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dead rising deluxe remaster, tony hawk 3+4 and toothless remakes. dead rising deluxe remaster is not a game I ever really planned to actually play. it looked like a worse version of a game I love with removed mechanics, softened edges and some weird toning down of the games politics. it felt super anti-art and a little gross, and in the end, I didn't even consider playing. however, a friend asked if I wanted to try her copy before she traded it into cex and I figured I'd go for it, picking it up after seeing the new jujutsu kaisen movie with her (it was great, seeing gojo on the big screen is not an experience I will ever forget!). but sadly in the end it is all of those things I thought it was. this is the worst version of the game in my opinion, and even with some changes and additions that I do genuinely like, it’s not something I can really recommend unless you some way or some how have absolutely no other way of playing one of the best games ever made, because even a bad port of dead rising is still very arguably that. so I'm not really going to talk about the actual game that in depth—I did that before years ago! it was one of the first games I covered, and while the article is probably pretty rough, it's better than going over it *all over again* so I'm just going to talk about the changes and what's new, starting with the stuff I genuinely really like! there is one new item here with the rocket launcher, a cut item from the original that makes a return here in the last chunk of the game. you find it on the soldiers you fight near the end and it is killer. it’s easily one of the game’s best weapons and its a ton of fun to use, though I wish you had more of a chance to since by this point the mall is almost empty, which is a shame, but stumbling across it was still a super nice surprise! I also like the redesign in paradise plaza. it's not as good or even as colourful as the original, but I thought it suited it super well and made the first few trips in there at least feel a little different. i like how some items like perfume and oil make puddles when you use them, which is pretty neat. the new controls can work okay at times. I like how they changed the moves you unlock to all be easily accessible. I love that the camera got a huge bump with more pics that you can save and a ton more unlockable modes like brightness and tilting. it's really neat and it made the camera stores more useful, though it came at the cost of the battery mechanic seemingly being deleted, which is a shame. i like how you can spare thomas in the snipers boss fight and you even get dialogue for leaving him until last, though it's sad you can't save him. they also cut the erotica category which i do dislike but I'll get into the reasons why later. i think it's removal makes sense, but i think the game loses a little by its removal if that makes sense. that's more or less it, though. the rest is all downhill from here. so for a start, the elephant in the room with this port is the new voice acting. I don't think it's all bad, not at all. I like the new jessie a lot, and I love all of the new NPC voices and how everyone has one now! same with how dialogue is skippable and how Otis doesn't get interrupted, though I do wish they kept that last bit, if just because of how funny I found it. though not all the new cast is great. I'm not really into frank’s new voice. I do think the new voice actor does the best with what he can. he's clearly very talented, same with brad's new VA who I think has a few stiff lines but is otherwise a solid choice, even if I very much prefer the old voices for both characters. same goes for the new looks. some, like jessie, are almost the same, but others like frank just look weird and ill-suiting. he looks too old and other characters like cliff and the butcher just look a little off, same with a few other redesigns like for the zombies and Cheryl. it’s not a big deal in most cases but I don't think it's as much of an all-around home-run as the original. same goes for the graphics in general. the game is a lot less colourful and at times it can't even render as many zombies as the original could, leading to areas feeling weirdly baron. this is especially an issue in places like the paradise plaza and the tunnels—though this could very well be a bug. what isn't a bug is the fact that parts of the mall that didn't have doors before now do, meaning you can't get some vehicles into different areas now and you can't do the cool jump in the car park anymore. this does suck and I don't like it, but again it's not a huge deal at all. the HUD also had a design overhaul and again, it's all or the worse, with things being a lot more generic now and being entirely rid of the newsreel, 24 hour news cycle inspired prompter UI the game had before. it's just a lot more generic now, which is a shame since that really added to the game’s sense of atmosphere before. there is also a new minor mechanic featured that I almost entirely forgot about: survivor affinity. this is pretty negligible and really doesn't come up unless you get lucky or go out of your way to trigger it, but giving survivors certain food or weapons can up a trust stat which makes them better, basically, they'll fight harder and try and save frank more often, it's neat but it's not something you'll really ever think about in gameplay unless you go out of your way to run a pain train of armed survivors, which I do admittedly love doing, and if you like that then this system is actually super useful. the survivor AI in general is one area the game tends to get a lot of praise for, and i just don't see it. if anything, it feels like on the lowest affinity the survivor AI is almost *worse* this time around. i certainly had a harder time with survivors just getting lost, standing still and somehow never shooting their weapons despite having shotguns! I will say the controls overall do