Remakes - Sorting the good from the crap

I for one like to see game remakes. But only good ones.

I am fed up with downloading crap PC remakes of good games, or good PC remakes of crap games (yet obviously the second scenario hardly happens). (edit: when I talk PC I generally mean stuff we can run thru Win32, sorry Linux guys).

After conversations in IRC last night I have decided to start this thread. So please if you know of any good PC remakes of good games then please let me know, and likewise if a game really is so bad it would be fun to see too.

A good starting point might be http://www.remakes.org - a sight full of some great entertainment, some absolute turds and some polished turds.

I know its really easy to post many games as bad ones, but please only post something that is so bad it will make you laugh, or something that defies belief such as a remake of a basic game that hardly tested the Amiga causing issues on a Pentium 4.

Please only list freeware/shareware remakes that can be downloaded and played.

I'll start, and edit this post to include all your comments/reviews:

Good Stuff:-

E-Motion Deluxe
You either love E-Motion or hate it. If you love it this should be right up your street. I know that graphics are pretty much the same as the original, but this is a puzzle game - not an action game for christ's sake. And the originals graphics were pretty boring too.

SWIV Decimation
Remake of SWIV. Very good. Plays similar to the orignal and has nice updated (yet same style) graphics. Won 1st Prize in the Retro Remakes Summer 2003 competion.

Warblade
Edgar M Vigdal made a superb Amiga PD game:- Deluxe Galaga (no HOL link, PD). Highly regarded by many as quite possibly the best Amiga PD game ever made. Personally I think Bip was. However it doesn't matter cause you now get to play Warblade, and possibly the reason why it's so good is cause it was written by none other than Edgar himself. You will have to pay for full version so maybe you could say that the author is ripping the original author off. That is of course if there are 2 Edgar M Vigdal's in the world !

Yoda Soccer
Quite what some stupid old Star Wars character has to do with football (soccer) I will never know. Not a very Sensible title for this, the most Sensible of games. This game is still in beta, and is written in Blitz Basic. However that doesn't stop it looking very promising. And the best part is it is open source so you know this is just gonna get better and better. Sorry - haven't you guessed with my puns....this is none other than Sensible World Of Soccer


Bad Stuff:-

Championship Soccer
Despite thinking Stuart Campbell is a prick I do actually agree with him on this. This game is great but purely gets included cause you have to pay for it. Let the debate commence as to wether it is a remake of Sensible Soccer or Kick Off (I think more Sensible). See the review of Warblade above to proove I have no bias against remakes you have to pay for.

Lemmis
Remake of the classic Lemmings. hahahahahehehehahahahahahahahehehehehe - read the description above the download: "It's done! This is the second 'real' game I am releasing for free!"
If this is done then I'd hate to see a beta. If this is a real game I'd hate to see a beta. How lucky we are this was released for free! And this is C code, not amateur hour Blitz Basic rubbish. I've included this in the bad catergory as it really is a joke, and possibly a good example of when to give up on a game rather than release it and class it as finished.

Airstrike
Remake of the brilliant Bip AKA Biplane Duel AKA Biplanes (Peter Mason) (not in HOL, PD game). I know it's Beta but you can already see they've ruined the game and to make it anything like the original would require a rewrite. Graphics are OK though. I've included this in the bad catergory as an example of all the talent & great skills put to use, yet no idea of how to make a game fun. From what I've gathered they've tried to make the physics as real as possible - but this is a 2D shooting game you play with your friends, not a 3D flight sim ! This game is open source and hopefully they will accept serious design amendments.

Bip
Another remake of Bip, however supposedly more faithful to the orignal. He's stolen the name so here's me hoping it is....If you press the skin changing key you will see it has the original Bip graphics. Nice Good how it leaves a massive blank area though - couldn't he figure out how to resize graphics? But then when you play you see something big is missing. The guy has completely f**ked up the physics and ruined the game. Also using C he hasn't worked out the concept of framerates so it suffers from dreadful skips/pauses even on P4 hardware ! I presume the game devlopment has now halted as he has moved on to bigger and better things.....Bip 3D....arrrrggghhhhhh! I've included this in the bad catergory as an example of how with the "right" programmer, a P4 + good GFX card can be made to struggle to move a tiny sprite.

Well, since this post the author of Bip has been in touch with me (see below) about this review. And rather than just say "f**k off and write the game yourself if you don't like mine" he has taken the criticism maturely and seems open to improving this game So hopefully if Maff (the author) and me (arguably the biggest Amiga Bip fan) get together on this and headstorm/argue/caluclate things over us Bip fans will all get the PC remake that we want, and this game can be moved into the Good Remakes catergory which I would be more than happy to see. Stay tuned.

