Remasters and remakes have a reputation for being lazy cash grabs. While this may be true of many of them, there have been more good ones than you might think.
Demon’s Souls Remastered, the Spyro Reignited Trilogy, the Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy, Destroy All Humans Remastered, Mafia: Definitive Edition (which is technically a remake), and others do exactly what remasters are supposed to do–make old games playable for new audiences and update them to modern standards while retaining the magic of the originals.
So here’s a question: if you could name old games you’d like to see remastered, and you could somehow know they’d be done well, which one would you name? I’m talking about games made over ten years ago, not games like Skyrim, GTA V, or The Last of Us, which are too recent to receive any notable benefit from remastering.
I asked myself this question and dashed out my top 5 below. Have a look and see what you think.
1
TimeSplitters 2 + TimeSplitters: Future Perfect
TimeSplitters 2 and Future Perfect are two of the most enjoyable games you’ll ever play. You play as Cortez, a man from the future who must travel through time to fight a time-travelling race of aliens called the Splitters (or Spli’as, as I say in my Geordie accent).
TimeSplitters 2’s story is simple. Each level tasks you with collecting a crystal and then jumping into a portal to the next area. There’s very little story to speak of. Future Perfect, however, raises the production value with well-directed cutscenes, companions, the funniest and most quotable dialogue you’ll find in any shooter, and a more complex and character-driven story.
The TimeSplitters games have a lot of character, both in terms of their stylishness (which is colourful and somewhat cartoonish and draws inspiration from iconic locations and periods throughout history) and the sheer number of actual characters each game has. TimeSplitters 2 has 126 playable characters, while Future Perfect has 150. Some of these characters are admittedly variations of one another, but despite this there is a considerable amount of diversity in the character roster: robots, henchmen, zombies, mutants, soldiers, a dinosaur, a gingerbread man, a monkey, and other characters that are so random and weird I don’t know how to describe them. With how seriously modern shooters take themselves, the world needs the weirdness of TimeSplitters to make a comeback.
Being a game about time travel, TimeSplitters has a huge variety of maps and weapons. The TimeSplitters games are like a mix-and-match of various locations and times in the form of a Goldeneye-esque shooter.
The game modes are varied too. There’s the usual deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture the thingy, etc. But there are also more unusual modes you won’t find in any other shooter; modes like Shrink, Vampire, Monkey Assistant, and Flame Tag.
Virus was a favourite among my friends and me. There’s something stupidly funny but also suspenseful about everyone in a match being set on fire one by one, making it increasingly difficult to find safety and fend off the flaming, screaming lemmings the other players have turned into.
Sticking with you long after you leave the game are the soundtracks to which each level and multiplayer map gets treated. These tracks get your heart pumping and raise the tempo of the fighting to get you in an eager mood for some senseless carnage. The tracks are so upbeat and energetic that each match becomes like a disco rave – except with guns, rockets, and monkeys. The best kind of rave.
In addition to the story modes (which can be played in co-op) and the multiplayer (with all their maps, modes, and characters), there are also a bunch of challenge modes. These challenges range from easy to insanely hard, from standard deathmatches and survival modes to window smashing and robot cat racing.
New characters are unlocked as rewards depending on how well you do. The number of unlockable characters and how generally enjoyable the challenges and story mode (through which you also unlock characters) are, TimeSplitters 2 and Future Perfect are ideal for completionists who actually want to have fun doing their ‘completioning’.
Each game also comes with a map maker. Not map editors such as what Halo 3 had – actual unadulterated build-it-yourself map makers. The map-making tools were somewhat limited in how they could make the maps look; they had to be made of modules. The decorative tools were limited to pre-made module aesthetics, lighting changes, and basic cosmetic options. The amount of freedom and creativity the map maker tools allowed, though – placing corridors, rooms, stairwells, adding weapons, power-ups, spawn points, cameras, machine gun emplacements, and so much else – was and still is unparalleled in the FPS genre.
TimeSplitters 2 and Future Perfect are two of the best shooters ever made. It’s a tragedy that Free Radical went bankrupt after the disastrous release of Haze, and it’s sad to see how little they’re mentioned in conversations about games these days.