feel much worse just on a movement level. it feels more sluggish. it could just be the animations but even with the level geometry, doing certain jumps feels a lot harder here than it ever did before, and some of the changes to geometry make things a lot more awkward, like the new stencil on the window to the toy store in paradise plaza making it pretty hard to get in there through the windows now. the new control scheme also has its own set of issues, like how while the dodge is much easier to do now, it being so readily accessible really breaks the game’s design and makes many of the games bosses a downright cakewalk now, same with being able to move and shoot. the game just was not designed with these things in mind and it really shows. the change to making the weapons cycle with the dpad here is also massively worse, it weirdly makes weapon switching more cumbersome than it did before. sure, it makes sense why it was there, but it just makes the game play worse. it makes you less likely to weapon switch on the fly, I find, same with how attacking is on the triggers now, which is just not a good way to control the game. on top of both being far more generic and samey ways of controlling things, its clear these new controls are just there to make it more in-line with every other modern 3D action game, much to its detriment. (though thank god you can still use the d-pad, the soulsification of action controls onto the triggers has been my least favourite control convention of the past decade, I really hate it). i also dislike the game’s general colour pallet now. it feels a lot more washed out and much less colourful. paradise plaza and wonderland plaza feel the least of it since both have new accents and i think paradise looks nice overall with its changes, but so much of the game just feels more bland looking. it doesn't pop like it should and it makes the original look better to me. it's also a lot less bloody but that's not something i feel personally bothered by, but some will hate that, i know. i had played both this game and tony hawk at a friend’s house after she went out of her way to grab these a day before launch, and i spent my time playing them with her. they aren't the kind of games I'd usually go out of my way to play mainly because they just never looked all that interesting to me, doubly so i never would have went out of my way to play a remake of one this close to launch, but i was willing to give them a try and see what other people saw in them. but sadly I'm just not sure i see what other people do. i don't think i like these games very much. I'll be focusing on the remake aspects of these overall moreso than the original games, though i did also go back and play those original games, which I'll cover at a later date. tony hawk 3 is a marginally similar experience to the original. it has the same levels, many of the same goals and the same mechanics. not a ton was cut here beyond, well, most of the soundtrack, which is something this collection does massively. only about 10 of the 60 total songs from both games are here and the new selections are a lot worse. I'll talk about it more in the fourth section, but it's a more toothless and bland song selection overall and the changes do damage the vibe, same with the graphics. it just doesn't have the same charm as the original or the same energy, and a lot of the punky energy feels missing. this is one where they don't really do much and I don't have a lot to say about it. I'll probably talk about the game more in depth when I cover the original, since I did like it a bit more, but this just isn't a game I enjoy very much in either form. the original version has more of a vibe to it that I can appreciate but I just find both games aren't really my thing. they're pretty hard and I just don't find the way they do goals all that fun. playing both versions of this just made me realize how much I don't enjoy these games. I find myself usually getting bored and wanting to quit 2 levels in most times on account of how little I enjoy the gameplay and how difficult I find a lot of the goals. I'm more of an SSX person really. that doesn't make these games bad though. they're designed that way and I think it's designed super well, something that even shines through in this remake, but it's not a design I really vibe with. I will say though this does have some super cool levels. I loved Canada (hey that's where I'm from), Tokyo (though it's a shame how it's a competition level, I hated playing those and I hated how restrictive they were and how little there was to explore), airport and the cruise ship, all super good levels, I was less into foundry and suburbia, but had some fun with them. I really disliked rio, los angeles (by far my least favourite) and skater island. the latter had nicer theming but I found it super unfun. tony hawk 4 is where the main big changes come in. the original (which i also played after finishing this one and found to be a far better experiance) had bigger open levels that let you run and do things at your own pace with no time limit. it had a more rock/punky OST and lacked the competition levels from 3, which i would consider a good thing as those were always the least fun levels to me in any iteration. this version changes that into just making it 3 but with different levels. the levels were much less suited to the 2 min timer it gives you, basically requiring you to up it to 5 mins just to get anything done. it completely kills the pace of many of the, again, far too big levels and in making some of them competitions it kills almost all the fun those levels had, zoo and movie studio are hit the worst with this, the former (and kona) both being far too big to ever work right in this style, it sucks! and it hurts the game massively. the new levels added to it aren't even designed fully with it in mind, weirdly, with the goals in waterpark being so complex that many of them will take almost the full 