1997 Westwood Studios—famous for their real time strategy games like Command and Conquer and Red alert— released a game called simple Bladerunner. It was a sordid point-and-click adventure game that went on to become one of the greats of the genre.
Partly because of the game itself, which had its flaws but was a viable enough adventure, but mostly because of that feeling, and how it showed that a licensed game doesn’t have to be a rushed platformer. Westwoods Bladerunner had been made with genuine love and reverence for the source material and felt like a piece of it Bladerunner universe in a way that few games of the 90’s (With some exceptions) could even dream, with its grimy pixels and textures taking players straight back to the streets of Ridley Scott’s 1982 masterpiece.
That was back then though. Well, as they seem in every other respect at the moment, things are worse. Nightdive released a remake of the game called Blade Runner: Extended Editionand it’s bad in almost every way imaginable.
First and most egregiously, the game’s muddy graphics have been overhauled, the result being a terribly smoothed and unnatural aesthetic that looks like someone typed “Blade Runner.” in DALL E mini. The whole game also now runs at 60 FPS, which more than doubles the original frame rate, which looks good in some cases but can be really irritating in others.
But there are also many other strange problems. There are new errors (this is not a port, The whole game basically had to be reverse engineered), the game’s fonts have been changed, some international voice dubbings are missing and its Music was kind of downgraded. Oh, and if all of that wasn’t bad enough, the remake was also essentially banned in Australia and New Zealand.
Indeed things are So bad, and the reviews and response to the release on places like Steam that have Nightdive so hostile rushed to add Westwood’s original 1997 version of the game-one upgraded to run on ScummVM of fans, and which ones Second hand standalone until available improved version out – to its own release, allowing players on PC to choose which edition they actually want to play. Anyone booting up the game now will be given one of three options: the remake, the original, or a version of the original “with some restored content not used by the original game.”
This emergency pack is now available on both GoG and Steam, although the improved version was also released on Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch, whose storefronts make no mention of the original game at the time of release.
