Honestly, the whole debate between whether games are “ports” or “remasters” or “remakes” seems kind of pointless. At this point, it’s pretty much a semantic issue in which we’re arguing over which increasingly-arbitrary label we’re using to designate games. Plus, there’s a lot of overlap between these terms, and there’s not always a defined solution.
I propose a new and improved system, which I’m calling the “Re-Scale
” (patent pending). With this system, rather than giving them arbitrary labels, we assign re-releases with a score between 0 and 10:
0 being a straight port with absolutely no enhancements or alterations;
and 10 being a complete remake from the ground-up.
With the Re-Scale
, you can take all sorts of different factors into account, such as improved visuals, remade assets, reorchestrated music, additional content or bonuses, new menus, or anything else that you think is relevant. Note that this isn’t a system to gauge the overall quality of a game; it’s simply to distinguish the amount of effort within the re-release. Of course, we can discuss what scores each game deserves.
Using this system, I would give Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD a score of 2/10 on the Re-Scale
. It has some touched-up assets and enhanced visuals, but by and large, it is almost the exact game we already saw on 3DS.
This is actually kind of fun and I might use this more often