Grim Fandango being remastered for PS4 and Vita

[Merus]

I'd be pretty happy if they didn't do any "originally meant to be"s. Down that road lies a lot of late-production choice reversal that seems too risky to try 15+ years after the fact.

 

This is a fair point; while I'm not exactly blown away by some of the back half, especially after the sprawling Rubacava, I can't imagine any new content won't make the game feel like Grim Fandango with some dodgy bits glued on to cover up some of the flaws.

[tegan]

The craziest thing about all of this is that against all expectations, Disney actually did something with the Lucasarts license.

[Architecture]

The craziest thing about all of this is that against all expectations, Disney actually did something with the Lucasarts license.

Adam Boyes basically insinuated that Sony was responsible for getting Disney to sign off on the project.  Perhaps we'll see more Lucasarts revivals.

[Tanukitsune]

I wonder if this means we'll get the more of the Lucasarts games on Vita and PS4 "exclusively"? Would it be strange for them to just get Grim Fandango? There are still a few Lucasarts games you can't get legally apart from Grim Fandango.

[Merus]

I suspect that part of it is that Sony's current business development team are unusually invested in building personal relationships with developers. I wouldn't be surprised if they did Grim Fandango only because Tim Schafer is involved.

[Nappi]

Holy shit! Didn't see this coming at all.

 

 

 

I hope all the DLC is included. 

[Roderick]

Imagine if Sony got Schafer back the rights to Grim. I mean, even if he wouldn't do anything with it (except make some classy, classy merchandise), it'd be such a huge thing, wresting that away from LEC/Disney at last and bringing it to its rightful creator.

[Bjorn]

I suspect that part of it is that Sony's current business development team are unusually invested in building personal relationships with developers. I wouldn't be surprised if they did Grim Fandango only because Tim Schafer is involved.

 

You can kind of contrast that too with MS's montage at the end, where it was like, "Hey, look, indies!  We love 'em, and have some!"  But without the sense that they were really invested in it, just a checkbox feature they feel they need.  Whereas Sony has come off as really wanting long term business relationships with devs across the board of all shapes and sizes.

 

I don't know what the reality is for each company, but that's the impression I'm getting.  I can't imagine a world where MS goes out and gets the license for a 15 year old adventure game owned by Disney, and then pimps it as one of the key points in their E3 presentation.  You might get fired for suggesting that. 

 

Also, this whole deal is mind-blowingly awesome.

[Udvarnoky]

Incredible.  As far as the remastering - I'd be happy just to get better-compressed cutscenes, everything else will be lagniappe.  I agree that faithfulness would be good here.  I think a lot of how they do this will come down to how much access Double Fine has to the original resources (should they have been preserved).

 

This is mind-blowingly awesome news on the surface, but the most important aspect of this is that some kind of agreement was reached with Disney about the IP.  This is an important precedent for other heavily needed re-releases of the LEC classics.

[Ben X]

As far as the remastering - I'd be happy just to get better-compressed cutscenes

 

Yeah, I wonder how much of the original data they have (animations, camera moves etc) or whether they'll be recreating a lot of that stuff by hand.

 

I wonder whether they'll do widescreen. That would be a lot more work than just painting some extra bits on the side of each background...

[syntheticgerbil]

I'm really interested to see the improvements here. This will have to be one of the most extensive remasters yet. The whole game will have to be formatted to widescreen. I'm guessing all of the prerendered stuff will be real time, backgrounds and cutscenes then probably have to reanimate the camera for every scene. If the backgrounds were real time, I'd love for it to slightly move with Manny. I wonder what decisions will be made with the lip sync animations? I'm guessing actually modeling Glottis' mouth would be a must, but should the mouths of the skeletons stay a texture? It's hard to tell which of the choices were truly made to work within the stylization of low poly 3D and which should be held true in a remake. Maybe the same mouth animations could be done but with more inbetween frames.

 

Argh, this is so cool the more I think of it.

