How Should Games Be Remade For A New Market?

Thanks to GamerDad for its editorial discussing some of the problems of videogame remakes. The author, having recently played Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes for GameCube ahead of playing the original, comments "I never really came to grips with that game either until I played the VR missions in [the original Metal Gear Solid" He goes on to point out: "Never assume that the audience for your remake is the same as the audience for the original. Hollywood has been remaking a lot of old movies and TV shows in the last few years but they're certainly not expecting audiences to know those plots inside and out to the point of leaving out crucial bits. That's kind of the situation I think Silicon Knights and Konami got in with leaving out the VR missions (or something similar) in Twin Snakes." But he concludes by arguing that 'what makes a remake most worthwhile is when time is spent reworking the game to make things 'different'." So exactly how reverent should a remake be?

Original MGS

[MMaestro]

Slightly offtopic but, the original MGS for PS1 didn't ship with VR missions. It had short videos explaining the controls and how to do certain actions (like using an enemy as a shield) but no VR missions. The VR missions were made into another game, MGS:Integral, and came out as a seperate game.

The same thing holds true with MGS2 (the original PS2 version), the original didn't ship with VR missions. Thats why both games plummeted in price so quickly. There was nearly no replay value without the VR missions.

Re:Original MGS

[Kassiopeia]

Perhaps this holds true for the US version of Metal Gear Solid, but the PAL version for the PlayStation I played in the day had a multitude of VR missions. There was a game packet with a mission disk released later (perhaps this Integral version) but the initial release in Europe had copious amounts of VR training to practice with.