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See this is exactly what I'm trying to point out - people get so hung up on NNT being a remake that they have to constantly compare it back to the original game. Anything NNT has that's good gets attributed to AO and doesn't count; everything it does wrong is a damning indictment and shows that it's a bad game and AO is better. It lives or dies purely on how it measures up to the original.
NNT is a remake, so of course it's going to take a lot from the original game! The point of judging it on its own merits is not to say "the game is bad because all its good qualities come from AO", it's to say that taken as a complete gaming experience by itself, it's a decent game. It's an engaging 2D puzzle-platformer with interesting level design, simple mechanics that are easy to pick up but difficult to master, and an interesting aesthetic that in places* is gorgeous.
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I dismiss the whole notion of "you can't judge a remake on its own without comparisons to the original". I find it really dumb. Let's say someone makes his OC Coldsteel The Hedgeheg artwork which is a traced over Sonic artwork, do you judge it as it's own thing, or what they did with it? Assuming the former, if you praise the elements of the new art like the character proportions or the pose... are you really praising the new art? The sole reason those are there is because he traced over the original art the author didn't make.
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Does most of that come from AO? Sure. Does NNT do them better than AO? For the most part, no, but it doesn't do them badly.
You seem to think that NNT is worse than AO. I honestly don't disagree! But my point is that you (and many other Oddworld fans) write off NNT as bad because it doesn't meet or surpass AO's bar of quality. That may be dissatisfying, sure, but being worse than AO doesn't mean a game is automatically bad - there's plenty of good games that are worse than AO out there.
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Oh no no, don't get me wrong. I do think New N Tasty isn't a good game, not just a not good enough of a remake. It's a bugged mess with glitchy animations, audio problems and tone/atmosphere issues.
>Having the camera free-flowing and utilizing perspective and angles adds depth and makes the environments feel more connected.
At the cost of many bugs and weird behavior when you're on the "edge" between "screens".
>Mapping the throwing mechanic to a controller thumbstick makes aiming rocks and grenades far easier and takes out the guesswork in landing a shot.
On the downside the throwables have no weight to them now. And no, there's still as much guesswork. And no, in AO the trajectory of the grenades is always the same and predictable, and if you say that you need to throw them once to know it, it's as much of a guesswork as the NnT/SS throwing lines.
>Being able to throw bottle caps to get the attention of sligs and scrabs means you don't have to wait around on enemy patrol cycles as often.
This is very bugged (and a really forced feature), they sometimes hardcode sligs to only pretend they're looking and they unnaturally turn towards you (I mean, more than their usual glitchy animation) and insta shoot you.
>Including the gamespeak option to talk to multiple mudokons simultaneously removes tedium some of the original puzzles had.
Except it didn't really have much tedium to begin with (especially if it's the first time you're playing it), as it had 3 times fewer mudokons, as opposed to the copy pasted 200... Plus sometimes there was sometimes a puzzle reason to do so, e.g. first stockyards escape secret area that required you to do a few routes in a dangerous scrab territory (Which they addressed in NnT by adding electrical gates to further make the level aesthetics worse)
>Quicksave!
I thought you were listing positives... I hate the concept of quick saving (or saving anywhere) in a game like that with passion.
>Adding difficulty options makes the game more accessible to newcomers while still allowing people to have a challenge if they choose to.
Oh yeah, I chose hard and the UXBs and meatsaws became completely unpredictable (even though I played it after they patched the saws so they are no longer longer to CPU cycles). Nice "challenge". Not to mention UXBs are no longer synced to the beeps.
>The level select system makes going back to replay levels and try for better endings much easier. I personally enjoy loading up the game and playing a level or two, without having to go through the whole game again.
I don't really think it's very important to me, but it could be to someone who somehow got the bad ending and wants a good one, I guess. Though if you got a good one and want to get the bad one you need to do the whole game again afaik.
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I'm not trying to argue that the game is perfect, because it isn't. I am perfectly aware that the game has issues, and plenty of them stand out to me as things that bring down the experience. I'm not even trying to convince anyone that the game is better than AO.
But it's not a terrible game, far from it. You might not like it, you might consider it worse than AO, and to you that probably means it's not worth your time. That's fine. But games shouldn't be judged in black-and-white good-or-bad. NNT is a mixed bag - it does some things well, and some things poorly.
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Sorry, I don't agree about the doing things well part.
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But I think it's a mistake to write it off entirely - because as we've seen, things can get so much worse.
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I won't like NnT more just because of a threat of the art getting worse if I don't!
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*I've voiced my criticisms of the game's aesthetic choices before, but I personally think NNT really does the native environments of the game justice. The Scrabanian Temple in particular stands out in my mind as an area that looks straight up better than the original.
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I am of a different opinion. While the original renders bear the marks of the game's era, I wouldn't pick - as far as the aethetics alone go - Scrabanian Temple from NnT over AO, due to the overambundance of bloom and overexposed light (and oversaturation). Some terrain textures are really low resolution as well, though it's technical and not aesthetics. It's also difficult for me to separate how this game "looks" into "the static" and "the dynamic" parts, and the shoddy animations took the fun out of watching this game in motion, no matter the location.