 

It could also be a pretty boring remaster and they could do like all of the HD remastered games so far and just change the texture and models and not rerender the cutscenes. I can only recall Ratchet and Clank 1 and 2 HD switching to 4:3 cutscenes and they weren't so jarring because the cutscenes were usually video recordings or ads, making that aspect ratio make sense. The worst thing about HD remake prerendered stuff is when old cutscenes were rendered with letterbox and all the company did was upscale some grainy 360p video to fit a 720p resolution. The worst is the Sly Collection because that company couldn't be bothered and you get letterboxed and pillarboxed cutscenes. Brilliant. Is it that hard for someone to at least have a full ratio NTSC or PAL master without compression of these cutscenes lying around?

 

 

The craziest thing about all of this is that against all expectations, Disney actually did something with the Lucasarts license.

Yeah, I really wonder who at what company initiated all of this.

[Bjorn]

I'm betting they don't go widescreen.  As much as I prefer widescreen content, it just seems like the amount of work to make that happen (unless a bunch of original wider field of view assets are available) wouldn't be worth it.

[Nachimir]

Yeah, I wonder how much of the original data they have (animations, camera moves etc) or whether they'll be recreating a lot of that stuff by hand.

 

Even if they have the data, they'll probably have to do weird forms of archaeology to get at it. When they started work on Oddworld games, Just Add Water got a lot of stuff from Oddworld Inhabitants, but had to track down old versions of software to be able to open it up.

[syntheticgerbil]

But think of how much it would be worth it.

 

I mean it's Sony and Disney money. Who cares?

[brkl]

I kind of fear people may be expecting too much here. There's a chance we'll just get a game that you can buy and play on a modern system with some rethought controls and cutscenes with nicer compression.

[syntheticgerbil]

I think it's now safe to say that it's going to be the most spectacular video game remake we've ever seen.

[Bjorn]

This will be the colorized Citizen Kane of Video Games.

 

 

[Udvarnoky]

I kind of fear people may be expecting too much here. There's a chance we'll just get a game that you can buy and play on a modern system with some rethought controls and cutscenes with nicer compression.

 

And that would satisfy the hell out of me, honestly.  The main thing to be addressed here is the fact that the game in any form has been out of print for...geeze, a long fucking time.

[lobotomy42]

...So instead of second guessing creative content they did or didn't get to do I hope they can focus on giving what WAS made an archival grade clean-up, give the controls a once over and call it a day.

If for instance Manny moved better, used modern animation blending and turns to move around, that would be the sort of change I'd welcome, but nothing to alter the mood, structure, or intent of any scenes as they shipped on the original CD.

 

Am I the only one in the world who likes the original Grim Fandango controls? Almost no UI overlay, the ability to easily run in a straight line across screens even as the camera changes angles wildly!

[syntheticgerbil]

I hope they add a feature similar to Wind Waker HD where I can draw little pictures with the PS4 and Vita touchscreen as well as take photos and send them via mail tube so that I can share them with my friends in the Land of the Living (or "The Cloud" if you want to get technical). That would also be a great way to trade the coolest tips and tricks like the well known forklift cheat.

[BigJKO]

I hope they add a feature similar to Wind Waker HD where I can draw little pictures with the PS4 and Vita touchscreen as well as take photos and send them via mail tube so that I can share them with my friends in the Land of the Living (or "The Cloud" if you want to get technical). That would also be a great way to trade the coolest tips and tricks like the well known forklift cheat.

 

 

.... I really hope to god they don't. The last thing a Grim Fandango remake needs is social features. 

[Roderick]

Good lord, why would someone want to abusively color Citizen Kane? That was a beautiful black and white film full of depth, not a nightmarish pastel horrorscape.

[SuperBiasedMan]

I have just noticed that two people on here have Christmas themed Grim Fandango avatars. I think before I just merged you into one person before.

[Bjorn]

Good lord, why would someone want to abusively color Citizen Kane? That was a beautiful black and white film full of depth, not a nightmarish pastel horrorscape.

 

When I was a kid, Ted Turner was obsessed with colorizing old films.  My first viewing of a lot of classics was the colorized version, because seeing them on Turner owned stations was the only way to watch them at all.  Weirdly enough, a massive pushback and near legal standoff over colorizing Citizen Kane was one of the things that slowed down, and almost stopped for awhile, the colorization of classics. 

 

And this concludes today's episode of random shit I don't need to know, but do. 

[Latrine]