Konami has had a mixed history with HD “remasters”: The Metal Gear Solid HD Collection is often regarded as an example of how to do an HD collection properly, where as the much hated Silent Hill HD Collection was a disaster in every aspect. Unfortunately, it seems like the recently released Zone of the Enders HD Collection for Xbox 360 and PS3 suffers from a little bit of sloppy execution.
ZoE fans across the world have already started to document problems with the inaccurate ports that both games in the collection have received: both games run at 30FPS instead of the 60FPS that Konami had advertised, and both games seem to have had their special effects toned down. The games’ lightning fast movement and combat seem to have been inexplicably slowed down slightly as well. The problems are reportedly more pronounced on the PS3 version, but are present to some extent on both platforms. Japanese gaming blog Esuteru has uploaded a comparison video of the HD ports vs. the original PS2 versions here.
Since Zone of the Enders was produced by the same team that created Metal Gear Solid, I was hoping that Konami would show ZoE the same love and attention they gave to the MGS Collection. Both ZoE1 and 2 are still definitely worth playing, and while these ports aren’t as bad as the hack-job Konami did to Silent Hill 2 and 3, it’s still regrettable that Konami wasn’t able to pull off a 100% accurate port. If Konami is going to continue mining their classic titles like this, I really hope they start to put some more care and thought into making sure these games are accurately represented.