[mtb]

GOOD ( imo of course ):

Pingus: good lemmings clone, even if till now there are only few levels, but you can create them ( as soon as i'll find a bit of time i'll try )

Tower Toppler: good remake of Nebulous. Problems: imo the speed of the "frog" is a bit too slow compared to other object, but i can always ask the author to do something or i can play with the sources ( always if i'll find the time )

Well, they are the only one i have tried...

Originally Posted by mtb

Pingus: good lemmings clone, even if till now there are only few levels, but you can create them ( as soon as i'll find a bit of time i'll try )

Pingus looks very nice. However I cannot include as (although I forgot to mention) I was specifically talking of Win32 remakes which the majority of us would be able to play. At the moment the site mentions no stable Win32 available for download.

Originally Posted by mtb

Tower Toppler: good remake of Nebulous. Problems: imo the speed of the "frog" is a bit too slow compared to other object, but i can always ask the author to do something or i can play with the sources ( always if i'll find the time )

I have to agree. From a very quick play this is good. Will be included in the main list.

Thanks for your reviews

[Drake1009]

For a couple of non-amiga based remakes there's
Scorched 3D (http://www.scorched3d.co.uk/) basically the classic artillery game with a couple of tanks shooting at each other, now in a good 3D view.

Cybernoid 2 (http://retrospec.sgn.net/games.php?gamelink=42) remake of the old cybernoid game. Quite good

Atomic (http://users.skynet.be/NightGem/windows.htm) old amiga puzzle game. this one looks quite good but plays well the same.

freeciv (http://www.freeciv.org/) is a good civ remake with multi capabilities (also for linux).

Also Oxyd enigma (http://www.nongnu.org/enigma/) is a good remake of the old oxyd game for the PC which required good steady use of the mouse and a good puzzle solving mind once in a while. Definately recommended for a try.

[Galaxy]

Rocks 'n' diamonds (http://www.artsoft.org/rocksndiamonds/ ) is a good (freeware) remake/clone of emerald mines. Unix, Mac OS X, Windows & DOS versions available.

[mtb]

Originally Posted by Jim

Pingus looks very nice. However I cannot include as (although I forgot to mention) I was specifically talking of Win32 remakes which the majority of us would be able to play. At the moment the site mentions no stable Win32 available for download.
Thanks for your reviews

Didn't know this. Anyway i think that being open source soon or later it will be stable also for win.

Another two GOOD links:

Trackballs: not exactly a remake but quite similar to Marble Madness. Even here the "main" focus in on the Linux version, but there is also a little bit older version fot Windows.

Xrick: Rick Dangerous remake ( the soudn is from st version anyway ).

This thread is becoming really interesting

[bobbybearing]

Apidya v0.61
Takatis

Originally Posted by Jim

Bip
Another remake of Bip, however supposedly more faithful to the orignal. He's stolen the name so here's me hoping it is....If you press the skin changing key you will see it has the original Bip graphics. Nice Good how it leaves a massive black area though - couldn't he figure out how to resize graphics? But then when you play you see something big is missing. The guy has completely f**ked up the physics and ruined the game. Also using BlitzBasic he hasn't worked out the concept of framerates so it suffers from dreadful skips/pauses even on P4 hardware ! I presume the game devlopment has now halted as he has moved on to bigger and better things.....Bip 3D....arrrrggghhhhhh! I've included this in the bad catergory as an example of how with the "right" programmer, a P4 + good GFX card can be made to struggle to move a tiny sprite.

im sorry to read you dont think much of my little biplanes clone, but im happy to take critisisum in all its forms to improve it. lets take your points one at a time and with a few pointers i might be able to fix whats anoying you and give you the game your looking for.

The resizing issue, try as i might i cant get any "massive black areas" when the game runs full screen it takes up the whole screen and when running windowed that window sizes down to the size of the playfield, perhaps you could provide me with some screen shots?.

"f**ked up the physics" perhaps you could be a little more descriptive? There is a fairly comprehensive set of attributes in the ini file that you can adjust to suit your tastes, if these dont solve your poblems you could describe how youd like it adjusted.

"the concept of frame rates" again im unable to reproduce this, while the game indeed needs more umfff than an old A500 to run, it runs perfectly smoothly full screen/windowed on my works Dell 1gig cellery machine with a crappy IBM onbaord video card, perhaps you could provide me with your harware.platform specs and ill endevour to recreate it and fix the problem?

Bip is written in C is using the the allegro libraries. Bip3D is written in blitz and has code to frame skip where necessary.

Development has not finished, ive simply not had any bug reports or change requests recently.

Hope you have a few spare moments to help.

