Thirith on 18/4/2012 at 12:01
It looks like these are good times for gaming nostalgia of all sorts, whether we're talking about Super Meat Boy's pixely masochism, The Legend of Grimrock's callback to Dungeon Master or Kickstarter projects such as the Wasteland sequel. These days it seems much more feasible for a small, talented team to develop and sell games that hearken back to the '80s and '90s.
What genres or specific games would you like to see being given this sort of treatment, and what modernisations (other than the obvious, e.g. higher resolutions) would you want them to receive?
Myself, I'd definitely like to see a modern Ultima Underworld-style game that captures the feel especially of Underworld 2. As a matter of fact, I would love to play a modern Ultima-style game; elements of this have been in various games over the years, but for me none of them have managed to get that combination of a living world, relatively non-linear gameplay, interesting characters and focus on other things than combat.
Malf on 18/4/2012 at 12:16
I know there's Wing Commander related things in the offing, but I'd really like to see a modern Freespace sequel from Volition. I'm not sure what the IP situation is there though. But we definitely need more space shooters.
After playing the Age of Decadence demo recently, I'm pretty confident we're going to have a damn good RPG on the way in the same vein as original Fallout. Even though it was only a demo, it was packed full of different approaches based on character class, skills and attributes. However, if the whole game is as packed full of choice as the demo, I can understand why it's taking so long, and we're not likely to see it any time soon.
It would also be nice to see modern updates to the Delphine adventure games pre-Flashback, specifically Future Wars and Operation Stealth
icemann on 18/4/2012 at 13:21
Along the same vein I would love to see a new Wingcommander game get done in the style of 3 & 4 (yep I mean with all the videos etc), as they had a sci-fi movie style to them that I just loved to death. I understand that that sortof style in games died a very long time ago (though used in the last few C&C and Red Alert games still).
A proper friggin Syndicate sequel would be a huge hope for me. Refuse to go anywhere near the recent game even with a 10 foot pole.
Beyond that I would love to see RTS games make a comeback in the style of C&C/Dark Reign/KKnD etc.
There has also been an extreme lack of JRPGs for the last 4-5 years, which for now is fine as there was so MANY released that I've got enough to keep myself busy for several years to come, but it would be great to see new good JRPGs released (eg a new .hack, Arc The Lad, Wild Arms etc). WRPGs are great and all, but its good to have some variety.
faetal on 18/4/2012 at 13:46
I still think that Elite has yet to be given a proper sequel. Frontier did a lot of things right, but ultimately too many wrong. The best tactic in Frontier was to buy a Panther Clipper, shield up and ram anything which was a threat, due to the manoeuvring and shooting being far too twitchy to satisfy fans of the original. Freelancer scratched some of the itch, but went too far in the other direction and felt a bit arcade-like. I still haven't managed to try out the X games yet mind, so perhaps the experience I'm looking for already exists...
Other than that, I used to have a C64 and would welcome games like Head over Heels, Skooldaze, Feud, Wizball and probably others.
Malf on 18/4/2012 at 13:55
Modern updates to Skooldaze and Back 2 Skool would be awesome, but I must admit that Bully scratches that itch quite well.
faetal on 18/4/2012 at 13:58
Seems like I ought to get Bully then. Is the PC version a god-awful port or is it playable?
Thirith on 18/4/2012 at 14:10
I've been trying to come up with C64 titles that I really miss playing and that could do with a modern update, but nothing comes to mind... or at least nothing that I don't think was done equally good or better on Amiga or later on PCs and/or that would benefit from modern tech. It's probably just me getting old, though.
I loved Wizball, and there's a fairly true-to-the-original freeware remake - in general there are quite a few free remakes of C64 classics.
Malf on 18/4/2012 at 14:15
Pretty playable faetal. I've never encountered any major problems with it.
PigLick on 18/4/2012 at 14:25
Seconded on the Elite thing. I really loved FFE, but the combat was total ass.
demagogue on 18/4/2012 at 14:37
I want to see a sequel or reboot of Hardwar (Elite on an alien planet), with the added feature that you can get out of your ship and walk around on the surface or in the buildings and it reverts to FPS style. That hybrid of trading, pirating, ship battles, 3D adventure, missions, and FPS would be beyond epic IMO. Ahhh I want someone to make that game!
Edit: For the record, the most progress is someone making an open source platform for the game in Ogre: (
http://www.hardwar.org/). Then fans can remake the game. They won't be able to polish it like a commercial studio though.
Let's see, in my C64 folder, I could see cool reboots for: Bard's Tale 2, Project Firestart, Exploding Fist 2, Hacker, Mercenary, Neuromancer, Paradroid, Parallax, Shogun, Taipan, The Last Ninja, and yes Wizball... A lot of those are kind of arcade or semi-arcade adventure games (some with relatively open & big worlds for the time), and there's something about that style that I really like.
