The remastered version of PO'ed costing $20 is proof we have strayed too far from the light of God

Why is there a remaster of the barely remembered 3DO FPS game PO'ed? I'll admit that it had an attention grabbingly insane premise of a chef fighting aliens but it is not fondly remembered. It's the kind of game that would be interesting as part of a 3DO mini-console or retrospective pack (something like the Atari 50th collection for the 3DO would be great) but doesn't seem like it would be worth playing on its own in 2024, when we have access to so many amazing games.

Except it is available as a standalone. For $20.

This is part of Nightdive studios remastering of old FPS games, which up until now has focused on games that were culturally important like Blood or Turok. Those games have a lot of nostalgic fans who want to play them again and are important to have accessible for people interested in the evolution of FPS and even gaming culture in general. But while $20 is a lot to pay for an old game like Turok you're at least getting an experience you might actually enjoy from it. PO'ed has never been considered good, and was a novelty at the time.

You can argue that there's room for remastering of novelties, and I fully agree. I think it's great when weird old stuff is resurfaced. You can play Ninja Golf on your Switch or PS5 today, legitimately. That's fantastic. Ninja Golf is kind of a bad game, but it's a cool curio, and fun for about 15 minutes. It was also sold as part of a much larger selection of games, all contextualized within a very cool documentary package, for $40. That package included actual classics like Tempest 2000 and a bunch of foundational arcade games, along with a lot of supplemental material. Ninja Golf for $20 on its own digitally would be kind of insane.

Like PO'ed is.

And it's not just PO'ed. The prices on these rereleases have been climbing for years. What used to be sold as parts of large collections are now being sold game by game, often for as much or more than a current indie.

You can argue that the game has been remastered, and it has and I'm sure they did a good job. You can argue that people don't need to buy it, or they can wait for a price drop, and that's true. Nightdive can do whatever it wants, and it's not like they'd holding a true classic hostage. We all remember when Nintendo packaged 3 Mario roms for $60 and then only sold that for 6 months. That sucked! But those were also Mario roms. That package included two of the greatest games ever made AND the only rerelease of Mario Sunshine. The games could back up the pricing.

And it's not like PO'ed is the only rerelease from that era. Quake 1 and 2 were remastered, sold for $10 each, and with online multiplayer. To say that Quake 1 and 2 are more worthy of remastering than PO'ed would be to state the glaringly obvious.

It's fun to have weird curiosities on modern platforms, and in the end PO'ed will become affordable and I might grab it for $5 for a laugh. My real concern is whether this pricing is sustainable. Are people buying PO'ed at $20? Dark Forces at $30? $30 is only $10 less than Helldivers 2, a fully modern game experience. And that's for a remaster of an ANCIENT game. At least Dark Forces is good and it's Star Wars. That's not nothing.

I guess I just miss the pricing days of the Virtual Console and even Sega Ages on the Switch, or those various compilation packs that seem to have dried up. Even I, someone who is kind of obsessed with old games and weird games, have to tap out at $20 for PO'ed. At a certain point you're paying new game money for what is, essentially, a prank on yourself.

Counterpoint: A prospective The Wheel of Dubious FPSes Season 2 demands blood and I will inevitably buy this when it is $5. Sometimes these out of nowhere remasters are even surprises! PowerSlave Exhumed is actually pretty dope, and if you've never checked out Chasm: The Rift, it's a bizarre little thing out of Ukraine that actually also manages to be "pretty neat." Is PO'ed in that ballpark? Probably fucking not! But given how quickly games go on sale these days, I'm fine waiting.

It's also probably because we've run out of the good, obvious, and easily licensed old FPS games to give the KEX engine treatment to (well, until they try to crack the nut that is Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight and its weird proprietary engine) and you can just assume that NOLF is never happening. What is left are the PO'ed and Killing Times of the world, which exist entirely for me to stream and go "haha this is terrible." It's not a bad problem to have, even if what's left is the dregs or the "We had to talk to numerous people in multiple rooms to make this happen so you'd better goddamn buy it" stuff like that Digital Eclipse remaster of Wizardry 1.

I'm also probably the worst person to have this discussion with because I've also been vocally demanding that GOG put out a re-release of Descent to Undermountain for "historical preservation purposes." I would pay exactly $10 for that. You may say "why would they release such an infamously disastrous title?" and to that I say "they also put out all those shitty Dragonlance side-scrollers and DeathKeep, it's fine"

They really are scrapping the bottom of the barrel when rereleasing old shooters. Can't wait for the Iron Angel of the Apocalypse remaster.

@arbitrarywater: Wow. You're going to compare PowerSlave to PO'ed? Sega Saturn fans in shambles.

PowerSlave is a game that a lot of Saturn evangelists considered a hidden gem. To the extent there are 3DO fans I've not heard any promote PO'ed as anything other than wacky. It's not Plumbers Don't Wear Ties levels of bad, but that's ANOTHER game that got released for a lot of money recently.

I mean look at your argument! You're the person MOST likely to want this game and your use scenario is "wait until a 75% off sale and play it for 3 hours on a gimmick stream." That's the BEST CASE SCENARIO. My point is not that the game shouidn't be re-released it's that the price is insane and it should be bundled with other stuff or at least be a $10 game.

I'm all for putting as many games as possible on modern platforms, I just think these prices make no sense.

@borgmaster: Sadly this is more like the middle of the barrel than the bottom. Kileak: The DNA Imperative is more like the bottom.

