I’ll admit that while I’ve booted the 1st level of the original PlayStation 1 game Chrono Cross at least a hundred times, it’s always been to test resolutions. See, Chrono Cross is a 240p game, with 480i menus – Something that made zero difference on CRT’s, but drives modern displays and capture cards crazy. Anyway, even though I’ve never actually played the game, I was always impressed with how it looked on CRT’s and when I saw the awesome team at Digital Foundry did a review, I was all in. Unfortunately, it was terrible…
Support Digital Foundry: https://www.patreon.com/digitalfoundry
While the DF team did their usual fact-based analysis, I’d like to throw a business perspective at this: Poorly emulated, badly scaled, cash-grab re-releases like this are borderline scams and take money out of everyone’s pocket. In fact, everything I always warn people about with those crappy “made for video games” HDMI cables applies here: If someone buys this game wanting to experience a game from their childhood, or because they want to try a classic game they’ve heard about, there’s an excellent chance we’ve lost them after that. Think I’m being dramatic? Consider this:
When someone plays their old console through a laggy, flickery HDMI cable…or when they play a smeared, laggy, broken re-release like this, there’s an excellent chance they’ll think: “Oh damn, that’s not how I remembered this game. Maybe I’m just remembering it with rose-colored glasses? I guess these old games aren’t as good as I thought.“. And then that’s it. They don’t buy any more retro re-releases. They don’t buy any more scaler solutions. Or amazing homebrew products and games. They don’t go to expo’s. They don’t subscribe to your retro gaming Patreon. They got duped and now they’re gone. Because of a slimey cash grab. And it’s rare we get them back…which also sucks for them, as there’s as many classic videos games as there are classic songs, movies and TV shows.
And why do companies keep releasing crappy hardware “for gaming”, or shitty re-releases with “tons of archived artwork!”? Because we let them.
So please, when you see things like this, let the companies know how you feel. Remind them they’re ruining it for everyone…including themselves, as people who got duped this time aren’t going to buy their next cash grab, regardless of how it’s marketed.