The good news is that the TimeSplitters IP has been bought by Deep Silver Studios, and they are now working on the long-awaited TimeSplitters 4.
Would it not be a great idea to remaster the two best TimeSplitters games so that this fantastic series may be introduced to a new generation of gamers and reintroduced to the old?
(Note: A unofficial remaster for the TimeSplitters series called TimeSplitters Rewind has been in development for a while, but since it’s the project of a team of modders, I’m including it here anyway. No list of most-wanted remasters would feel complete to me without it.)
2
Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction
Mercenaries is an open-world sandbox game set in North Korea during an alternate reality Korean war. After a coup overthrows the North Korean government, the region devolves into a maelstrom of fighting between the UN, China, the Russian Mafia, South Korea, and the North Korean military.
You play as one of three Mercenaries sent in to kill or capture General Song (the guy who did the coup, as mentioned earlier) and important North Korean figures. The bounties are organised into the Deck of 52, an ingeniously arranged hierarchy of cards representing the bounties. The most wanted few reside at the top and the least wanted many reside at the bottom, setting your expectations for how difficult certain members will be to capture or kill and how big the reward will be for doing so.
The tagline sells this world as a playground of destruction, and it delivers on that promise with flying colours. Every building is destructible – an impressive and novel feat for a PS2 game. The amount of vehicles that explode during regular gameplay, every one of which you can hijack and drive, is on the level of a 90s action movie. The game actively encourages you to be as destructive as possible by rewarding the destruction of enemy vehicles and property with what may be the most satisfying money-ticking sound effect in gaming.
The most powerful and destructive weapons in your arsenal are airstrikes. Using the money you earn completing objectives, destroying enemy vehicles, and collecting cases of cash, you can buy up to sixteen types of airstrikes: artillery barrages, surgical strikes, carpet bombs, and gunship supports, to name a few. Even all these years later (the game was released on the PS2), these air strikes are some of the most beautifully destructive weapons you can wield in any open-world game.
You can also call in various vehicles, weapons, ammunition, and other supplies. Each faction has several vehicles, including cars, trucks, APCs, tanks, and helicopters. You can use these vehicles to disguise yourself as a member of different factions and to call members of that faction to hop in with you and aid you in firefights with other factions.
It’s hard to talk about Mercenaries without mentioning the Just Cause series. After EA shut Pandemic down, the Just Cause series rose to dominate the military explosion-fest sandbox genre practically unopposed. Despite a clear advance in technological capabilities, however, the Just Cause series never significantly improved over what Mercenaries established. In fact, I’d argue the Just Cause games are flat-out inferior to Mercenaries despite Mercenaries being the founding game of the genre.
My main issue with the Just Cause series is the tone; it’s just too over-the-top wacky for many people, including myself, to engage with. Mercenaries has a comedic tone too, but it’s more subtle; the comedy is limited to a few deadpan one-liners and the general absurdity of the sheer amount of chaos and destruction on display. In its quiet moments, of which there are plenty, Mercenaries’ atmosphere is eerily gloomy. A thick choking fog hangs over the land, the towns are bombed and impoverished, and the colour palate is stained with washed-out browns and greens. Mercenaries’ gloomy aesthetic goes a long way in grounding the game in a sense of seriousness about the war, giving your actions more moral weight than if everything had been played as a joke, as in the Just Cause series.
Considering the genre of destruction-focused sandbox games has long been monopolised by the Just Cause series, it’s about time the game that founded this genre made a triumphant return and reminded everyone how much fun blowing things up can be.
3
Vampire: the Masquerade – Bloodlines
Bloodlines is a roleplaying game set in the seedy vampire underworld of Los Angeles. You play as a vampire belonging to one of thirteen clans, each with a different look, stats, abilities, and contextual dialogue responses from other characters.
Roleplaying games are about choice, and Bloodlines gives you a lot of it. Quests can be done in many different ways. Relationships with characters can be affected by the clan you choose. Many dialogue options are unlocked depending on what skills you spec into. Bloodlines was released in 2002, yet somehow it remains one of the most reactive and player-driven roleplaying games ever made.
