6 Classic Platform Games That Should Be Remastered
With the success of Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy, here are 6 more classic platformers that deserve to be remastered.
Nostalgia is a powerful marketing tool, as proven by Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy becoming the biggest single-platform game launch of the entire year (so far) – shipping millions of copies and selling out across the world.
While the difficulty can sometimes leave a sour taste in your mouth, this is a brilliant title, transporting any 20-something nerd like myself back to their childhood with lovingly upgraded visuals and audio.
So after the meteoric triumph of bringing Crash back, one question has been on the lips of many-a-gamer – what other colourful characters should be brought back from the dead? What platform games of old should receive the remaster treatment?
And while nobody has an official word on this (no matter what silly comment-baiting videos you see on Facebook), my life in the 90s was dominated by platformers – putting me in the best position to list six that are sure to be huge if they returned…
1. Croc
Flashback to 1997. I was a kid with simple aspirations, such as being able to do an ollie on my skateboard (I failed with painful consequences). For Christmas, my Mum bought me a copy of Croc: Legend of the Gobbos and the outside world quickly became an inconvenience that stopped me from gaming.
This free-roaming platformer is a gripping one from the outset – with a perfect blend of jump puzzles, enemy combat and atmospheric boss fights. Plus, that soundtrack is so chill, I’d love to hear it re-recorded.
If you’re going to have a list about bringing anthropomorphic animal characters back from the dead, you can’t forget Gex. I got onto this trilogy of games rather late on, playing Deep Cover Gecko first on my Playstation.
On the face of it, this seemed to be another run of the mill platformer. But the teen humour, the pop culture references, this slightly more adult presentation made for an enticingly cool game – which paired with great gameplay, a unique universe and uses of the word “ass,” to great effect.
This would take a bit more work to do, namely updating the references and humour, but it would be totally worth it!
Fire up the Megadrive (or Genesis for the American readers) and pop in a copy of Earthworm Jim. You’ll see just how utterly timeless the gameplay is and how the “attitude” 90s art style has come back into fashion – making this one of the perfect characters due for resurrection.
For the love of God, please don’t try and add a third dimension. Focus on improving the cell-shaded animation of the 2D graphics and keep the gameplay as razor sharp as it always was.
Bonus points if you remember this classic from the Megadrive (Genesis) era. This 2D side scroller was born out of a simple rhyming surname connection to create an amphibian antagonist.
The premise would be pretty simple – just upgrade the artwork, soundtrack and controls. Going back to it nowadays, I realised how clunky the directional pad was.
Yes, we already tried before to...limited success. But now's the time to ignore this past and move forward.
He came back once on Xbox, and he deserves another rebirth (a re-rebirth?). Conker’s Bad Fur Day was nothing short of a transformative middle finger to the crop of childish platformer games at the time.
It proved that adults wanted the same colourful adventures that kids did, and that those same kids really just wanted to hear curse words exclaimed by a squirrel. Give this and its Xbox sequel a remaster, you’ll have a good seller on your hands.
Of course this purple dragon had to make it onto the list… Alongside Crash Bandicoot, Spyro was another Playstation platforming icon that many adults look back on with nostalgic love.
This would be a no-brainer for Sony to commission a remaster of, with a couple of caveats from myself. With all the PS4’s processing power, take a look at making the sexiest fire effects possible and please make the transition between springing and stopping more immediate.
It made the controls kind of twitch and unwieldy at high speeds.