It's funny how many of our favorite games of the past could just be boiled down to "
maps"...
Like, this isn't NFS3. It isn't that game's physics code, it doesn't have that game's AI, it doesn't play exactly like the original. But you can rip the maps and other assets, and there are various basic handling models for UE dictating how cars behave on a track, and now there are plug-ins to do those effects that had to be invented back in the day for sense of speed or light hits, and so you can create a facsimile of the game world all by yourself if you know what you're doing.
Not that this guy Dávid Kerekes didn't put in some work, it's just funny how doable and easy this is now with some games, to the point that even he says, "I barely started working on it," yet here it is in playable form.
You couldn't do this so easily with Burnout, as a counter-example. Sure, you could rip the track, and you could maybe even find car models on the Marketplace with breakaway bits, but the gameplay isn't just "maps". It's logic for how often traffic populates the roads, it's AI for the multiple opponent vehicles, it's a set of game rules for whether you crash or rub off on guardrails or how hard you have to smash for a Takedown. Still doable, but you'd have to make a game, not just a "map".
It's just kind of surprising to think about how turnkey some games really were. They were maps, and avatars or vehicles on those maps. Brilliantly designed maps, which is where the work went in (as well as in making the engine that threw us into those maps,) but the nitty-gritties of how cars drove and how characters walked or jumped and how guns shot, those were kind of generic aspects (the whole idea of NFS was to try to simulate driving a car, so how different can cars drive, you wonder? Pretty different, actually, but that's all shades of difference on a general physical notion of "this is how cars drive.")
Heck, you could completely replace how the cars drive and characters walk and how the guns were aimed, using more modern and accurate or complex systems, and you could call that an "upgrade". It's not just not the same game, it's a "better
" game!
Just something I think about where I see stuff like this or the
Need for Speed Underground 2 UE fan project or the
Simpsons Hit and Run UE project. These are not "remasters" of the original game by any means, but when you boil down what those games were, sometimes there's not a great difference between the greatest game in the world and a tribute.
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