Please Reboot Me

For better or worse, developers and publishers are constantly looking through their back catalogues in search of franchises to reinvent; the upcoming Syndicate and X-COM titles are prime examples, along with countless others throughout gaming history.

Accepting the recycling of ideas and brands as inevitable, we're going down our finest nostalgia glasses and look at some games from the golden decade of gaming, the '90s, that we wouldn't mind getting a 21st century revamp:

 

Road Rash

Motorcycle games have rarely been as successful as their four-wheeled counterparts; the unfortunate tendency for bicycle/rider separation can be particularly frustrating for many players. As always, there is one major exception to every rule, and this one left tyres marks and blood stains in its wake. Road Rash took illegal street racing and armed it with a variety of weaponry, such as clubs and chains; the simple aim, win at all costs, through fair means or foul.

Any remake would have to stick with the long, winding American highways formula of the originals; whilst the temptation would be there to include built-up urban areas with multiple routes, Road Rash was always about the speed, rather than tight intricate cornering. And if someone decides to implement a sidecar co-op mode, how could EA possibly not be onto a winner?

 

Earthworm Jim

Back in the days before that pesky third-dimension infiltrated our games, everyone used to love a good side-scrolling platformer. Whilst Mario and Sonic fought it out for the top spot, most gamers would agree that the bronze medal went to an invertebrate in a space suit who went by the name of Jim. Brilliant humour permeated the entire game and perfectly complimented the balanced gameplay, complete with the ability to use Jim as a whip, rope swing or helicopter.

A less than exceptional 3D version was released for the PC and N64 some time back, and there had been rumours, quickly disproved, suggesting a fourth game was in development. A HD re-release of the original is available on XBLA/PSN, but there's always room for a fresh title if they can match the standards of the original.

 

Desert Strike

Thrusting the player into a fully-fledged mini warzone, Desert Strike (and sequels Jungle, Urban, Soviet and Nuclear Strike) shunned the densely packed, bullet heavy approach of shoot 'em ups of the time, preferring to assign the player a series of objectives and leave them to decide which order to approach them.

Some of the later games suffered as a result of trying to included too many different vehicles, rather than focusing on the core helicopter gameplay, and the switch from isometric view to 3D on the PlayStation/Saturn for Soviet strike was hampered by a slightly limited palette. A current generation follow-up is long overdue, even resulting us getting a little over-excited when the news kept talking about the recent Teacher Strike.

 

X-Wing/TIE Fighter/Wing Commander

Let's be frank here; the market is severely in need of some fresh space combat action. The X-Universe games do a brilliant job of filling the galactic sandbox void left by Elite (sadly Elite 4 remains as elusive as the Higgs boson), but the tightly structured mission format of the combat driven titles has yet to produce a new champion over the recent years.

Whilst there have been numerous space combat games in the intervening years, none of them have been quite as engaging. The X-Wing/TIE Fighter games built on the existing Star Wars franchise, allowing fans to experience a taste of what life might have been like for a certain blond haired Jedi; whilst the writers of Wing Commander had to start from scratch, but still managed to deliver a compelling narrative to match the well executed gameplay. In retrospect, anyone hoping to release the next big space combat game should take note - stick a picture of Mark Hamill on the box and we're almost guaranteed to rush out and buy it.

 

 

Any walk down Memory Lane is inevitably going to result in encountering the odd pothole, as such, there are some games we're glad to see the backs of:

 

Rise of the Robots

In one of gaming's earliest examples of 'style over substance', developers Mirage crammed the cartridges/floppy discs of Rise of the Robots with some of the most incredible CGI characters seen on a home computer/console at the time; unfortunately they appeared to run out of room to include the gameplay.

Key features of note included there only being a single attack button, being unable to jump over an opponent when trapped against a wall, and player one having the grand sum of one character available to choose from for both single or multiplayer games.

Somehow a sequel was released, which did resolve some of the issues, but was ultimately just as unsuccessful as its predecessor.

 

Battlecruiser 3000AD

Despite our previous admission of the desire to see more space combat on our screens again, we'd prefer it not to be in the form of the Battlecruiser franchise. Battlecruiser 3000AD (and to a lesser extent its sequels) took the vast sandbox approach of Elite and combined it with the hardcore sim aspects of Flight Simulator, to create a buggy, unfriendly, unintuitive mess of a 'game'.

The poor reception on release was further compounded by the sheer amount of hype generated by the game's creator, Derek Smart; debate still rages as to whether Smart's promotion efforts beat John Romero's statement of intent to "make you his bitch" for the title of biggest undelivered promise in gaming history.

 

 

So, what games are you hoping will make a comeback? And which do wish will stay buried for the rest of eternity?