Remakes of older games

[Prelauncher]

The only justifiable reason for remaking anything is if it has become outdated and modern audiences don't have the proper context by which they can parse the work. Usually such stories are poorly designed and do not have any lasting effect but it does happen that great stories enveloped in the biases of the times when they were written lose part of their meaning and I think a remake in this case is perfectly acceptable if handled well. Usually that is not the case, with remakes entailing little more than an alteration of the surface elements which can be extremely harmful because you can almost never excise an integral part and substitute it for something superficially similar or even completely different and expect to get the same results. That's not to say it can't be done and doing a remake in the interest of utilizing technology that wasn't available at the time it was created is fine in my opinion. But it has to be done by someone who truly understands the original work. The only reason for updating the tech is improving the ways in which the work expresses whatever it was originally intended to express, right? People think that simply having prettier visuals will magically make the piece more accessible or more potent expressively. Worse yet, some others adopt a viewpoint completely contrary to that and say that prettier visuals can never improve a work. Both are false in my opinion and illustrate a complete lack of understanding as to the role of visuals in art (the media that utilize it that is).

Rather re-imagine than re-make? I.e. use the new technology to further strenghten what you tried to achieve in the first place.