Hudson Soft is dead. Long live Hudson Soft.
Here is a good-but-not-great game in the form of a ten-year-old
remake of a twenty-year-old Mario competitor which was never, as much as I love
it, as good as Mario. Why do I care? Why should you?
Consider the method by which long out-of-print games are
brought to contemporary platforms today. Porting is tricky business, and I do
not intend to undermine the efforts of AM2’s nearly flawless reproductions of
classic Sega games (Wonderboy, Streets of
Rage, Space Harrier) to XBOX, PS3, and 3DS. But they’re exactly that: reproductions,
exactly the same at best and pallid imitations at worst. More recent 3D games
are generally upscaled, smoothed out a little, and packaged and put on the shelves.
While this can potentially make the old new again—ICO and Shadow of the Colossus
finally play as intended at 60FPS—most games look just as dated as their
sources or worse. Rendering decade-old assets in 1080p can accentuates
flaws. Ten yeas ago, developers hid graphical blemishes in the gaps between a 480i/p display's lines. The low resolution had a way of smudging the images to conceal aesthetic blemishes. As so many newscasters would find out, hi-def gave blemishes no place to hide. Playing Devil May Cry 3 on a PS2 connected to a 480p
CRT television is looking at your reflection in the soft lighting of your
bathroom after you shower. Playing Devil
May Cry 3 HD on a PS3 connected to a 1080p flatscreen is looking at your reflection
in the blazing fluorescence of an Exxon Mobil restroom at 3AM. The only way
around this is to overhaul the assets; to rebuild the game from the
ground up. That takes time, money, and creativity, a combination few developers have.
And that’s exactly what Hudson did with their PC Genjin remake. The 2D sprites are now
colorful, fluidly animated 3D models. The general shape of the levels is intact,
but with secrets added to the original’s barren stretches and with some of its
padding extricated. It’s a work by fans. It’s
a work of love.
Hudson bestowed three
other games with paeans in their Hudson Select line: Cubic Lode Runner, Star
Soldier, and Takahashi Meijin no Bouken Jima
(Adventure Island). Each has a distinctive look: PC Genjin’s backgrounds resemble the paper cutouts of an elementary
school diorama (Little Big Planet
would later perfect this aesthetic) and Takahashi's renders are Claymation inspired.
PC Genjin is still
about a half hour too long. The difficulty of its bosses is disproportionate to
that of its levels, and the enemies, while cute, cloy. But that it wasn’t a
great game to begin with makes the remake even more interesting, because if it
were perfect in the first place, what would a remake offer?
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