A friend sent me an e-mail today with a link to a website where a group of about 5 people were re-making chrono trigger and rendering it in 3D. They have a trailer you can download which looks pretty damn amazing. All of the scenes are in game rendering too, none of the trailers or screenshots is CG. However, about a month ago, Square Enix issues a cease and desist, so the project is no more. But damn, just look at what could have been....

http://www.opcoder.com/projects/chrono/

Pretty sad when something with this much potential is cut. But this does raise a few questions...

From what I've seen, the stuff they've thown together so far would nearly be grounds for getting hired by SqareEnix. Perhaps there's already a new chrono title in the works and they just didn't want something to paralell it's release. Regardless of remake/sequel or SquareEnix/Independent, I would like to see chrono star in another RPG.

btw magus looks fucking awesome.

My GOD people! Why the fuck do we need to remake great games, just to put in spiffy graphics? Look at FF8. Story sucked (but I liked the GF's stuff), but it had spiffy graphics when compared to FF7. Fuck, will take the old FF1 NES graphics as long as it had a -good- story. I don't need games to look real. My main problem is that games like Doom 3 and shit like that requires most people with computers older than 6 months to spend $200 or more on a video card just to play the fucker. In 6 months from now, will have to get a new video card just to play the shit there. It's getting bad. Why can't computers work on a platform level? You have one card that will play all the games that will come out for that. I can spend the same amount on an X-Box and Fable, and also be able to play any other X-Box game (including that kickass X-Men Legands) on that X-Box! I don't have to buy upgrades.

Down with 3D and improved graphics! Benchmark everything, and stop fucking over the poor guy

I don't play video games for the story - not even RPGs. The thing that keeps you playing a game is the gameplay. If a game plays awesome but has a horrible story, you'll probably still keep playing - take flying games and fighting games for example. If a game has an amazing story and horrible gameplay, however, you'll probably quit pretty early. Getting to play Chrono Trigger again in an updated state would be pretty awesome, IMHO.

If you'd check one page up you'd see this:
NOT a remake, but a tribute to tihs great tame.

That aside, I would agree with Scrozer on the fact that bleeding-edge graphics aren't essential and can be easily made up for with great game mechanics or story. However, I wouldn't label them in a negative way. Like here, for example, you'd get both elements of a great story, with good graphics as an added bonus. All of that playing on PC (sys req can't be that high for something like this) and current gen systems.

Are graphics progressing too fast? I would say almost. Doom 3 would actually be one to compliment on it's graphics. Not only because they look good, but they actually made it to run on older machines. (I have a friend with a P4 1.8, 512 ram, and a 3-4 year old 64mb GeForce card... and he runs it on medium quality, no hiccups!). Granted I wasn't terribly impressed with how the storyline or gameplay progressed, the graphics really added something to the creepy nature of this game.

Hopefully some other game developers will follow in it's example of optimizing the game to run on a wide spectrum of machines, since it'd simply be way too hard to slow down the progression of today's games' graphics. That, at least would be a great compromise. Them getting their great graphics, and you not having to worry a large amount about "is my system good enough?"

Personally, I've ridden out a 64mb Kyro graphics card in a 5 year old machine up until this summer. It was to the point where the P3 500mhz was the limiting factor in some of the newer games. You don't HAVE to shove in a new card every 6 months... You can get at least 3 great years out of decent card. And at that rate, It probably comes close to matching the cost of having to buy new consoles (assuming you don't go for the cream of the crop.

And yes, I do think that if graphics were to slow down in their evolution, that gameplay would improve. Would it be great if that happened? Yes. Will it happen? Sadly, unlikely.

The guy that runs Opcode is about as nice as you can get. He had absolutely no intentions of selling this game. He probably would've even given the rights to square just for a little credit to his team, but square didn't want their giant wallet to get trumped by a 5 man team working on a budget the fraction of the size.

On a side note, Activision is threatening to destroy the homebrew community as well. They just recently issued a cease and desist to about 100 people who were developing homebrew carts of games that they bought the IP to when Atari defected. All they were doing was developing ports for colecovision and later Atari models that were 2600 exclusive. Consoles that have been dead for nearly 20 years.