Bloodlines also drips with personality. The art style is moody yet colourful; the characters are slightly cartoonish in appearance to accentuate their features in support of their eccentric personalities. The dialogue is witty, authentic, and often hilarious, and the facial animation tech was way ahead of its time.
The biggest benefits of a remaster would be bug fixes and a rework of the combat system. When Bloodlines was released, the game was in an abysmal state. Without the unofficial patch, it’s practically unplayable. The combat also needs fixing. It’s not frustrating or overly difficult – it’s just jank to high hell. The jankiness can be fun at times, but the combat does not match the quality of the game’s other aspects.
With Bloodlines 2 coming out at some point (assuming it survives its seemingly endless stay in development hell), a remaster of this cult classic would be well-timed to get people into the series before they play Bloodlines 2 or, if Bloodlines 2 sucks, then a remastered Bloodlines 1 would be the perfect way to wash the taste of bad blood from people’s mouths.
4
The Simpsons: Hit and Run
Hit and Run is probably the greatest GTA clone ever made.
Playing as members of the Simpsons family (and also Apu because why not), you drive and run around a bunch of semi-open world levels that collectively comprise the most extensive and detailed rendition of Springfield in gaming. Each world is brimming with gags, references, characters, unlockable vehicles, costumes, and collectables.
The characters are always saying something funny, and the missions are constantly pushing the limits of credulity with how much vehicular destruction the people of Springfield are willing to endorse to solve their petty problems.
A remastered version of this game wouldn’t look much different from the original. The graphics just need a little polishing, and the controls are still as smooth as they were back in the day.
I mainly want a remastered version to make the game easier to access and reintroduce it to a generation of gamers who may not have heard of it before.
I also want them to experience the hell that is the final three missions. If I had to suffer that as a kid, everyone should!
5
GTA 3D Trilogy and Liberty/Vice City Stories
Rockstar already attempted a remaster of the GTA 3D trilogy, but as you probably know, it was a bug-ridden, weird-looking, unfinished mess. A cash grab, one of the most blatant we’ve seen in a while.
A proper remaster of this trilogy should keep the art style of the original games intact. It should fix the bugs in the original games, not add more. A few updates to the gameplay (such as keeping the weapon wheel from the definitive edition) are all a remaster needs.
It would also be great to see Liberty City and Vice City Stories get included in the remastered collection or else in a collection of their own. As PS2 and PSP exclusives, many people cannot play these games today. A port to PC and modern consoles would be appreciated, but a remastered collection alongside a proper remastering of the 3D trilogy would be excellent.
It would also be interesting to see GTA 3 and Vice City partially remade. Both games had to cut much content before their releases to meet deadlines. GTA 3 barely uses the third island, and Vice City is missing an entire planned section of its map. Vice City was initially supposed to include a place called Gator Keys, a chain of islands, possibly including a swamp, based on an actual location in Florida. The GTA community would go into meltdown if Vice City was remade to include such a vast piece of cut content.
If only Grove Street Games were given the funding, time, and talent they needed to do this, then the Definitive Edition would indeed be worthy of its name.
Sadly, like Tommy and Claude in head-high water, I’m not holding my breath.
End of List
While it’s possible (even likely) that none of these remasters will happen, I highly recommend you play the original versions of each game if you can.
You can get The Simpsons: Hit and Run for free online for PC. The GTA 3D trilogy has been put back on Steam after backlash against Rockstar’s decision to remove them in the first place. Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines is very cheap on Steam (but be sure to download the unofficial patch!)
Unfortunately, you cannot play the TimeSplitters games, City Stories games, and Mercenaries without an old console. If you don’t have a PS2 or know how to emulate console games on PC (which I don’t), you either need to shell out a lot of money for one or hope a remaster will one day come.
I thought of making an honourable mention list at the end, but I think I’ll save them for a future list. There are a lot of old games out there that don’t deserve to be lost to the great eraser of time.
Now that I’ve given my list, what games do you think deserve to be remastered? Did I miss any obvious ones?