I never played PO'ed when it was new. I read plenty about why PO'ed was bad back then. When I heard about the Nightdive remaster, I checked out the PSX port. It felt bad to play and I wrote it off as a bad port of a bad game. Maybe a good port of a bad game might be more fun.

It is not. PO'ed still sucks. Holy hell it sucks. $20 for the privilege of playing PO'ed in 2024 sucks.

Dark Forces for $30 is also a bit rough, but I'm more willing to chalk that up to a Disney tax. But that's a tall ceiling. I love talking up Dark Forces to folks who didn't play it, and it's hard to sell at that price.

These two combined don't feel great. I know this all costs money, licensing and porting isn't free, but I'm going to approach the next Nightdive remaster with a more critical eye.

Can't get down with this badmouthing of Kileak though! It's not as good as BRAHMA Force or Epidemic but it's better than PO'ed! We can go far lower than Kileak.

It hasn't been mentioned yet so i figure i should, the PO'ed remaster was announced on April Fools day.

Maybe they've got a list of IP they've got the go ahead on and PO'ed somehow found its way on there, maybe as a package deal for something else, it's not the most in depth remaster they've done but it's a good quality, maybe their dev pipeline for KEX engine remasters is refined to the point where this didn't take much time, maybe the interns worked on it, whatever the case the budget was low enough for a "why not it'll be funny" decision and here it is, John at Digital Foundry finds the game culturally significant so it's worth it in my eyes :P. Whatever the reason i assume it didn't take much time away from whatever their next project is.

The price should be lower though alarmingly £16.75 in todays market could be considered a low price, their prices have been steadily increasing with every release and the acquisition by Atari probably hasn't helped.

Hey, at least it's not Kingpin Reloaded.

I have been thinking about the same thing and I have no answers. My immediate reaction was that these games are Game Pass bait, hoping to get picked up on a subscription service and they get paid that way without any gamers directly paying for them. But then I said the same thing about Stubbs the Zombie Remake and it hasn't appeared on Game Pass. I believe it has been on Humble Bundle because I own it somehow, but I'm not sure how much money they get out of that.

You can probably put the recent Felix the Cat Collection in the same bucket. The term "collection" is a little misleading because it's really just 3 different versions of one game, and you should probably just play the best version and not touch the other ones. I haven't played the game, people seem to like it and based on the trailer it's doing pretty impressive stuff for the NES, but I'm also going to guess that this is a 2-hour game with save states and rewinding, and that we saw all the levels on the trailer. So we're looking at $25 for a NES game, I remember when Nintendo sold NES games on the Virtual Console for $5, and inflation is certainly a thing but it's not that prices have increased five-fold in 15 years, so it seems that there are just people out there that will pay basically any price for an old game.

@emnii: I knew the PowerSlave defense force was out there but I didn't know there was a Kileak defense force waiting in the wings. Truly every game has its defense force. I know your pain. I, too, have halfheartedly defensed bad games, like Balan Wonderworld. The Kileak of its time.

@cikame: Nightdive can do whatever it wants, I'm not responsible for its finances, but as a consumer this stuff just seems bizarre to me. Yes it's a funny joke to remaster PO'ed, and it has some game preservation value, but it's not just PO'ed as others have pointed out. Old games have gotten really expensive.

@apewins: Are there people paying for these obscure old games? I don't actually know. I'm sure Turok sold but I'd guess a lot of these games do very poorly. I'm someone who loves playing retro games in new wrappers but I'm not sure anyone has figured out the economics. Xbox couldn't make backwards compatibility of old games economically viable (PS4/5 and Xbox One/Series backwards compatibility is different because it's not done on a game by game basis), and Nintendo abandoned the Virtual Console. PlayStation's attempts to put old PS1 games on PS4/5 are a fraction of what they did for PS3 and they haven't even bothered with PS2 games, even though those are much more playable today, and PS2 is now much older and should be easier to emulate by PS5 than PS1 was when PS3 was released.

Maybe there are retro gaming whales who will pay a lot and THAT's the profitable business? Maybe you sell 60,000 copies no matter how much they cost so if you can do that for $20 each you can make a profit but if you do it for $10 you won't get many more sales and will make less money?

Or maybe it's price drop bait. Sell for $5 off the bat and people will think it's worthless but release for $20 and then people WILL buy when it drops to $5 because they think they're getting a deal. A common tactic.

@bigsocrates: Package Kileak, Epidemic, and BRAHMA Force. Maybe throw in a little Robotica as a bonus. I will buy that package for $20, easy.

I have been tempted by Balan. It can sit next to my LOTR: Gollum.

I think increasingly the move is to sell to ravenous fans (if there are any) of said product before reducing it in various sales.

As a counterpoint, a new game in the incredibly faithful to PO'd would probably have no problem selling at $20.

@emnii: I mean I would buy that package for $20 too. But not Kileak on its own. And I probably wouldn't play Kileak for more than 25 minutes. It's got big Ninja Golf energy.

@shindig: A new game that LOOKED like PO'ed but was good would have no problem selling at $20. If ACTUAL PO'ed had never been released and a game that was exactly like it was released today for $20 it would be universally panned and nobody would buy it and everyone who did would refund it.

Shovel Knight looks like an NES game but is good by modern standards so people are willing to pay for it. But there are a lot of NES style games released today that are bad and nobody buys them. PO'ed is awful and if not for its notoriety and place in video game history it absolutely wouldn't sell if released today.