But does he really listen to much NIN? Who listens to their own band?
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There’s a lot of good comments coming out of this!
I’m starting to think that the answer to @sapphicvalkyrja 's question is “whatever you relate an update or remake to compared to the original that becomes something more than just an update or remake to” which Hurt by Cash has become.
The American Recordings series were done a man at the end of both his career and his life and it can be felt in the music. The Downward Sprial was from a man at the beginning of his and I think the feelings in it reflect that. It’s really hard to relate a remake of something to a cover the more I think of it, especially a song like Hurt as it means many things to many people - I like both versions but it was at different times in my life when I first heard them and they bring back memories that relate to a then. I can also relate to Depeche Mode’s Personal Jesus that Cash also covered and he made his own, and both songs are amazing as they are!!
I think @captain has the best answer so far with the Orge/Tactics example. Another one that comes to mind now is the resident evil/dmc series - both with RE 1.5 and how RE4 “became” DMC.
I need to think a lot more about this, as it features two of my favourite things in the world - music and video games!!!
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Wasn’t trying to challenge this point of view (or to say no one listens to both Nine Inch Nails and Johnny Cash—you’re not a weirdo!) as much as poke at the idea of replacement. If the Cash song replaced the NIN one then no one would ever listen to the NIN song again, which is not the case. Just considering a different angle from the FFVII Remake and Vampire the Masquerade comparisons—FFVIIR and FFVII are separate continuities of the same concept but they exist in dialogue with one another, while VTMB as mentioned is most often played with a number of patches/amendments, and not often without; the two versions of the song don’t really interact with each other, but nor does one replace the other in all contexts. Maybe another point of comparison would be Final Fantasy IV and FFIV DS. You can prefer one or the other, or think one is worthwhile and that the other is not, but I would not argue they operate in the same way and communicate the same feeling—something that is often the case for video game remakes but which the culture ignores because of all the mentioned material incentives to only carry one version forward in time.
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What I meant here was no one who is listening to the NIN album is going to stop right at the end and listen to Cash’s version of the song instead of the NIN version[1]—you would listen to each in their context—but that is the sort of thing that the publishing arm of the video game industry would have us do if they had their way!
maybe I’m wrong ↩︎
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Tactics Ogre is sort of a case in point in that the psp, and then the more recent releases have diverged from the original in somewhat heavy-handed ways and have effectively buried the original’s (arguably still superior) visuals and mechanics. Contrast this with Vagrant Story which is still preserved in amber despite also being unfriendly to novice players by contemporary standards.
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Oh, don’t worry, I didn’t think you were! But yeah, I naturally don’t think the Cash version replaces the NIN version, either, since I enjoy both—but your addendum does make me wonder about giving Downward Spiral a listen but with Cash’s at the end just for fun, lol
Something I’m still kicking around in my brain (that I didn’t properly elucidate in my original prompt) is that Reznor himself sort of transferred authorship of “Hurt” to Cash—when he plays it live, he will sometimes (maybe always, I’m not sure) introduce it as a Johnny Cash song, rather than one of his own. That respect for or deference to the new version on the part of the original creator is part of what got me thinking originally
So in that respect I’m curious about examples with some sort of symbolic transfer of authorship. Like, hypothetically, if modern Square remade Final Fantasy VI in the style of the Final Fantasy VII Remake trilogy, and its original creators (like, Sakaguchi himself, say) viewed it not unlike how Reznor sees “Hurt” now, that’d be an example, but I can’t think of any actual games where that kind of thing has happened
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I’ve been slowly chilling with the newest video by one of Youtube’s foremost longform essayists on the subject of videogames, Noah Caldwell-Gervais, and it reminded me that there perhaps is a Remaster that definitively replaces the original: Diablo 2 Resurrected. I can’t remember every game discussed in this thread so far but maybe this isn’t the only Remaster that has been done in this way, but it sounds pretty impressive at how it sought to present the source material with an absurd degree of precision and faith, to such a degree it makes Bluepoint’s Demons’ses’s Soulses’ses seem like apostolic blasphemy.
For those that don’t keep track of Blizzard games these days (myself included, but, I still had heard about this), Diablo 2 Resurrected is not exactly just the original game recreated out of old assets, with a handful of modern quality of life features. It is literally Diablo 2 with a new visual engine just superimposed over the original game. All of the movement and logic and player-and-game-world-interaction is the original game, and it’s not like the original game, it is the original game in a literal sense, to the degree that you can press a single button and switch between the updated visual style and the original visual style in real time. It’s really more like an extremely fancy visual filter than a recreation, which is pretty damned interesting.
