Play Again?

In the midst of gaming, like with the realm of Hollywood film, many of the games we see come out in this day and age are games that have been made available more than once, on multiple platforms or other such demonstrations of release repetition. To this day, we see many people refer to these releases as "ports," "rereleases" and "remakes." I'm sure there are more terms for it that I have missed, but these are the three I would like to focus on.

For a while, it seems the way people use these terms are categorically mixed, so I thought I would try to assess how these terms should be used.

"Port."

A port is a bare bones experience, moved over exactly as it was with few or no tweaks with little to no extra content. An example of this would be Call of Duty Black Ops 2 for the Wii U, or perhaps Marvel vs. Capcom 3 for the Vita.

"Rerelease."

A rerelease is like a port but with more of an emphasis on it being released anew. These often are essentially the same game but have updated visuals, tweaks, some extra content, bug fixes, achievements, and other such upgrades to make the experience feel more modern. A Playstation 2 HD collection for the PS3 would probably fall into this category. The upcoming Director's Cut for Deus Ex: Human Revolution would probably also be considered a rerelease under this description.

Finally, the "remake."

Remakes are an overhaul, particularly in the graphics department, completely made anew to look completely different (though often maintaining the feel and style of the original). These will often have some gameplay upgrades and are often released with the concept of nostaliga as part of its value. Games like Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D, Halo: Anniversary, the upcoming Ducktales remake and Double Dragon Neon would be examples of this.

Of course this is just my view on the matter, not THE view. Do you agree? Disagree? Why? What are your thoughts?

[lex-1020]

I would make some changes to the categories you have. For instance, by your logic, Resident Evil 4 and OOT3Ds would both be "Rereleases" since they only had "updated visuals, tweaks, and some extra content."

Edit: Thank you for helping to clearly define words that are most certainly overly used incorrectly.

[PopRocks359]

Resident Evil 4 on PS2/Wii I probably should have listed as a rerelease, yeah. I completely forgot to take the new Ada campaign and the new weapons into account. I'll edit that portion of the article right now.

However, I do still feel that Ocarina of Time 3D should be considered a remake because it featured touch controls that made the experience more intuitive and a complete visual overhaul to bring it up to date with the hardware.

[Welshy]

PS2 HD collection are a bit of a grey area... They aren't strictly being remade, but they do recieve quite a substantial boost in the resolution department.

If i was you, i'd add a "Remaster" category to cover that void, the gap between remake and re-release is to big by your 3 definitions.

God Of War HD and MGS HD would be good examples of an HD collections that are neither subtantially changed enough to count as a remake, but have enough extra polish to considered better than a re-release.

RE4 "HD" was pretty much the same while the above MGS and GOW looked quite a bit better than their original launch, especially if you take Vita's MGS HD touch controls into account or how Resi 4 was pretty much a straight up Gamecube port.