Ever since Nintendo upgraded from its original 8-bit look to a “Super” 16-bit, we’ve been regularly fed the line that the most important part of a game is its pixelated prettiness. Ironically, Nintendo would go on to disprove this theory with its DS and Wii, both of which lag behind in their competitors in the graphics department but nonetheless pretty much print money entirely based on their fun factor.

Now the indie scene, who tend to use lower-grade graphics out of sheer necessity, are seeing how far they can take this with the faux-retro Demakes movement.

A demake is essentially rolling back modern games to see how they would work on previous generation of console. Sometimes, it’s just recreating screenshots—the pixel art forum Way of the Pixel held a contest last year to demake titles back to the original Gameboy. The results are rather awesome, especially the recreations of Bioshock and Okami.

But indie gaming site TIGsource stepped it up a notch with their current competition. Though entries stopped being accepted at the end of August—there were 68, total—voting for the winner goes until Oct 3.

Rather than just making images, these guys actually recreated games that play on old system emulator—but because of copyright issues, they have non-infringe-y names like Heroes in Guitar Land (which is heroically hard) or Assasin’s Creed demake Contract Killer's Ideology.

Now this is all well and cool, but it does reveal that to a degree the graphics and processing power do matter—Shadow of the Colossus just doesn’t have the same emotional resonance on the TRS-80 Model III as it did on the PS2 and Portal sure as heck isn’t as neat as an Atari 2600 game.

Oh, sure, these are freaking cool for a few hours of play—and kudos to the techies-with-time-on-their-hands who built 'em. But at the end of the level, demakes are more funny than, y'know, fun.