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.