2 minutes to do on their own! pinball is good for this though, even if it absolutely has its own issues with design that make it pretty unfun to play i feel. it's just not a well designed level. cool though its theming is, it is hurt beyond repair by the game’s use of generative ai that is most noticeable in the game’s pinball level with the side panels and headboard that fuck up fingers and can't keep a consistent art style even in the same image and also in the graffiti in the waterpark, plus how the cash icons look. I'll include some images so you can see but it's genuinely disgusting and embarrassing and it's pushed me to consider a full boycott on Microsoft published games from now on. the use of AI in this and their other games like COD, use that is naturally undisclosed on the games storefront, should be a de-listable offense if not an outright fineable one for fraud. it really speaks to this game’s status as a remake that only exists to be a product and not as something that exists for a real artistic or desirable reason, just a toothless bland mess. to come back around to some minor positivity and give the game credit, some of those levels are nice and i did like a few of them, though none of them lived up to the levels found in the original, and both the circus and Chicago levels both randomly got cut here. the best levels here are probably zoo (which has sadly been hurt irreparably by now being a competition level and had its vibe pretty harshly diminished in the remake process, now being an empty zoo instead of a working one and all the animals removed), college, Alcatraz, san Francisco and the new waterpark level. I find kona, shipyard and London to be just okay and I really don't care for pinball or movie studio, cool though their themes were. I think the latter could have been salvaged were it not a competition level though, those really damage how fun I find these levels. the new soundtrack is also a lot lamer, seemingly being more focused on very anachronistic modern choices and radio rap which i'm just super not into. rap is already my least favourite genre and the doubling down on it here just made me eventually end up muting the music and putting on my own since I got tired of having to skip every other song. beyond my own personal dislike for the style of music it also just doesn't fit the game’s vibe and feels really out of place with the time period the game is trying to evoke. it also lends more to making the game feel overall a lot less rebellious and a lot more toothless. much like deadrising, the edgier parts of the game have been sanded down and de-fanged, making it a much more bland experience overall, same with much of this game’s edgier theming being toned down a little. it just feels safer. it's art redrawn, sanded down and filled with even more brand collaborations and record label deals, some of which you even have to pay extra for (unless you bought the game on disc and never patched it, in which case you can access a lot of it for free HA), some of the advertising and crossover characters felt a little off to begin with but in the current era of brand oversaturation, overt advertising in paid products and IP crossover mania. it feels so much more cynical and gross to me, especially with the spongebob and TMNT stuff, it feels gross. in the end is that not the point of a remake, though? and indeed the point of ai, to sand down the edges of art and the rebellious spirit therein, to make it a more marketable product and take away what it has to say, to make something meaningful into as wide appealing a product as possible. statements of intent and design be damned, they're both almost perfect remakes if you think about them like that and the latter game’s use of ai fits that ethos to a T, a hollow facsimile made in the image of something meaningful. it might be good enough for some, better for those who don't really know any better, but for anyone that knows enough, it's just a real shame and remakes are, if i can be candid, really fucking lame. though for both of these games i do have to admit, I'm not sure i particularly like either version of them. while the originals are a lot better with their music and tone, i just never found this style of gameplay very fun outside of exploring the levels, and while 4 does give me that in the original ideration, i just never vibed with its style of humour or the OST that other people seem to find super iconic and listenable (neither the rap nor the punk music are really either something I'd listen to in my own time and i just didn't enjoy either here, though the rock stuff was a huge step up from the rap and there was a song or two in there i did for sure enjoy). I'm just not into this kind of thing. the gameplay i can see the appeal of with the scoring systems, but i just don't enjoy crafting combos or doing these challenges and the game’s more bland levels were very difficult for me to find myself pushing through to get to those better levels, the lack of real story or campaign stuff doesn't help either, but i know this is entirely a me thing and i won't hold that against the original versions of these games. it is just a little sad to realize that these weren't for me and i wish that wasn't the case, so do take what i have to say about certain aspects with a grain of salt. i was never going to enjoy these anyway, try though i did. i don't usually make negative pages like this and i will keep those to a minimum from here on out, but playing both of these in a row just really bothered me. the defanging and the need to make everything marketable and homogynous with their design. it bothers me and it's a trend i really dislike seeing, so i just had to get it off my chest at the very least. thanks for sticking through the negativity if you got this far, i hope one day both of these series get the continuations they deserve, instead of both languishing with bland remakes instead of original projects worth playing.