While we can’t wait to play the upcoming PS4 titles, we’ll always have a special place for the classics. Sony has spoiled us with some great and some not-so-great HD remakes, but there are still a few titles we wish we could see updated for this current gen. Welcome to our list of 8 Games We Want Remade In HD.
Final Fantasy VII
Our fans would murder us if we didn’t start the list with this. Final Fantasy VII is the quintessential Final Fantasy classic, and the one fans claim the most for a remake. While revolutionary at the time, it was the franchise’s first foray into the realm of 3d, and it shows. The polygon characters look really dated, and the graphics are really rough, yet behind this hides a timeless classic that people are still enjoying nowadays. Square has claimed that they’d only go back to VII if they felt they had surpassed it, but that might take a while… we’re basically speaking of one of the greatest and most beloved titles of all time.
GTA 3, GTA:Vice City And GTA: San Andreas
We have to thank the PC modding community for giving us glimpses of what the GTA series (The PS2 titles, at least) could look like in HD. Let’s face it, while GTA4 was great and GTA5 is looking like it’ll be fantastic, there’s just something about these old titles that made them incredible. The graphics still look passable, so just a few adjustments in the screen ratio, trophy support and new textures would be all it takes to get us to buy these classics again. And damn, CJ was the greatest main character ever.
Half-Life
The PC modding community did quite a number with Black Mesa, a recreation of the original Half-Life with the Half-Life 2 engine. We need (keyword: need) this (or something like this) on PS3. After how buggy and inferior the PS3 version of the Orange Box turned out to be when compared to the other platforms, even a port of the Black Mesa mod would correct everything. Still, we cannot get mad at Valve, who provided us a fantastic version of Portal 2 for PS3, and even gave us a free PC copy of the game with our purchase. We love those guys.
Day of the Tentacle / Maniac Mansion
The great success that was Telltale’s The Walking Dead series made us ask why aren’t there more point-n-click games out on the PS3. And then we realized that what we really wanted, more than anything is reliving Bernard, Laverne and Hoagie’s time-traveling adventure in HD graphics. The original graphics were beautiful, cartoonish and great for their time, but still due for an update (we’re talking of a really early 90’s game, after all!). It’s not like we’re asking for 3d models here, but just HD sprites like the PSP remake of Final Fantasy IV would be a dream come true.
Crash Bandicoot
Yes, we know, there are issues with the character’s copyrights and bureaucracy and money are preventing us from getting new Crash titles, but we still miss him. Crash was to the PlayStation what Mario was to Nintendo, and we’d love to relive his classic games on our modern platforms. It was a great, quirky game and one of the first and few that got 3d platforming “right”. It’s just that everything about this game felt great…
Silent Hill
Seriously, Konami, listen to us! They teased us releasing an HD collection of Silent Hill that didn’t include SH1 nor SH4, games just as good as the two they did include, but in the particular case of SH1, an essential piece to the over-all plot of the series! We get it, the models and graphics of the PSX can’t be as easily upgraded as the PS2 games were, but still, Harry’s story is one that deserves to be updated and told again. From the soundtrack to the feeling of isolation this game created, everything was just so memorable we can’t but just keep talking about it years after its original release, back in ’99.
Xenogears
We all know how Xenogears was criminally under-rated, its second disc rushed, and how it suffered a really poor localization. That didn’t prevent it from becoming one of “those” PSOne JRPGs that people remember as one of the timeless classics. And the fact that there were way more chapters planned into the story (at the end of the game, it’s implied that it was just the “fifth episode” of a series), it just makes us think there was so much untapped potential…
Despite this, Xenogears stands on its own as a unique, odd and at times clunky, but marvelous title. If we could just fix the “clunky” part of it, we’d be probably in front of one of the greatest games of all time.
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