I would have said dead space until the remake came out and blew me away. So if the devs really care about it no game is untouchable to me. You can always play the original.

The Game.

Portal 2 is 12 years old and still looks incredible.

Sometimes a simple port to modern systems with 60+ fps and widescreen/4K is all you need and in this case I say remaster everything good. There's no excuse for a great game being permanently stuck on a Saturn or PS2.

Pong.

If you change it, then it's not Pong.

Tetris? Any remake they've made was basically just a texture pack?

The original Rollercoaster Tycoon is perfect in every single way.

You thinking that something can't be improved on is not a good reason for it to not happen.

I remember over a decade ago when people were whining about a rumored Silent Hill 2 remake (long before Bloober Team even existed). The argument was as presented here: They shouldn't do a remake because it can't possibly be as good as the original.

You know what I have to say to that? A Silent Hill 2 remake would not erase the original from existence. So who cares? If the remake ends up sucking, go play the original. Simple as.

Funny enough, it's an even more effective thing to do today in regards to Steam games. For example, it's really sending a message about the state of Payday 3 when Payday 2 has several times higher 24 hour concurrent player peaks. It really makes it clear that people wanted more from the franchise and were simply unhappy with the newest product.

No such thing, technology gets better and even games that feel perfect today would be better with newer UI, smoother framerates, or better controls.

Of course you can say that the original Super Mario Brothers needs to exist still so people could keep working on speed runs, or just cause of the history, but a better SMB with new controls and smoother gameplay should always be on the table.

Phantasy Star Online. They've tried to release sequels over the years - Universe, PSO2 - and failed miserably at capturing what made Episodes 1 and 2 great. There's no way they would be able to just update the graphics without trying to "improve" something in the gameplay, or changing the loot system, or adding MTX, and would just fuck it up again.

PSO is so good that even now, 23 years after it launched on Dreamcast, there's still hundreds if not thousands of people like me that still play regularly. Whether that's offline on their GameCube or online in Blue Burst on PC on a server like Ephinea.

Heroes of Might & Magic 3

Dishonored.

That game looks beautiful, even if compared to some of today's AAA titles.

I just want great ports, like what iD Software has done with Doom and Quake. I don't care about updated visuals as long as I can play my favorite games in 1080p with modern controls.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.

Honestly hard question because essentially you want a game that would be worse now. Something that playing now would tranish it then make it better even with updated graphics/movement. Or something you know the company would take a direction which would make it negative.

Something like redoing the original Super Mario 1, 2 and 3. Where the updated graphics and changes to game play takes away from the original pixel feel. As I feel Nintendo would probably use modern day Mario design.

~~or mass effects removal of zoooming in on mirandas butt~~

Chess of course!

This isn't quite what you're asking, but Halo CE vs the MCC remaster. Halo: CE was superior visually-speaking to the MCC remaster because there were a lot of changes the MCC made to the lighting and textures which ruined the atmosphere of the original. That's not to say the remaster is bad, it just isn't good because it lost the original feel of the game.

When it comes to games that could never be remastered, I think Hylics 1 and 2 fit the bill for me. It's not that Hylics 1 couldn't look better, but so much of the visual style relies on photographs and claymation that it'd be very, very hard to do a proper "remaster". Hylics 2 is the same, except now there's video you have to remake instead of still images.

Super Hexagon

Katamari Damacy

2d art and pixel art survive well because of the inherent abstraction being part of it's aesthetician. The greater the graphical fidelity, the less the game leans on abstraction, and instead on fidelity, and then a remaster adds more visual appeal.

A game like slay the spire or katamari damacy gains very little from a visual remaster, but a game like Crysis would get a lot. Its worth noting that katamari damacy did get a remaster anyway...and its aesthetic is still what makes it look good, not the resolution. Crysis on the other hand had low aesthetic emphasis and heavy technical emphasis so refreshing the technical graphics does a lot for the game.

Nethack.

"BRUCE LEE" on the C64 🥰

https://c64online.com/c64-games/bruce-lee/

The original Sims + expansion packs. I haven't played any of the newer ones but I spent a lot of childhood playing the original with my mom and we had so much fun together.

Livin' Large was my fave expansion pack because of the servo. Such a fun game!

Dead Cells.

I’m definitely in the minority, but remasters in general aren’t my cup of tea. I’d generally rather play the thing as it was. If a game was noteworthy for some reason I’d like to see it in roughly its original historical context, especially if it’s noteworthy for what it did with the hardware at the time. Remaking it can really take away from that in my opinion.

I don’t always mind it, especially when it makes a game that’s hard to run on modern computers readily available and has options that are faithful to the original… and sometimes it’s just nice to have shiny new graphics (like with the Spyro remakes). Other games it just seems silly for… like Bioshock and Mass Effect aren’t that old and the remasters don’t seem that different, so why bother? I guess they come as a bundle, so that’s a win? And I guess these releases are also good for consoles, but they seem silly on PC.

I won’t yuck anybody’s yums, though. If you like remasters that’s great… I just don’t really see the point most of the time, but maybe it’s because I like seeing old graphics and seeing where we came from and stuff.

Star Wars Battle Front 2 (2005)

I cannot tell you how many hours I burned playing Galactic Conquest with friends.

WATCH THOSE WRIST ROCKETS!!!

The original Doom and Commander Keen. And no, not because of the nostalgia, but because they're actually perfect the way they are.

Paper Mario. Not that it'd ruin it, just cant do much.