Maff

Ex Maffia/NerveAxis in the gold old scene days.

Originally Posted by maff

im sorry to read you dont think much of my little biplanes clone, but im happy to take critisisum in all its forms to improve it. lets take your points one at a time and with a few pointers i might be able to fix whats anoying you and give you the game your looking for.

Hmm. hehe. I sort of had a feeling this could happen but guessed it wouldn't. I see this is your 1st post so I guess you have friends on here. Welcome to the board

Don't take the criticism personally, however personal some of it might seem. Rather think of it as my review, my opinion of the game.

I wouldn't rate this game in any way as one of the worst I have seen (check out Lemmis) and maybe I am biased (in a bad way) against this game because it is one of my favourites and am upset to find a non-perfect PC version. Reason I want a PC version is mainly for network play which your game does support

The resizing issue, try as i might i cant get any "massive black areas" when the game runs full screen it takes up the whole screen and when running windowed that window sizes down to the size of the playfield, perhaps you could provide me with some screen shots?.

Maybe it wasn't black. Now I think more it was the sky colour. But it was basically the orignal Bip 320*200 screen centered into what ever resolution you had when running full screen mode. This was with version I downloaded about 2 months ago. I would have thought all sprites/graphics would be resized to match the resolution, e.g. for a 1280 * 960 resolution all graphics/movements shold be 1.5 times that of a 640 * 480 resolution.

"f**ked up the physics" perhaps you could be a little more descriptive? There is a fairly comprehensive set of attributes in the ini file that you can adjust to suit your tastes, if these dont solve your poblems you could describe how youd like it adjusted.

Stuff I remember is things like when the plane stalls and the angles and stuff being different to Bip. It just wasn't the same as Bip. I will replay the game later (I am not on my machine) and provide more details. Whilst I agree that modding the config file could be done to solve some issues (I attempted this) many issues were still not possible to fix with config changes. But it depends on what you want this game to be - from the name it suggests to me you want it to be a Bip clone, and I also get this idea from the fact that you ripped the Bip graphics. If it is to be a 100% perfect Bip clone then I would recommend 2 things:

1 - Make the default config 100% Bip.

2 - Get rid of the other skins. If you own the website where the game is hosted maybe do a poll or something. I reckon 99% of the people who download your game probably do it because they remember Amiga Bip. It would make your life easier to support only 1 skin. Maybe once we have a 100% Bip clone what I would like to see is a "tarting up" - i.e. better graphics, maybe a few more suprises such as different baloons and birds that if you hit you crash. Nice sounds. Stuff like that, but all configurable on/off so you can revert to classic Bip at any moment.

"the concept of frame rates" again im unable to reproduce this, while the game indeed needs more umfff than an old A500 to run, it runs perfectly smoothly full screen/windowed on my works Dell 1gig cellery machine with a crappy IBM onbaord video card, perhaps you could provide me with your harware.platform specs and ill endevour to recreate it and fix the problem?

It stutters on my P4 single player. Unless you have made a recent modification then I presume it still does. With most games rather than coding like you could on the Amiga (relying on the blitter/vblank for timing) you have to constantly calculate the framerate and adjust movements accoringly - especially with network play.

Bip is written in C is using the the allegro libraries. Bip3D is written in blitz and has code to frame skip where necessary.

Oh I was under the impression it was written in Blitz Basic. I think I came to that opinion cause you are obviously you have written Bip3D in BB and are obviously a BB programmer. Good to know you know C

Development has not finished, ive simply not had any bug reports or change requests recently.

Good I am happy to see this and hope it can evolve.

Hope you have a few spare moments to help.

I would love to Anything that helps to make my fave Amiga game a 100% perfect reality on the PC I am happy to help with. I will play your version of Bip sometime over the next few days and write detailed analysis on what I see as the faults or issues that could be improved and then get back to you with a PM.

I will now modify my review accordingly.

Feel free to search this board for Biplane Duel and you will find I was (am when I get bored) disassembling it. I'm not sure if you know Amiga Assembly but I would be happy to help with things such as exact physics calculations and exactly how Amiga Bip works.

P.S. Maff, you will notice the review of Airstrike is a lot more harsh. Now if the authors of that game come on here then I won't know what to say to appease them And if the author of Lemmis comes on then I am disappearing !!!

P.P.S. [edit #2]

I haven't played your Bip 3D game. The reason I wrote arrrghhhh is because Bip in 3D is not Bip (in my book). Whilst I respect the right that you do what you wanna do and maybe wanna write Bip 3D as a good 3D project I have to ask what the audience for this game would be. I am sure there are many more PD 3D flight games to fulfill the market for people who can't afford/don¡t want to buy a commerical flight-sim, and real Bip fans would hate to play it in 3D. Simplicity and unsimulator like behaviour was to me what made Bip such a joy to play.

