Remaster Disaster

In an industry as big as video games, it's inevitable that there would be plenty of Video Game Remakes and Updated Re-releases and Remasters made a generation or more after their initial release. It's a completely common process and easy to make a quick buck off of it, as it takes a game that was already feature-complete at worst and downright critically acclaimed at best and gives it a fresh coat of paint with brand new visual upgrades, HD remastering, or even a flat-out remake from the ground up that seeks to deliver itself to a new audience at the minimum or act as an outright Adaptation Expansion at best. Oftentimes, the re-release or remake may even be outright superior to the original version of the game, bringing in new waves of audiences and creating a Newbie Boom full of people who haven't experienced the original game beforehand. Well, this is not about good remasters or remakes. A Remaster Disaster is the walking embodiment of Finagle's Law taken shape in the form of a video game remake or remaster; what can go wrong, will go horribly, horribly wrong. Maybe the game is a flat-out walking Special Effects Failure that somehow looks noticeably worse than the original game beforehand, which could be absolutely damning if the original game was released before the HD era. Maybe the "remaster" is full of bugs and glitches that weren't in the original game. Maybe it's cut out a ton of content that was in the original game and adds almost nothing of substance to it in tandem with it. Maybe it was a little too faithful in the wrong ways, and brought forth the Early-Installment Weirdness that later games in the same franchise accounted for without the same charm. Whatever the reason is, the verdict among players is clear: the remake or remaster is terrible and gets quickly panned among veterans of the game and even newcomer players for taking a game that was loved by many and bastardizing it. The most Egregious cases of this either do all of the above-listed possibilities at once or — at worst — end up delisting the original game if it was on digital storefronts to funnel players into playing the new and "improved" version. Either way, if it was a good game then, it's now massively undercut by the remake or remaster. That's not to say these remakes can't be enjoyed as a whole, nor that you're not allowed to like them. If a game's popular enough to get a remaster or remake, odds are there is a good game buried underneath a fundamentally flawed re-release that can still be enjoyed. But as a whole, if the game openly makes the average experience of this game much worse due to being a trainwreck of a remake or remaster, then it qualifies for this trope as a whole. Be sure to only include remakes or remasters that are plainly, largely agreed by the consumers and fanbase to be far inferior to the original version. This isn't for remakes or remasters that you personally think are bad even if it's generally enjoyed or seen as a flat-out upgrade by most fandoms over the previous version; it has to be remakes and remasters that are noticeably and generally agreed upon by the fandom to be a downgrade versus the original version of the game. A Sub-Trope to Porting Disaster, for game ports that are seen as poor from the base games who in their native concepts were perfectly fine. For its non-video game equivalent, see Digital Destruction or Special Effects Failure. For a more general example of changes in media that are largely reviled, see They Changed It, Now It Sucks!. Compare Sequelitis, which is about the decline in true sequels, and The Problem with Licensed Games, which is about the issue caused by changing mediums altogether. Contrast Remade and Improved for when the remake is considered better than the original.