Nostalgia is a powerful force. It dominates the film industry, and now reboot games like Tomb Raider and Bionic Commando are beginning to appear. The graveyard of our industry's history is full of things best left decomposed, but here are five dead I.P.s that could make a triumphant return to the realm of the living.
Featuring one of gaming's most charismatic protagonists: Yellow Ant.
Look: Cities are boring. Ants are where it's at. SimAnt featured an unique simulation experience wherein players controlled the destiny of an ant empire through the heroic efforts of a yellow ant. By virtue of its unnatural color, Yellow Ant could make obnoxious whistling sounds and summon vast swarms of arthropods to collect food, fight spiders, and commit glorious genocide against the reds! It was a game made for pro-McCarthy Entomologists!
In modern times, the entertainment value of this classic would never hop the bar set by today's IPs. But there is plenty of room for innovation here. Imagine, if you will, trading the top-down view for a GoW-style, over-the-thorax third-person look at life in your backyard. Envision the thrill of charging a swarm of red ants, or wasps, or grasshoppers with a brigade of your fellow mandibled killers! Part God of War battler, part RTS, part Honey I Shrunk the Kids, and part Animal Planet! YES! This game would have it all!
Next! Let's talk racing! One of the most creative racing games to come out of the PSX generation was the Jet Moto IP. They were basically Star Wars speeder bikes with a motocross feel. Their ability to hover graced the game with a flexibility of terrain generally not available to other racers. Ocean, broken highway, and sandy beach could all be found on one track! The sense of speed was excellent, and the other innovation of grappling towers, large poles you could hook a laser wire to in order to whip-lash yourself around tight turns, made this game a real blast.
Today, it just isn't enough to race. You need to shoot things, blow up parts of the track, or give the other driver cancer in order to capture the player's attention. So you need something along those lines. Personally, I like the idea of giving one thumb stick over to downward thrust, thus controlling your altitude over the track. This could be manipulated to maximize a run, avoid hazards, and potentially attack other players. Throw in machine guns, tricks, and the ability to pull people off their bikes with your grappler device, and you have yourself a real modern racer.
Who doesn't remember Road Rash? The iconic motorcycle racing game where most races ended up being a desperate battle for survival. Could you make it to the end of the race without your motorcycle finally exploding from all the wrecks? Would you crash within reach of the rather short arm of the law, and be wearing a pin-stripe flag instead of zooming under a checkered one? Could you avoid coming in last place after your 120kph crash sent you flying 2.5km from your motorcycle, while other racers mercilessly attempt to run you down as you huff it back?
Unlike Jet Moto, Road Rash has everything it needs to make a glorious return to modern gaming. It already has combat! Punch a dude off his bike! Steal his 2×4 and then knock him off his bike! Give him an encouraging kick into an oncoming Ford Taurus (PSX version)! It's all game, baby! Hell, six-year-olds were taking out police officers in this series years before GTA ever hit the shelves!
All we need is some great graphics, you know, something like the Burnout series. Add in a multiplayer system like Blur but with the biker bar ambiance of the PSX Road Rash. A dash of character, perhaps some storyline, bike and rider customization. Boom. You have a best-selling game ready to roll! (Or combine with Jet Moto?)
Shouting men and bulging veins. Like a good friday night.
First person, third person, the shooting genre is saturated. It's ready for a reboot of this cult classic squad-er! You control a squad of four soldiers and attempt to kill the other team by riddling them with bullets and turning them to piles of ash. The game plays out like NBA Jam in the way you can switch characters to control, and all you can really do is shoot.. You have one attack, and you try to kill someone with it while navigating an obstacle heavy battlefield. It had charm! It had fun! And it had co-op!
Easily rebooted as a Live Arcade release, this game just need a graphics overhaul and a few new tweaks to the gameplay. Perhaps a few more classes, some airstrikes or something, give each class three abilities (offense, defense, and utility,) and make each teammate playable by a human over the internet. Boom, you have a multiplayer sensation just waiting to happen!
Man, oh, man! This was the single most interesting beat-em-up to ever grace the classic consoles. You could customize your fighter with a variety of body parts, determining your special attacks, abilities, and statistics. Not only that, but you could ruthlessly dismember enemies at any time during the game. Like that guy's saw blade hand? Rip it off and put it on! Need some jumping legs to cross the giant chasm that makes you waste like a billion lives in level 1-1? You know, the blatant design flaw that otherwise ruins an amazing game right at the start? Well, you might be able to steal them, but the chasm is still AS BIG AS THE DAMN SCREEN so you won't ever make it before you die in just the right way to spawn on the other side!
Anyway, despite the memories of a single level that stuck with me for 14 years, the game is ready for a serious rehash. You will definitely need some better level design, but I don't think you can stray from the side-scrolling gameplay without ruining the spirit of the game you are trying to remake. Definitely want to upgrade the graphics, add more selection to the robot parts, and add combos and perhaps exp. points to upgrade your cyborg systems to give it the Castle Crashers flair that was so successful. The you'll have an arcade game that will sell well to people with roommates.