Yet more great Kickstarter gaming news! So a back earlier this year, I produced a retro review of “The Great Giana Sisters”, a game from the Commodore 64 and Amiga days of gaming that was notorious for being one of the earliest Super Mario Bros. clones in existence. The review mentions a recent remake of the game for the Nintendo DS that, while imaginative, some fans believed fell short on paying proper homage to the original’s fantastic music and unique charm.

Unbeknownst to me, a Kickstarter was established by independent developers, Black Forest Games, under the name “Project Giana”. With the idea firmly cemented in their brains, they set to work with the goal of making a truly innovative remake of Great Giana Sisters that would help to not only bring back the spark of the original game, but hook players that may not have cared for the DS revamp. What the Kickstarter originally didn’t really make clear, but thankfully writer Audun Sorlie at Destructoid managed to lay all out on the table with his interview with BFG, was that original game composer Chris Huelsbeck was along to help with the project’s soundtrack, along with DS-version composer Fabian Del Priore co-producing and metal-chiptune maestros Machinae Supremacy along to help out.

With a playable demo currently available to try, and a ton of goodies for those who pledge to the fund, (the very first tier gets you the game for PC), “Project Giana” is shaping up to be one of those Kickstarters that again appeal to the childhood gamer in so many of us. (Now that we’re adults with larger budgets than our weekly allowances) Whether it make it’s 150K goal within the August 31st deadline or not will be determined these next few days, but if it does, it will be another testament to the growing idea of resurrecting similar older games through the power of the gaming community.

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Screenshot from the forthcoming Rise of the Triad remake, rebuilt from the ground up using Unreal Engine 3.

It’s quite easy to remake something, be it a tv show, movie, or video game. Maybe that’s why there are so many of them. At worst, a remake can be nothing more than a simple cash grab aimed at nostalgic fans. At best however, it can bring back what fans loved about the original work while introducing it to a whole new generation of fans. It’s not hard to make a good remake either, especially in gaming. There are 4 simple steps to making one:

1. Preserve (and enhance when and where necessary) what worked the first time around
2. Fix (or get rid of) what didn’t work
3. Add in new features that enhance the original experience without diluting it
4. Give it a graphical makeover. It doesn’t have to use today’s cutting edge graphics (and in some cases, it probably shouldn’t, just so as long as it looks better than it did the first time.

Here are 5 of the best remakes in video games. They’ve gone above and beyond simply reskinning and re-releasing the original game, they’ve added to it, and in some cases changing it completely while preserving what players loved about it so many years ago. Check them out, and sound off below if there is a remake that you enjoyed or that you want to see.
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