I think they are both 3D accelerated, the ground seems texture-filtered and perspective-corrected also in the original picture. I think it would have looked worse with the SW renderer.

EDIT: But when you look at that brown grating on the floor... now I am not fully sure anymore. Hard to say.

To me the main differences with those pictures is that the new version can be run in higher resolutions, and it seems as if the new version uses more colors on the screen (or textures), a bit like 16bpp versus 32bpp. There's some color banding in the old picture that is not in the newer one, something that I recall from the old 16bpp 3D accelerated games.

Either way, to me the visual enhancements look quite unimportant. But maybe that's just a good thing, too big changes could have pushed the true fans away. Anyway, at least I don't feel like buying the game again, especially considering its DRM. I would feel the same way if it had only Steam DRM.

Interesting to hear about the new version being developed by DotEmu (if I understood right). Kinda makes sense, and it'd also explain why this doesn't look like a complete remake, but a polished re-release.

I can't find any info of the changes and fixes they made. Did they for example fix the magic defence bug or did they just add achievements and other nonsense?

Wasn't that one fixed back in the original PC version? I wouldn't be surprised if they brought it back, for authentic console experience.

"Information" (or: the complete lack of it!) is the main problem of this re-release. This, the non-existent advertisement and the extremly restrictive/contradictory DRM (cloud saves + SecuROM with 3 activations = win!) makes me think that they don't really want to sell this game. Hell, I don't even know if this game is really limited to 3 activations. That's just something I've read somewhere in the TOS of the shop. The same goes for the "You have 30 days to download your game"-bs -.-

I agree. This release sucks and I'm not getting it. Good thing I still have the original for the PS.

Thanks for all the info everybody! I was fearing this would be a crappy port of the original PC version with DRM on top, but I didn't expect it would be even worse than that. I'll make sure to tell my friends to avoid that version at all costs.

I thought you were gonna say it wasn't a crappy with DRM and I was all "-_-", but then you turned the sentence around.

And yeah, this release saddens me. It's a shame that not much effort seems like it was really put into the parts of the product that actually matter. I'm still directing most of my ire at the character booster, though. Grr...