Since I guess I sort of deal with a lot of these things on a daily basis, I thought I'd clarify a few of these possibilities.
spiraldoor wrote:I played R1 yesterday for the first time in a while, and I'd forgotten how good it looked. If Gameloft remakes it I'd rather they reuse the old sprites in higher resolution than give them the so-so treatment received by Earthworm Jim.
The thing about reusing the sprites and what Gameloft appears to have done with Earthworm Jim is that it will most likely be using (if it were to happen) the original graphics put through some sort of smoothing filter. The problem is, and what appears to have happened to Earthworm Jim is that if you don't have artists with a good eye on hand to touch up and add proper hi-res textures to the newly processed graphics, you get muddy, blurred out hi-res sprites with flat color.
I'm assuming you meant the old sprites should be copied exactly and cleaned up, which I'm all for. It's sort of labor intensive in a way, but it's better than any sort of "reimagining" in the vein of the Monkey Island remake.
A lot of remaking depends on how the original graphics were made. With both Earthworm Jim and Rayman, I know for sure that all drawings and backgrounds at least started with an artist doing a pencil sketch with plain old paper. What happened after that depends on the methods the 90s video game artists used.
I'm pretty sure for instance with Earthworm Jim that the penciled out animation and backgrounds were scanned in and then used as a template to paint over in the computer to create the sprites, animation, and background graphics. The reason I think this (without directly asking Doug TenNapel or something) is because the final graphics in the EWJ games look clean and vibrant, without any deliberate traces of compression artifacts. There is dithering for the 256 (or less on Genesis or SNES) color gradients in the backgrounds but it seems intentional, also leading me to believe the graphics were created on the computer. You can see pretty much all of the elements on this screenshot here:
The dithering is apparent in the green sky and the graphics are what would be considered sharp for that time. So Gameloft's only original art to source would be the final graphics.
Alternatively, the game Monkey Island 2 shows a different method on how to create graphics. The character sprites were all done on PC and are stuck at that resolution, but original painted backgrounds do exist that were scanned and then cleaned up on the computer to fit the resolution style. While this method retains the original artist's intention for the art much better, at the time, primitive scanning created a lot of compression type artifacts and suffered from downscaling the art to fit within the 256 color frame at 320x200 (or 240) resolution. You can pretty clearly see this in the screenshot below.
The good thing is about a Monkey Island 2 remake is that the original art could be found and rescanned at a much higher resolution under 16 or 32 million colors for use with the remake. It would probably still have to be touched up somewhat, but it would lend to much more quality in my opinion.
So where this long winded explanation fits into a Rayman remake depends on the methods they used to make it. I've seen videos of artist doing pencil drawings of the original Rayman, but it's hard to say if these were scanned and used like the original EWJ as just pencil templates. The sprites for the original Rayman were definitely done on the computer for that resolution as the graphics are sharp (even though they are pixelated) and lack compression. I'm not sure if all of the background components were done a similar way, much like Monkey Island 2.
There's also the intro and ending movies, which I consider important, but I guess Ubisoft doesn't because they were left off completely of many Rayman PC releases. I would guess all of that stuff was animated, painted, and drawn by hand and either output in a high quality movie and compressed to the crap at the time, or all of the components making the hand drawn animation and background art were downscaled and composed in the low resolution. There's also the possibility all of that art was done on computer, but with the way the forest and hands guarding the great protoon look, I would guess they were scanned as finished paintings.
How all of that was done sort of makes up how the intro and ending movies would be remade in higher resolution.
spiraldoor wrote:r1_graphics.jpg
Look at the sky. It has like three colours in it, and it looks bad. A remake could have... hundreds of colours. And antialiasing would be important; look at the edges of everything. Their jaggedness mars everything.
Well to be technical, if that is a screenshot from the PC version, it's already using 256 colors, whereas the console versions would be using less or similar depending on the release. A remake would probably use the 32 million standard, but the sky still could be flat plane of color no matter what amount of colors. It just depends on the style
spiraldoor wrote:I wouldn't like them to add new levels to make it longer (apart from the levels that were exclusive to certain versions), and I think the difficulty was fine in the PlayStation version (and I can't think of any good ways of increasing it without ruining it).
That would be nice. Especially if the new added levels were actual levels with a new theme, separate bad guys, and maybe a new boss instead of the previous "find the tings" add on levels made with Rayman Designer.
spiraldoor wrote:~One thing a remake should certainly add is a proper ending FMV, with Rayman retrieving the Protoon and saving Betilla. I really can't believe that the ending FMV in R1 was meant to be how they ended the game; it just wasn't that good, especially compared to the fantastic intro. They must have run out of time or something.
It's still a bad thing with video games where the intro is a long elaborate movie and the ending is short and unfinished seeming. I would guess it's always because they run out of time and money, but also designers may just put more weight on the intro movie being good since more people will see that only.
Acarr wrote:HD Rayman1 with surround sound, sounds pretty cool actually...
Surround sound might be harder and easier depending if someone at Ubisoft or maybe Gameloft has access to the original music tracks and can relayer it to accomodate for 5.1 or sometihng.
That game was made in the 90's afterall, and it could be so much larger now(Ubi could make a new world and so on).
