This right there -- this is how you do a remake of a classic game. You get people who really, passionately love the original and know it by heart, all the way down to the code base (which, in this case, was painstakingly reverse engineered using custom tools). And you try to provide an experience that is as faithful to the original as possible, while making smart and subtle changes to bring it up to date.

Do you simply want a polished-up version of the Master System game, running in widescreen and 60 FPS? Or would you rather have a lavish re-imagining with gorgeously animated cartoon visuals, a studio-recorded soundtrack and a more user-friendly interface? How about anything in between? It's up to you.

Many remakes of oldschool titles that offer the option to switch to the original graphics seem hellbent on making them look at ugly as possible, probably in order to make the new art look better in comparison (I'm looking at you, Monkey Island Special Editions). That's not the case here: Even if you decide to turn off the rather good-looking CRT shaders, you get a clean, evenly scaled look, akin to a modern "pixel art" indie game. Not to speak of the new hand-drawn visuals, which manage to look amazing and animate beautifully without sacrificing the responsiveness of the controls.

In fact, the game plays even better than the original, thanks to the doubled framerate and some slight tweaking and rebalancing. They even threw in three different difficulty modes, as well as the option to play as "Wonder Girl", if you're so inclined -- just because.

All in all, this is notably a labor of love by people who know their shit, and a great way to experience this 8-bit era evergreen.

When it comes to FPS games from the era around Y2K, everyone of course remembers Half-Life, but as ground-breaking as that game was in its design and presentation, you have to admit that the actual content was pretty dull, even for the time: An interdimensional portal opens, and then you fight your way through the corridors of giant research complex, shooting aliens and soldiers. Video games, eh?

In No One Lives Forever, you sneak into a stylish sixties nightclub, battle enemies while free-falling out of a plane, try to avoid the ticket inspector on a train ride, fight an obese German opera singer, explore a sunken ship in diving gear, inflitrate a giant office building and pick off enemies with a silent crossbow, drive a snow mobile through the alps, stand up against your sexist superiors in well-written interactive dialog sequences, visit a tropical island and infiltrate a secret base hidden inside an active volcano, pose as a journalist to interview a narcissistic big game hunter, and fly into space to disintegrate evil scientists with a laser gun -- all in one game, within a few hours. Now that's entertainment.

It seemed like fate when Animal Crossing: New Horizons released just in time for the start of the COVID lockdowns, promising a much needed opportunity to hang out with virtual animal friends in a relaxing island atmosphere.

It worked for me -- for a few days. Then, suddenly, I turned it off and realized I had no desire to ever return, which was odd to me, considering Animal Crossing is a game that runs on a real-time clock and calendar, and is supposed to be played in short sessions over the course of years. Also, I had poured almost a hundred hours into its predecessor New Leaf on the 3DS, not missing a single Christmas (sorry, "Toy Day") since 2013.

So, what happened? To be honest, the culprit was this well-made parody video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auTi3stuL5M (CAUTION: Watching this might ruin New Horizons for you forever.)

It was the moment when the painful truth became clear to me: I kind of hate New Horizons. Watching this chopped-together, fan-made satirical video promising all those easy to implement little things that would make the game just a little less tedious and condenscending, knowing that Nintendo would never, in a million years, be arsed to do any of those things, made me finally say to myself, “You know what, Animal Crossing? Fuck you. Fuck your disingenuous cutesy aesthetics, fuck your arbritary restrictions, fuck your skinner box OCD bait.” I have not touched the game since.

Even if the gameplay was less cumbersome, the world of New Horizons feels utterly sterile, boring and lifeless. There are tons of decorative objects and pieces of furniture in the game, but you can do practically nothing with them but place them in the world and look at them. For a “life sim”, there are virtually no social dynamics, and no opportunities for emergent storytelling. Villagers wander around randomly, spouting the same few phrases, and NPCs like Tom Nook or Isabelle serve as nothing more than glorified, painfully slow menu screens. It works better in New Leaf on the 3DS, because that game's scope is limited enough that it lines up nicely with its mechanics and interface. But in New Horizons, every bigger event or introduced feature is just yet another bar for you to fill or new set of bullshit items to collect.

Soon after, I discovered The Sims 4 and never looked back. Yeah, that game is a piece of garbage (play The Sims 3 for an actually good life sim), but it has the courtesy to let me use mods and custom content to get rid of all its bullshit, dig into its well-designed creation tools, and turn it into whatever I want. No bars to fill, just unlimited creative freedom. Just what I needed after hours of fumbling around with materials and storage space in New Horizons. And hey, if I ever want to be overwhelmed with ungodly amounts of tedious busywork, I can always go back to real life.