Rayman Pirate-Community

This has been discussed elsewhere, but I thought it was a subject important enough to warrant its own thread.

What do you think about the idea of Rayman 1 being remade for current-generation systems? If you have any thoughts or ideas about this, post them here.

In the event that the game does get revisited, the odds are the new version will be made by Gameloft. This studio, which is a subsidiary of Ubisoft, is familiar with the Rayman IP (they developed R3 GBA and RRR1 GBA, as well as the other Rayman mobile games).

Rayman 1 would not be the first game that Gameloft remade; they are currently working on an Earthworm Jim remake for virtually every platform of consequence. Here's a comparison of the original with Gameloft's remake:



I think it looks good, if a little blurry and lacking in detail. But it's a work in progress. We'll see what it's actually like when it's released...

If it was up to me, R1 would not be remade by Gameloft, but by Golgoth, some of whose work you can see below:



Their Toki remake just looks excellent to me, and if they remade R1, it would be a head-explodingly good-looking masterpiece. But that's quite unlikely; Gameloft is the realistic possibility. Speaking of which, Gameloft are currently working on an improved iPhone remake of the original Driver game for the PS1. And it's looking good.



Well, relatively good. It's still only an iPhone game. But it's looking way better than the PS1 original. Now, I wonder what Gameloft would be able to do on the HD systems...

I think there's a strong possibility that Gameloft are developing Rayman DSiWare, whatever that is.

~I may update this post with relevant information as it arises... now, discuss.

That would be awesome but it's unlikely

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.

Not much interest? I thought of something else: a potential remake could remix the audio in surround sound. That would be amazing; some of the music tracks in particular.

Oh yes, that would be very nice, for those that have surround sound systems.

HD Rayman1 with surround sound, sounds pretty cool actually, but it would be as fun as a stick in the mud for people like ourselves, who have played R1 inch-by-inch, and/or don't have a HD tv or whatever.

If there were ever to be an R1 remake, I'd like it to be longer, harder and with oh so much more depth to it, as well as high-resolution graphics of course. <3 I remember playing it about a year ago, and ouch the graphics were ugly.

I don't have a HD TV or a surround sound system, but my situation is ultimately irrelevant to the game so I chose not to mention it. I wish people would stop talking like this whenever graphics are mentioned.
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.

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). I used to always play R1 on the PS3 with the smoothing filter turned on, and it didn't look too bad. With the filter off it looked terrible. I only play it on ePSXe now, and it looks respectable, but not great.

~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.

Another interesting possibility would be for them to insert sequel hooks; hints here and there at the coming events of R2 and R3, but I'm not sure what form they could take. Perhaps some kind of Zaroff reference in Space Mama's Crater, for example?

I agree as the PS version was hard, but a remake could make everything go so much faster(like rayman running, slopes, platforms etc.), then more puzzles etc. (ie. Rayman using the helecopter to cut the ropes, and that other puzzle Stacey mentioned in the Jaguar version) and then possibly a few more enemies and bosses thrown in?
And, of course, why not make it longer? 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).

I don't have HD either, but those adverts about it look so cool.

Now that I think about it, the PS1 porters did do a good job with expanding the game (creating the helicopter level where you cut the ropes, the frying pan-riding level, the Bad Rayman level, and so on). If the remakers could create some additional levels of good quality and increase the game's length that way, I would be pleased.

But I'm not sure about adding an entirely new world.

spiraldoor wrote:But I'm not sure about adding an entirely new world.

Me too, but I'd say that would be because we are so used to how it is now...

Perhaps a new medallion could be added to the old map? The giant present in the sky would be a good location for one...

I would really like a tridimensionalised version of rayman 1 0o

spiraldoor wrote:(creating the helicopter level where you cut the ropes, the frying pan-riding level, the Bad Rayman level, and so on)

Don't tell me you didn't know these were in the PC version.

@Romagia: There's something like that being made by RayFan9876. The topic is here.

Intresting. Thanks for the link.

PluMGMK wrote:

spiraldoor wrote:(creating the helicopter level where you cut the ropes, the frying pan-riding level, the Bad Rayman level, and so on)

Don't tell me you didn't know these were in the PC version.

Did I say that they weren't?

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.

You guys want ANOTHER Rayman 1 remake?

Maybe if they gave it an ending, made it 3D, put in voice acting, inserted two new worlds, had an actual fight with Mister Dark, and some characters from R2, I would be interested. Otherwise, just get out the PlayStation.

spiraldoor wrote:

PluMGMK wrote:

spiraldoor wrote:(creating the helicopter level where you cut the ropes, the frying pan-riding level, the Bad Rayman level, and so on)

Don't tell me you didn't know these were in the PC version.

Did I say that they weren't?

spiraldoor wrote:Now that I think about it, the PS1 porters did do a good job with expanding the game (creating the helicopter level where you cut the ropes, the frying pan-riding level, the Bad Rayman level, and so on). If the remakers could create some additional levels of good quality and increase the game's length that way, I would be pleased.

But I'm not sure about adding an entirely new world.

Sabertooth1000000000 wrote:You guys want ANOTHER Rayman 1 remake?

Maybe if they gave it an ending, made it 3D, put in voice acting, inserted two new worlds, had an actual fight with Mister Dark, and some characters from R2, I would be interested. Otherwise, just get out the PlayStation.

What do you mean by "another" one? They never made an R1 remake in the first place. And making it 3D would make it a completely different game, entirely defeating the purpose. And the inclusion of new worlds is an idea which does not appeal to me; neither does the inclusion of R2 characters, or a Mister Dark fight. The game is fine the way it is, and your suggestions would ruin much of that. As for your final suggestion... the fifteen-year-old graphics are terrible. So no.

Plum: Stop being stupid. The PlayStation version was made before the PC version, and therefore those levels were added by the PlayStation porting team. I don't know what you're trying to achieve.

~Now... does anyone have any idea what happens to all the physical artwork (paintings, drawings and the like) that's produced for games? I've never really thought about it before; I suppose all that stuff gets filed away in a vault somewhere, in case the developers ever have need of it. Perhaps there's a filing cabinet somewhere in the depths of Ubi Montpellier, stuffed with R1-related art that's been there since 1995...

spiraldoor wrote:Plum: Stop being stupid. The PlayStation version was made before the PC version, and therefore those levels were added by the PlayStation porting team. I don't know what you're trying to achieve.

No it wasn't. The PC and Jag versions came first, then the PSX and Saturn versions. I don't know what you're trying to achieve.