I loved the original Homeworld, but I was never, how do you say, "good" at it. So you can imagine that when I sat down to play the Homeworld Remastered Collection , I was pretty scared of making a fool out of myself, given that over a decade has passed since I last played it, poorly, on the best gaming PC a broke college student could afford. Thankfully, the folks I was meeting with anticipated this, and had a map all set with a large fleet for me to bound-box, and send into the fray - and just like that, with a single right click, the fireworks began.

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Homeworld's massive, three-dimensional space brawls were more or less the first of their kind, but very few games have recaptured that sense of scale. With this shiny new coat of paint, there are few, if any space-based RTS games that offer such a spectacle. Seeing the remastered version right next the classic version (which is also included in the Homeworld Remastered Collection) was beyond night-and-day different, to the extent that someone seeing Remastered for the first time would fully assume they were looking at a recently developed game.Don't take that to mean that returning fans will find it unrecognizable though. Gearbox consulted with members of Homeworld's original developer, Relic, to assist with the remaster, ensuring that the spirit of the original would be maintained. It totally paid off too. Homeworld's ships looked futuristic and functionally rugged all at once, and those traits are preserved beautifully.My session ended, unsurprisingly, with my entire fleet decimated. That single right click I made? The enemy mothership. I wasn't even paying attention honestly, I was just doing what I always used to back when Homeworld first came out: picking out individual ships, focusing in on them to admire all their little details, and watching happily as they streaked toward a beautiful, fiery death. Thanks to how good the Homeworld Remastered Collection looks, I can happily ogle as if it were 1999.

Vincent Ingenito is IGN's foremost fighting game nerd. F ollow him on Twitter and argue with everything he says about them.