blind_dead_mcjones said:
and there was me thinking that developers actually had a sense of shame, wow they definately proved me wrong
Assuming its just a HD upgrade that with a budget price tag... don't see the problem.
The current generation of consoles isn't going anywhere soon, so it makes sense to upgrade major releases to HD. The problem with the video game industry is that the format is changing every few years, so the past tends to get lost. Much like the music and video mediums went through digital remastering when CDs and DVDs came out, games need to be converted to new formats or risk being lost.
Closest analogy I can think of is comic remastering. The printing methods used have completely changed, so Golden Age material has to be completely recolored. Sometimes they try to keep it as close to the original as possible (which runs into problems because they no longer use the poor paperstock commonly used in the past, so this often looks extremely bad), sometimes they pull out all the computer coloring tricks to create a more modern looking product.
Video games are running into the same sort of choices. If you have to completely recode the visuals of a game, do you keep the original graphics, which have often aged horribly and might cut into resell value... or do you upgrade the graphics, risking alienation with the more hardcore fanbase. It's going to take a bit of trial and error to find the right balance.
Doing premium priced remakes along the lines of Goldeneye are a completely different matter, since that's creating a product that is designed to play differently. A good HD upgrade should feel exactly like the original, but with nicer graphics. I think the Serious Sam upgrade on XBL did a damn good job of it.
