Shenmue 1 & 2 HD

Played the shite out of this on my dreamcast. I can't see myself enjoying driving forklifts anymore.

I played through Shenmue 1 and a lot of 2 on my Dreamcast back in the day. These games were impressive technological feats for their time but they felt clunky even back then. I don't think they're going to age well, even with an "HD" facelift.

I'm glad more people will have a chance to dip into them, but I think most newcomers will come away wondering what the big deal was.

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Have you played Shenmue 2? It corrects a lot of the issues players had with the first game.

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I did. I don't think I can go back to it.

I am very much looking forward to 3 though.

I never played Shenmue, but I'm planning on getting this. I'm looking forward to the arcade games!

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I think people might be turned off by the english dub, relative lack of action, and lack of real guidance on where to go.

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That's certainly not going to help but I feel like a large part of the appeal of that game back then was the simulation of a "real world." I remember picking up all sorts of objects in the various houses and looking at them, rotating them to see each side. It was neat that I could explore this virtual world, go buy food from vending machines, and go down to the local arcade to play a game, but that's pretty old hat now.

GTA, Red Dead, and Sega's own Yakuza series has created much more convincing and interesting "living worlds" since then. Very few are going to care that you can examine an individual tea cup in Shenmue or that the weather in the game is based off of historical records of the actual weather in Japan during that time period. I ate that stuff up back then, though.

I actually wish "Shenmue 3" was really one game with a complete reimagining of Shenmue 1 & 2 with 3 being it's third and concluding act. When you boil down the story of 1, there really isn't a whole lot going on, but there is a ton of tedium. It could be distilled down to the first few hours of a modern game. I don't remember 2 well enough to know if the same is true but I'd be much more interested in the project if this was the case.

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GTA, Red Dead, and Sega's own Yakuza series has created much more convincing and interesting "living worlds" since then.

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The graphics are certainly better, but I still feel like Shenmue's game world is more immersive. The majority of buildings are shops you can enter. The NPCs all have voiced dialogue and have their own schedules that they go about to-to-day.

The day and night cycle actually has meaning with shops having opening/closing hours and certain activities only being available at specific times of the day.

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I actually wish "Shenmue 3" was really one game with a complete reimagining of Shenmue 1 & 2 with 3 being it's third and concluding act. When you boil down the story of 1, there really isn't a whole lot going on, but there is a ton of tedium. It could be distilled down to the first few hours of a modern game. I don't remember 2 well enough to know if the same is true but I'd be much more interested in the project if this was the case.

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It's a rough spot for the developers of Shenmue 3. I feel like making the new Shenmue feel different than the old games will cause a lot of fan outrage even if some level of modernization wouldn't hurt.

I don't remember Shenmue 2 that much myself. It was probably 2004-2005 the last time I played it if not earlier. The story of Shenmue 2 does have more action though. There's a brief part of the game where you take a job moving crates but it's nowhere near as annoying or as long as the forklift activity in the first game.