10 Obvious Video Game Remasters The Industry Is Ignoring
Soul Reaver with modern graphics would be incredible.
The rate of gaming remasters and wholesale remakes is certainly on the up and there are plenty of varied and completely valid responses to such a trend.
You might scoff in the face of nostalgia and want to developers to put their efforts into moving the industry forward and that makes total sense. Perhaps you can't get enough of that sweet, up-scaled stuff and who could blame you?
Whatever you may think of some of the more nostalgia grabbing attempts, there are certainly good reasons for bringing games back from the dead. Porting games forward and cleaning up the edges has been a part of the video game industry for a long time as a way to keep classic titles alive.
After all, video game preservation is a very important subject. How come one can find super-duper Blu-ray rereleases of the most average 1950s movies and yet we all pine for 20 year old classic games to be released from consoles that aren't manufactured anymore?
This list will focus on games that are right there, waiting and pleading for a remaster, and yet developers and publishers seem to be turning a blind eye to.
These beloved titles from a time gone by deserve the opportunity at a remaster. Won't somebody listen?
10. Bully
In 2006, Rockstar released Bully (known in the UK as “Canis Canim Edit”) to positive reviews. It was a bold proposition, syphoning the studio’s style into a really unique setting; taking GTA’s criminal empire into a morally grey school where players aimed to make peace with warring cliques and rise to the top of the school system.
Many reports point out that Rockstar had thought about Bully for a long time after its release, apparently working on a sequel years later for around eighteen months behind the scenes but nothing ever came of it. It seems strange that the fledgling franchise has therefore seemingly fallen into the role of being one of the studio’s most overlooked properties.
Outside of its non-Grand Theft Auto output, at the very least Red Dead Redemption got a sequel and 2011’s LA Noire got a remaster in recent years. In comparison, Bully got a port to mobile devices in 2016 but otherwise remains locked on the hardware of the era.
As one of the biggest studios in gaming today, it’s surprising that Rockstar doesn’t continue to push forward its previous successes, especially the refreshingly different tone of Bully. Even if it never gets a sequel, leaving Bully trapped in the past seems counterintuitive to a studio that sometimes needs to prove that it’s more than just GTA Online.