arent these games fixed or updated?

how many nes, super, genesis or PS1 games could benefit from this?

They may not have made money or tanked badly, but how hard can it be to fix the game code? Arent programmers better now than they were 10, 15 years ago?

You and many others have thought, "this game would have been awesome if _____ was better?

It shouldnt be that hard to fix them. Newer games get updated all the time.

maybe fan translators can alter roms to enhance games instead of just translating them.

Many classic games are comming out for wiiware/psn/xboxlive, so why arent companies digging in and fixing their past goof ups? Many older games can be given new life.

Or will game companies do it anyways, once they reach the bottom of the barrel?

What do you think about this? can it be done or is this just wishful thinking?

[AppleQueso]

It probably can be (and has been) done, it's just sorta sacrilege I think to mess with a game like that. Plus there's the worry of the "fixes" making things worse. The latter seems to frequently be the case with older games that receive modern updates. (Turtles in Time re-shelled anyone?)

[slowslow325]

The problem is, a lot of bad games aren't worth fixing. They know some people didn't like the first one, so why would they buy the remake? Plus, in order to get the game to have any sales, they usually must completely redo the graphics to make it better for people that care and people that want their money's worth.

And some completely atrocious games, must have gameplay completely altered.


But anyway, that's another cool thing about the 2600. ROM hacks are pretty easy and don't require much time if you know what you're doing. Because of this, you can get things like "A Better Pacman" and a version of Donkey Kong with the missing 50m level. Oh, and "ET The Extra Testicle".

[Limewater]

Another issue for later consoles is simply lack of source code. That's apparently a big part of the reason that Panzer Dragoon has never been ported to another system. I doubt they saved the source code for a lot of these older games. This means that if they want to tweak a game, they have to hack back through the hex code and reverse engineer it. It's just not worth the effort to them. For the later systems, like the PS1, this gets really complicated.

[Gamerforlife]

This is what we have remakes for. I don't believe in messing with the classics in any way whatsoever, but if you want to remake them, sure why not? There are a bunch of awesome remakes on the PSP that I like

As for Turtles in Time: Re-Shelled, wow, where to even start on how badly they effed that one up. They pretty much gutted the original. It's like a completely different game. Honestly, all they had to do was just re-release the SNES and arcade versions together with some achievements and everyone would have been happy, but apparently they couldn't get the soundtrack rights, and that whole diagonal attack bullshit is just messing with the game's original design. Sacrilege. Hmmm, reminds me of Working Designs

Some people enjoyed the remake though, so what do I know?

[d123456]

Ghosts and goblins you cannot go from a croaching left to a croaching right position.You need to first let the character get up.

DL to DR will still keep the character in DL position

[AznKhmerBoi]

because they wont profit enough like they would if they just make some cookie cutter shooter. Cough cough Halo n call of duty

[kamiboy]

IF developers cannot be arsed to fix new games coming out right now I fail to see why they would got back to a 10 year old game. Seriously though, have you ever had a current generation game crash on you? They do that a lot these days don't they, sort of like PC games have always been, only now we get to enjoy things like unfinished beta version being released and then maybe patched afterwards.

How Fallout 3, especially the PS3 version, and especially those DLC's ever got past any sort of even rudimentary quality control baffles me to this very day. Crash bugs alone froze that game once for every hour or so of gameplay, not to mention all the other things.

At least old games could only be faulted for having bad game mechanics, today games are broken before they even get to that point.