Remastery

I mentioned remastered albums the other day, and how pleased I was that the remastered Bridge of Sighs was actually pretty true to the original. Who here remembers the remastered ZZ Top song "La Grange?" A classic in its original form, acoustic deficiencies and all, it turned into a remastered mess that had so much reverb it sounded like it had been re-recorded in a large oil tank. I couldn't bear to listen to the remastered versions, which caused me pain akin to that of a root-planing procedure. But there are worse things, such as the time Pink Floyd remastered "Money". I'm not even sure that "remastered" is the right word. They changed the time signature and made it into a dance song, and how could they do that without re-performing the song? I don't know. I'm not a sound engineer and they can do amazing things with computers these days. But I didn't care for the outcome.

Role-playing games are occasionally remastered. That's not what they call it, but that's what goes on. It's the same game, but the copyright holders let ardent fans rework the rules according to their own notions of what the original game lacked, and the final results are usually not good. Take Car Wars, where the original game wasn't too complicated and could be played reasonably quickly and enjoyed appropriately, but after about 23,000 updates and extensions had reached the complexity of nuclear physics. Or Traveler, which was a (in my opinion) particularly nice science-fiction role playing game. But that's until the fans remastered it into Mega-Traveler. Now, there were certain ideas in Mega-Traveler that I found flavorful, but my overall reaction upon leafing through the rules was "Well, we won't be incorporating any of this in MY universe." Plus - and maybe I'm just being fractious and difficult - I couldn't (or perhaps wouldn't) understand what "mega" had to do with anything.

Which is irrelevant, isn't it? One would think there would be no way I could possibly mix badly remastered ZZ Top songs and science-fiction role playing games in the same article, but huzzah! There you have it! It's beer time.