One of the more memorable games of the past decade or so was Tomb Raider way back in the PlayStation / Saturn days of 1996. It was one of the first games to feature a strong female lead character (which, in addition to my tabletop RPG background, made me willing to play female characters when MMORPG’s came around) but also had some mind-wracking puzzles, some fun action sequences, and some fantastic locations, some of which meant climbing to dizzying heights. I still remember both myself and my then-wife getting a bit queasy watching my Lara climb and climb and climb then take a look around. Overall a very memorable experience that I’ve always cherished.
In 2006 Eidos released Tomb Raider Anniversary which was a re-imagining of the original game, in a similar vein to how Tim Burton re-imagined the Planet of the Apes and Sleepy Hollow stories. In Tomb Raider’s case, there was enough of the “old and busted” there to make me remember some of those Good Ol’ Days but it also had that re-imagined layer of “new hotness” that not only added the obvious graphical improvements of the Legends engine but also the new moves Lara has learned in the decade since her first appearance, which in turn meant the Anniversary game required all new content for her to use those moves.
Moving from the 5th generation consoles (PS1 and Saturn) to the 7th generation (Xbox 360) was a huge leap in technology, and I will concede that it’s a potential issue for my current wish list for Anniversary Editions of two games (actually, two series, each containing two games) that are less than ten years old. Only a single console generation has passed in that time and in the PC the only major difference would be that DX10/DX11 is around, as well as wide-screen and higher resolution displays being commonplace.
First, as much as I tend to bash the Halo games, I did sit down recently and complete the single-player campaigns (normal difficulty only) of both Halo 3: ODST and Halo Wars. I wouldn’t mind seeing the original two games get an Anniversary treatment, even if they both just used the existing Halo 3 engine. Update the graphics and textures, fix any glaring issues, fix any story and gameplay elements and we’re good to go. Fixing some of the story elements (Halo 2 in particular felt like the campaign wasn’t quite finished in favor of the multiplayer game) would be enough of a “re-imagining” for me.
Second, I’d love to see a Knights of the Old Republic (1 and 2) Anniversary Edition. This could be major! Not only include all the fixes and additional locations that were added after the fact but a “re-imagining” could also fix one of the most common criticisms of the original game: that it was a LOTRO clone, ie. way too much time wasted traveling back and forth. Turbine has been actively revamping (or “re-imagining”) the low-levels zones in LOTRO and working their way up to mid- and high-level zones eventually, making the leveling and quest story curve flow more naturally as well as eliminating a good deal of the traveling. BioWare has come a long way in the six years since KOTOR; I see no reason why a re-imagined game with modern tech, graphics and sound wouldn’t be equally successful, if not moreso, plus the original would still be around for those whiny purists. Sound would be a huge benefit to an update as well; I’d read Jeremy Soule saying how he had to construct the soundtrack to “fool” players into thinking there was a full orchestra playing the soundtrack because at the time, state of the art tech was 8mbps MIDI. Now everything’s on DVD and Blu-Ray, if not outright installed to a hard drive, so he could get a full orchestra to play his soundtrack so players could finally hear it the way it was intended to be heard.
Do you guys have favorite games you’d like to see updated? Would you rather a faithful remake, simply with newer eye candy, or would you rather enjoy a re-imagining so you could not only still remember the original fondly but also have a new experience at the same time?
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