20 Remakes and Remasters That Are Worse Than The Original

For the Metal Gear series’ 35th anniversary, the folks at Konami compiled the Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection, with Volume 1 uniting  the first five main entries in the franchise: Metal Gear, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, Metal Gear Solid, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty and Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, plus a whole host of tidbits and extras for our gaming pleasure.

Anyone who has played these games knows how immersive they are, taking control of various iterations of Snake as they sneak and shoot their way to victory against terrorist, Soviets and other nefarious types. And, of course, a big ol’ bundle sounded like welcome news – until the release date.

Dropping on Switch, PlayStations 4 and 5, Windows and Xbox Series X/S in October 2023, the Master Collection was a major letdown. Sure, the bonus content was expansive and, on the whole, great – but that’s not what we came for. The display settings were lacking, several of the games were, at best, a mess of pixels on modern screens, and also locked at a woeful 720p. Amongst many other issues were loading glitches, subtitle typos and the absence of the ability to switch between screen formats. Konami rushed it out way too soon, and while some load-bearing patches have since been released, the definitive experience is still on the games’ original console releases.