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There's a visceral reaction a person gets when looking at uncanny valley engine ports of older games. It could be horror, the triggering of a fight-or-flight response from seeing appalling monstrosities rendered at a crispy smooth 60 FPS. It could be disgust, such as from the realization that a lazy person can steal assets and slap it in an unmodified engine and call it their own. Or it could be simple bemusement, like how people seem to believe doing so is something which requires effort or praise. Regardless, watching videos of bad attempts to "remake" games in newer engines has an addictive quality that I can't deny, like perpetual horror movies you can't look away from.
A personal favorite of mine is "CryZENx," who is the main culprit for many of these horrifying Unreal Engine ports. They carry the mark of every stereotype you can imagine. Their assets are either stock or stolen, from the models to the environments and right down to the music and sound. Their videos simply show incomplete project after incomplete project, with no polish whatsoever. They cannot make unique animations of their own, because when they try, it's stiff and minimal. Their videos have hundreds of thousands of views from people hopeful to see HD recreations of old games. But, most importantly, their attempts to make "original" models all have an amateurish and terrifying quality.
Their game of choice is Mario and The Legend of Zelda, which is subject to a limited variety of ripping the models from the game with the animations (or ripping newer models and rigging them to older animations, lending them an even stranger quality) and throwing them into environments (which are also stolen) with stock engine effects. If he feels a little bit adventurous, he'll also take models directly from other games and slap them in, such as directly ripping the model of the Temple of Time from Breath of The Wild and presenting it as a uniquely made asset in his Ocarina of Time videos. As a word of warning, CryZENx cannot audio balance to save their life, so watch your volume if you don't like being surprised by a low quality Mario whooping at you.
CryZENx is also prone to trend-surfing, devoting their time to making things like a flavor-of-the-week Bowsette mod which still steals both the model, animations, and sounds from other people (the model is fan-made, the animations are stock or for a Waluigi mod of Super Mario 64, and the voice lines are ripped directly from Super Smash Brothers Melee). In the most bizarre video of theirs, they have the owl from Ocarina of Time lecture the viewer about suicide prevention before Link stumbles across a crudely made grave with "RIP ETIKA" written on it via what appears to be MS Paint.
Since CryZENx is prone to stealing, they've been called out for it and have been forced to try their hand at making their own assets (or they'll just try to steal from somebody else), with demonstrably horrific results. This is why, for example, he has multiple videos of the first area from Ocarina of Time where the character that greets the player, Saria, has a different model each and every time (and not just differing in quality, but with completely stylistic changes).
There are also times where CryZENx can't even be bothered to steal environments from multiple sources, leading to these videos which take place in the "Kite" demo for Unreal Engine, demonstrated here.
Thus, he simply takes models and animations directly from games such as Super Smash Brothers Brawl and let them run around in a photo-realistic field with broken animations as they harass hordes of deer. To help advertise the video, he'll occasionally take screenshots other people have made for a theoretical "HD remake" of the game the character he ripped stars in. He'll then title the video as such, despite it simply being the character running around a tech demo with entirely stolen assets.
Of course, CryZENx isn't the only one out there. For instance, take this Russian user who tries their hand at Unity remakes of Nintendo games, as well. There's nothing stolen as far as I can see, but the quality of work is just the same.
Ultimately, I adore these bad ports and all the blatant theft, lies, and attention-seeking that comes with it. I'm sure there's more people like CryZENx out there who tries to port old games to new engines, some of which probably actually look good, and I'd love to see more.
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