Playing ZOE1 (PS3) now.
The Good:
-HD and pretty damn smooth for the most part. Hard to divorce what might be slowdown versus the simple fact that you get none of the best toys from the sequel, but it feels better
-You can press start at any time to skip cutscenes
-Obviously Jehuty plays a bit clunky compared to ZOE2 but I pretty much got the hang of it within 10 seconds or so
The Bad:
-Obviously they didn't figure out the proper game flow until ZOE2; can't say anyone enjoys hunting down robot mobs for passcodes
-The original script is awful, not sure if they re-recorded lines or not but it sounds about the same. Pretty sure in an ideal world they would have retranslated it.
-Inexplicably Konami decided to pony up the money for a brand new ZOE1+2 anime cutscene when the disc boots up, but *didn't* spend anything on bringing ZOE1 cutscenes up to even last-gen standards. Which is a shame because the game badly needs it; every cutscene is lacking tremendously in polycount, textures (this is before toon-shading folks) and VFX. It not only looks noticeably worse than the real-time graphics, but as best I can tell they just 2x'd the original video files and maybe applied a bit of after-the-fact filtering to smooth it out. (To me it basically looks like when you switch to an SD channel on your HDTV)
Just a shame since the new cutscene is both a spare part and nowhere near as good as the E3 ZOE2 video it shares the music with.
Not really bad, but a missed opportunity:
-ZOE1 and ZOE2 are basically bookends of a short term, multi-game story, so it's really kind of a shame they just went for the quick-and-dirty HD remix and not the Criterion "here's the vision" approach. In an ideal world (yeah, budgets, I know...) they pretty much could have recoded the particle engine, merged the two games into one, and add in the extra content (web, ZOE 2171 IDOLO, maybe even FoM) to fill in the gap.
But by dropping all of the extra stuff there really isn't even context anymore; you just get your two games on one Blu-Ray and if you really wanted to know how the two games connect, head to Google.
I'm actually curious how different/not different the art book will be from this, which I already own and was the first thing I ever imported.
I'd have to spend some time later to look through the pages to see what is different but my initial impression is certainly that the Anubis book has a lot more content. That being said this is easily the best CE art book I can remember owning; it's full-size, has a significant number of pages and seemingly half the book is in color. The CE box itself is a bit fragile (nowhere near as sturdy as FFX-2) and the CD is in a cardboard sleeve but otherwise still feels like good value.