Of course, the quality of visual aesthetics are of course inherently mostly subjective (it might literally be the most subjective thing possible, even literal taste as in the flavour of foods seems to have more objectivity to it), but I would say that all but the people most irrationally* devoted to the original game’s aesthetic would say that the original has objective qualities that make it superior. Surely, even if you prefer the way the original game looks (because of nostalgia for the original game or just a very dedicated preference to perhaps the mechanical qualities of how videogame visuals were brought to us from that particular time period (like real Cathode Ray Tube devotees I guess, idk), the way they went about faithfully capturing the visual style of the original game, just with, like, two decades worth of new tools for digital moving image generation, is awe-inspiring. I personally think anyone who would say that Resurrected looks worse has got to be coming to that conclusion from an irrational frame of mind on the subject. My glasses prescription is not that strong, but I feel like it’s hard to tell the difference between screenshots of Diablo 2 and Diablo 2 Resurrected on a TV from a metre or two away until I can zoom in and see the obvious differences.
*
tT be clear, there is no intended value judgement in saying it’s “irrational” to prefer it or even to dislike it in comparison to Resurrected. Irrational does not mean wrong or bad! Many of my favourite decisions and attitudes and positions are quite irrational.
It might not even be fair to say that Diablo 2 Resurrected is exactly a “remaster,” in the sense that “remastering” is a process by which you recreate the raw material to rearrange it into a new product meant to mimic the old, but at a higher fidelity of sensory output. In audio that would mean re-recording the musical tracks entirely, either to use better quality audio capturing technology to capture a higher range of frequencies, or on better instruments, or in a more favourable recording environment, or whatever. With Resurrected, the original recording is still there, and a new recording is being played over top of it. It’s kinda more like a Remix with a layer of Remaster icing on top.
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I love Noah’s work so much! After watching his most recent one I was pretty close to actually picking up the new version of Diablo II, which happens pretty commonly after one of his videos. I never played the original game, so I don’t have any horse in the race of which version would be definitive, but at least conceptually I really like that approach to a remaster, and I hope it’s the sort of thing that becomes normalized with time if we’re going to be remastering games for the rest of the industry’s lifespan
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As far as I understand, audio remastering doesn’t involve re-recording at all; it’s essentially just polishing the original tracks. Am I wrong?
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Wait, yeah, ok, I think I’m the one who is confused here.
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I take strong umbrage with this sentiment.
D2R does not replace D2 + D2LoD for one key reason – existing fan mods do not work with it. There are d2 mods that are still being updated to this day with new seasonal content and leaderboards, and D2R does not support them.
https://www.projectdiablo2.com/
An attempt to suggest D2R is a replacement for D2LoD is to my mind, at best, grossly misinformed.
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Damn…I forgot about mods!!!
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sounds a lot like the wonder boy remaster, which also has the push-a-button-to-swap-graphics thing going. afaik this one doesn’t use the original code but i’m pretty sure they aimed to make it as 1:1 as they could, while adding a couple lil things on top
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There is exactly one exception to this, though. Square Enix, I am begging you to release the FFXIII trilogy on modern Playstation hardware. All you gotta do is give me a version that runs at 60 FPS with the proper Playstation button icons so I have useable footage for the video that’s going to make everyone buy it and finally love it (okay, that last part might be a bit of a stretch, but let me have this!)
I’m trying to do you a solid, help me help you!
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Do you play games on PC much? It takes up a bunch of storage space, but there are many mods for the PC version of FF13 that offer higher-resolution textures and touched-up versions of the FMV cutscenes, as well as performance fixes (and whatever else you might want to tailor the experience). It took a couple hours of work but I set my Steam copy of the game up like this a few months ago and it was a delightful way to revisit the game — until FF7: Rebirth took my full attention away from it lol
I don’t know if the sequels got similar treatment from the community, but I’d be surprised if not!
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I do not generally use mods, no
I have them on PC and just did a nearly-100% playthrough fn the Steam version of FFXIII late last year (recorded the playthrough, even), but my brain isn’t happy with the button displays being “wrong” for the footage, as it were
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it’s so bonkers to me that they haven’t done this yet! i mean, i know ps3 (as well as pc/xbox) architecture is gonna have a chunk of differences compares to ps4/ps5 but like… every other one of em is out there!! i have 13 and 13-2 on my pc and did play them years ago on a super underpowereed laptop but like… i hate gaming on my pc, which is just not equipped for gaming more complex than baba is you. my gf did just get a steam deck, tho, and i haven’t dug into it enough to see if mods etc can be applied to things on there, so i might give them a shot there (and finally play 13-3???) but it seems like a slam dunk for the thirteens to have a ps port by now
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I have had XIII and XIII-2 installed for like two years with the fan patches that fix many of the PC port issues. One day I’ll get more than 5 hours into XIII.
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I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the re-evaluation the XIII games seem to be getting in recent years will encourage Square Enix to finally get this done, but part of me wonders if they’re still so spooked by the original response to the game that they’re going to drag their feet for awhile yet
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