Remastering has been around for quite some time in the music industry. Now it's a thing for the gaming industry too.

It has its uses. Some games can no longer be played on modern systems (at least not without shooting yourself in the leg or going on a pixel goggling safari) without a remaster.

Whether a remake is good depends on whether the changes they made are good or not.

Dragon Quest 3's remake, for instance, fixed the major problems with the original game's stat growth algorithms. In particular, in the original DQ3, using a seed to boost Vitality or Intelligence would actually stunt the character's HP or MP growth (and in the Intelligence case, there was no way to fix that, as Mystic Nuts didn't exist in the original game). In the remake, however, using the seed will cause the character to get the appropriate amount of HP or MP at the next level up.

Dragon Quest 6's remake, however, wasn't so good. For one thing, monster recruitment was removed. Also, they actually made the game balance worse. For instance, there's the Vacuum skill (mistranslated as "Thin Air"). This was a very useful attack that hit all enemies for no cost. In the remake, they made that skill, which was already very useful, *more* powerful. (This incidentally made certain enemies more dangerous than they were originally.) Another example is Magic Burst, whose use was somewhat questionable in the original (spend all your MP to do 3 * MP in damage? Generally not worth it.). In the remake? It now only does MP * 2 in damage, making the ability pretty much pointless. This is especially obnoxious when the character who gets the ability tends to be one of the least useful human characters to begin with.

Incidentally, Dragon Quest 4's remakes make one change that makes balance worse. Healusall/Omniheal cost 36 MP in the original, which felt right (not too cheap to make the game easy, but not the 62 it cost in DQ3). In the remakes? It now costs only 20 MP, which is too little for such a powerful healing spell, especially now that the Hero (who learns the spell) can now equip an item that restores MP as you walk, which she could not in the original.

Good observations and all that but a remake and a remaster are different things. I don't know much about Dragon Quest, but those examples sound like the game was actually recreated.

Let's look at Monkey Island Special Editions, Grim Fandango and Day of the Tentacle. They are remasters because the original code is still being used (at least in part), it's just that it's been updated to work better and given a new coat of paint. If DOTT works in any way like Monkey Island and I suspect it will, the originall DOTT will actually be present in the game files and the new interpreter would run it just like Monkey Island.

Grim Fandango again, the original code is present and fed through a new interpreter.

Remakes are a whole different kettle of fish. The issues can be similar or totally different as you point out.

A remaster will typically not have changed game logic, dialogue or other such things and stuff as a remake would.

Funny you'd mention XCOM as a bad example in spite of it single-handedly innovating and revitalizing TBS genre :-P

You mean there are less original games now, when gaming has become mainstream, as opposed to "back then", when most genres weren't even invented? Well... Color me surprised. Still, you should probably focus on indie games a bit more.

The problem isn't remastering, it's the excessive amount we see nowadays.

Game development has gone from being small teams to million dollar productions. It's easier and cheaper to get people to fix up existing assets and make it compatible with modern systems than it is to hire a new team to make a new project. "Relive the old days!" is more like "The game is so old we can sell it to a new generation of gamers who have never heard of it before!" And why would a company try to take advantage of that? Buy up obsolete IP's or recycle your old ones for free money.

I don't see a problem with keeping the classics alive, so long as a proper job is done of it.

Therein lies the problem though. How do you recreate a game that was at least in part defined by the limited processing power and screen resolutions that existed at the time? Personally I think that a lot of these updated versions are actually too much like the originals in all the wrong ways and perhaps ironically not enough like the originals in ways that do matter as a direct result of this.

The Monkey Island HD versions being an example of this.

What basis do you base that assumption on tho? It was fairly easy to create a new genre back when there weren't really any for videogames, but there comes a point in which majority of approaches that work have been experimented with. I don't know of any genres which are currently missing on the market, do you have any ideas?

I don't think there's been a point in history in which so many games were made in general.

...
How you know what you don't know?
It's obvious that humanity has still a long way from inventing everything, be games type or whatever.

The problem is that once a pattern in created, people tend to reason inside those pattern and creating new ones becomes more and more difficult.

The concept of remastering games is a bit baffling for me too.

They put so much time and effort to add graphical and possibly audio enhancements and changes to accommodate modern systems but the end result is often almost the same exact game with nothing really new to offer. Yet they are being sold off for the price of a full- or a mid-price game, depending on the developer.

In my opinion these games should not be sold off full price, but they can offer many hours of entertainment to those who never had the chance to play the originals. They just don't have anything to offer to us "old-timers" who were around around the time when those games were actually new.

This era of remakes does have some promise though. Maybe instead of metaphorically "reinventing the wheel" we should take a closer look at those classic games, learn what made them so great back in the time and compare them to the kind of games we have today. And then see how the gap between generations could be crossed while still staying true to the original in spirit at least. It would not have to be an exact remake.

Let's just take Legend of Grimrock by Almost Human as an example. They took the timeless classics of grid-based dungeon crawler genre, lovingly and carefully extracted their essence and then painstakingly forged it into a beautiful love-letter to the genre.

So what happens when the new systems no longer run the remasters? A Re-Remaster?

STOP THE MADNESS!!!

Kinda, but it is also because the remasters play on the nostalgia of older gamers with diposable income.
I've fallen into this category as well thinking: "I remember playing The Secret of Monkey Island as younger" and then buying the game because I can.

I really think the driving force behind the sudden remaster trend is that AAA game development costs have ballooned out of control, and it's become hard to take risks because of the massive investments they now are...

So they re-release old games because they cost significantly less to produce and will sell on pure nostalgia alone, it's generally easy income.

As someone who primarily buys older games, I have no qualms about remasters as a concept. After all, it allows more people to experience the game and potentially offers a cheaper way to obtain the game (depending on how rare the game was prior to that).

That said, remasters do bug me in three ways:

1) They are constantly conflated with remakes. I don't even understand why. The very term 'remake' implies something that is built from the ground up, which remasters aren't. You don't need to be a tech expert to understand the difference between something that was made anew from the ground up and something that is using the same assets, but was spruced up somewhat and had some extra bells and whistles thrown in.

2) While I can see the merit in using the term 'remaster' for games that are being re-released on the same platform, it's incredibly redundant when it is being released on a new platform. After all, we had a perfectly suitable existing term for those kind of projects: 'enhanced ports.'

3) Though I don't mind remasters onto themselves. I do fear that the trend might disincentivise backwards compatibility and efforts to preserve games in their original form. This is a particularly big concern in cases where, for better or worse, the remaster significantly differs from the original in terms of gameplay mechanics, music and so on.