EPTVideo game remakes have been getting awfully popular lately and I find that’s a good thing for the medium. The implacable pursuit of superior technology renders older games unplayable, obsolete or just uglier than heavy meth addiction which can leads to many classics being unavailable or unappealing to a younger generation and it’d be a shame just to let those completely fall to the wayside. The best sort of remakes are of games that either hit an idea really, really well or just aren’t the kind of thing that gets made anymore but should but just isn’t for some stupid reason, perhaps since it lacks crafting, zombies, procedural generation or multiplayer First Person Shootery. My chosen games for this piece are Cossacks 3 and Bioshock Remastered, the former only a remake technically and the latter a game I played the regular version of quite a bit earlier this year but my understanding of the remaster is that it only provides an improvement of the visuals so let’s just pretend I played that one, ok?
My decision to try a bit of Cossacks 3 was a bit foolishly simple, I saw it’s an RTS and there’s a bunch of blokes with muskets standing around in the screenshots. Military themed strategy games have a certain appeal to me, I guess it’s a mixture of being a massive history nerd and also my deep seeded, and shamefully pathetic, desire of complete mastery over others. I’ve not really heard of the Cossacks games before but it’s originally an RTS from 2001 and immediately I can tell which RTS from that time whose shoulder it’s peeking over: Age of Empires 2. Similar visuals, interface, unit behaviour, formations and mostly the same resources with a few added on for innovation’s sake. Amusingly, it’s a lot more like Age of Empires 2 than Age of Empires 3, which was also about dudes brandishing muskets but also a lot of other strange things as well.
Now I mentioned above that a good choice for a remake is something that you can’t really get these days, a lesson the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered people could learn as soon as they’re done consuming all the cocaine in the world which they can surely afford with all their pre-order money, but the proviso is that it has to have been a good idea in the first place and that’s where Cossacks 3 stumbles into a pit of rusty cheese graters and used syringes. Cossacks 3 is a perfect example of RTS games at their most agonisingly tedious: simple unit design and relations that denies both satisfying micromanagement and the visceral thrill of control, a low mechanical requirement, long periods of turtling while you spend ages building up a bustling economy and an economic system that just seems convoluted for the sake of convolution.
Why are there six resources in this game when two of them, Stone and Coal, go almostly completely forgotten by midgame? Why is it a good thing there’s a mechanic which allows groups of the same kind of unit to form up and start behaving as a single unit? That just simplifies micromanagement, which is the opposite of what RTS games should strive for! Why is it that extra production facilities get increasingly, and swiftly prohibitively, expensive? Do you like games being dragged out because I can’t spend all my fucking money? Why does this fucking game crash so often? I’m particularly perplexed at the decision to make successive unit production structures more expensive. You want players to have to decide between economy, unit production, infrastructure and technology in a more natural way, not just bluntly stating to the player “you can’t make another barracks until you’re wealthier than the Iron Bank of Braavos so why not get a few cheap resource gathering techs that help you gather types of resources you can’t fucking use right now”.
Historical RTS has always had an underlying issue and that’s an obligation to a certain degree of realism. It turns out that human beings can’t do much more than run about and shoot guns at each other so you can’t have the elite Sich Cossack regiments be able to throw out Adept Shades or abuse Stimpacks, that’s just not being fair to the Turks. The great historical Rock Paper Scissors of Horsey>Shootey>Speary>Horsey is as complex as it gets in Cossacks 3 and, if you’ll excuse my pithy nature, it’s SO FUCKING BORING. A good historical game, like the Company of Heroes series, finds clever ways to enrich proceedings but Cossacks just can’t be fucking bothered.
Perhaps the selling point of the game is a sense of spectacle and as mildly entertaining as it is to assemble a couple hundred clone troops together for an Eastern European punch up it simply cannot compare to the majesty of, say, a Total War game. It lacks so many lovely things like good voice acting, audio design, exciting gorey violence or a sense that maybe you might learn something interesting about the dudes with muskets and why they seem content to murder each other in the face.
Look, if you really have a hankering for RTS games that are as traditional as they get, warts and all, then I guess you could play Cossacks 3. It’s at least semi functional enough to be a podcast game, something to do with your hands while you listen or watch something on another screen. Just try to avoid the lingering sense of dread that you’re wasting your precious time on this bullshit, as you sit there slowly dying, whittling away to dust by time’s eternal march, as you forsake human contact or meaningful pursuit. It’s not up to me to judge how you spend your limited time on this Earth, if you wanna play video games that’s fine by me. Just try not to play ones that lick my balls, yeah?
Anyway, onto a game I totally recommend, 2K’s 2007 hit Bioshock, a remastered version recently becoming available on Steam, PS4 and Xbone. A masterpiece in atmosphere, world building, level design and narrative, I remember thinking that all it needed was some updating on the textures which is all the new version provides. Well, alright, perhaps the Vita chambers should be removed since one shouldn’t play a game like this without a palpable fear of death. Well, alright, perhaps the decision to make the end boss a considerably less interesting character than the main villain was a bit daft. Well, alright, perhaps that bit where you have to escort a Little Sister can fuck right off, and maybe it’s a bit weird that you have to do a Pipe Dream style minigame every time you want to hack something (can we blame Bioshock for popularising hacking minigames in general? I’m not sure, but let’s!)
But there’s just so much there to admire! I like how vestigial the crafting system is, allowing you to shore up your special ammunition reserves every now and then but never feeling like something you need to consciously think about when playing. It’s incredible they managed to find the right balance between letting the player use every weapon and X-men mutant power they find without requiring specialisation (like previous -Shock games had done) and throwing enough nasties your way to keep you feeling pressured. And even to this day I still rate Andrew Ryan as one of gamings best villains. It’s the most engaging underwater video game around except for possibly SOMA but my tolerance for horror games is akin to my father’s view on contraception, ie, hey if you’re a fan that’s your thing but it’s not for me (I’m his sixth child, so it’s not like I’m being negative here).
They also re-released Bioshock 2 which I’d advise you stay right the hell away from. It didn’t have Bioshock 1’s lead designer or writer and it shows. The emphasis on an oppressive atmosphere is lost by framing the player as a cyborg badarse who can shoot lightning from one hand whilst holding a minigun in the other and the villain was constructed by taking Andrew Ryan and completely reversing his philosophy (and gender!) which just feels lazy to me. They couldn’t have missed the point harder if they were drunk and on fire, which is basically what I hopethe fate of the Bioshock 2 team should be. There’s also Bioshock Infinite which stands as a testament to failed ambition and is perhaps worth playing and appreciating more in that respect. As is the case with so many entertainment franchises, the first is the best.
Or if you don’t like that, play Resident Evil 4! It’s great! Or Homeworld Remastered, it’s also great! Oh man what an age we live in. remakes of quality games on PC forever! Or at least until my RSI gets so bad I can no longer appreciate games without direct neural interface.
