20 LAZIEST Video Game Re-Releases They Thought You'd Buy

11. Star Wars Episode I Racer (2020)

To this day, Star Wars Episode I Racer is still not just the best podracing game, but the best Star Wars racing game out there. Playing as Anakin Skywalker, Sebulba, Ben Quadinaros, Gasgano and every other alien you see on the starting line of the Boonta Eve Classic in Phantom Menace, you have the chance to go far beyond Tattooine, competing in the kind of races Qui-Gon references in the film, getting up close and personal in high-speed events that require skill, concentration and Jedi-like reflexes.

For a game released in 1999, especially one by the notoriously uneven developer LucasArts, this was a doozy, giving PC gamers the ride of their lives for years, with ports for the Nintendo 64 Dreamcast and Game Boy Color never quite comparing but at least holding their own enough to become home gaming classics. And so, twenty years on, a re-release was warmly welcomed.

To give the game its due, there were no wild promises made prior to the release of the HD version, so we shouldn’t have been too surprised when it arrived on the Switch, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in 2020 with basically no changes. The graphics were sharper, the textures rounded and polished, but that was it. And yet, despite this re-release being simple and lazy, so many of us bought Episode I Racer again just so we could hit the nostalgia button without reverting to Windows 98.