[Adeptus]

Found some Paradroid remakes on Sourceforge:
Freedroid has 3 variants:

freedroidClassic: a clone of the classic C64 game Paradroid.
freedroidRPG: a Diablo-like extension into an RPG.
freedroidWorld: a multiplayer action variant

I've tried Classic, and it is quite faithful to the original.
Was going to try RPG, bit it's ~50MB... bit much over dialup...
I think World is new, don't remember it being there last time I looked...
edit: Oh yeah, they have Win32 binaries, & source for compiling on *nix etc.

Haven't tried these two...
SDL Paradroid
NightHawk

[Adeptus]

Are there any M.U.L.E. remakes out there?
I found one commercial one (Space Horse or something like that) but I'm not going to pay US$30 (from memory) for a game I've never heard of, from a developer I've never heard of (from a webshop I've never heard of...)

edit: Found this one on Sourceforge, but it's in Planning stages only, & has had no activity since 2001

edit again: Found a DOS one on remakes.org, will have to try it out...

[manicx]

A very good remake is THROW IN. It is a remake of the Kick Off 2 and it's under development at the moment.

[LaundroMat]

Is that SWIV remake still downloadable? There does no longer seem to be one on their website..

[bobbybearing]

Originally Posted by LaundroMat

Is that SWIV remake still downloadable? There does no longer seem to be one on their website..

ftp://ftp2.zeronews-fr.com/zeronews/

I will eventually update review all these games, please bare with me as I am busy with offline-life and my computing time is spent doing many things as well as working on my spec for Biplane Duel 2004 as promises for Maff in this thread. The document is already 20 pages but I want to be as comprehensive as possible.

Originally Posted by Drake1009

For a couple of non-amiga based remakes there's....

Thanks Drake1009. However I was only interested in remakes of Amiga games. However I urge others to check these out, especially if fans of the originals.

Originally Posted by Galaxy

Rocks 'n' diamonds (http://www.artsoft.org/rocksndiamonds/ ) is a good (freeware) remake/clone of emerald mines. Unix, Mac OS X, Windows & DOS versions available.

Will playtest as soon as possible.

Originally Posted by mtb

Another two GOOD links:

Trackballs: not exactly a remake but quite similar to Marble Madness. Even here the "main" focus in on the Linux version, but there is also a little bit older version fot Windows.

Xrick: Rick Dangerous remake ( the soudn is from st version anyway ).

This thread is becoming really interesting

Again, will playtest.

Originally Posted by bobbybearing

Apidya v0.61
Takatis

How the hell did I forget Apidya when I wrote the 1st post! Yeah, this game is an impressive remake, I played it some months ago. Review to follow. Will also check out other game.

Originally Posted by manicx

A very good remake is THROW IN. It is a remake of the Kick Off 2 and it's under development at the moment.

This game is a very early beta, and downloads are not available to the general public (you have to request). Until the author feels confident to make his beta/v1 available for download from the WWW then I think it would be unfair to review it.

[Adeptus]

Originally Posted by Jim

Thanks Drake1009. However I was only interested in remakes of Amiga games.

Shame, when there are so many C64 remakes I'm finding now
Downloaded a few, yet to try but screenshots look promising...
Bruce Lee
Mail Order Monsters
M.U.L.E.
All found on www.remakes.org (thanks for posting this link! )

Originally Posted by Adeptus

Shame, when there are so many C64 remakes I'm finding now
Downloaded a few, yet to try but screenshots look promising...
Bruce Lee
Mail Order Monsters
M.U.L.E.
All found on www.remakes.org (thanks for posting this link! )

Bruce Lee is very good (as a remake).

[manicx]

Originally Posted by Jim

This game is a very early beta, and downloads are not available to the general public (you have to request). Until the author feels confident to make his beta/v1 available for download from the WWW then I think it would be unfair to review it.

Jim, if you want this Beta, there are two ways to get it:

a) Become beta tester your self (if you fancy that)

b) PM me

[mtb]

GOOD ( even if not specifically an amiga remake ):

Frozen Bubble : there are version for Linux , for Windows and MacOsX, and for java ( so you can even test it from the net )

I don't know ( can someone please test it? - via dial-up it's a pain to download it ( i need to add python to my linux distro also ), but the screenshots are promising ):

The Bub's Brothers: open source, linux mac and windows, similar to Bubble Bobble

[IanS]

Ok, so not Win32, but my Sony P800 had a good version of Stunt Car Racer, although the controls were fiddly. Witty spoonerisms are not required thanks :-)