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Ten games that deserve to be remade (page 2)
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If you are the type that fell in love with Neverwinter Nights and loved the ability to create your own modules or just download modules made by other people, the Adventure Construction Set is the pinnacle of what you could want in a game. Released way back in 1985 by Electronic Arts, not only could you create your own adventures in ACS -- including fantasy, space and spy themes, you could also tell it to create you a completely random adventure.
Think of Neverwinter Nights as a d20 construction set rather than an AD&D construction set, with the base game including light modules in various themes from fantasy to science fiction in order to give the mod community access to the graphics needed to create any type of adventure, even altering the basic rules of the game. This is something that I suggested on the Neverwinter Nights 2 forums when it was still in development -- sadly, the community manager quickly locked the topic, which showed me they were more for milking the cash cow than taking the next step.
Still, if there were a Neverwinter Nights 3, I'd want it to go in that direction. And, perhaps if Bioware took the helm again, it would.
4. Descent
Descent took the first person shooter, added a space ship, and put it into cavernous levels where you sped around in six different directions (north, south, east, west, up and down) and blasted anything that got in your way. While it never had quite the success as games like Doom -- possibly because it wasn't as easy to pick up and play using just a keyboard as some of the other shooters -- it did have a very strong and loyal community.
An interesting and unique concept, it is one that would transfer quite nicely to today's consoles and the sophistication of multiplayer modes found in today's games.
3. Magic Carpet
In the 90's, Bullfrog was the development company known for innovative games. They redefined the god game with Populous, and they taught us how fun it was to be bad with Dungeon Keeper, but of all of them, Magic Carpet was perhaps the most innovative. Flying around on a magic carpet, you collected mana and different spells while doing battle with creatures and other spellcasters.
One of the coolest concepts of Magic Carpet was the ability to change the landscape of the game. Not only could you create your own castle, but you could have a real effect on the world by using spells like crater, volcano and earthquake to change the terrain.
The combination of fantasy spell casting, castle building and battling it out against other wizards created a wonderful game unlike any I've seen since, and a game that would no doubt become an instant hit if any game developer was bright enough to resserect it from the video game graveyard.
We seem to get a new version of Civilization every few years, and Stardock's Galactic Civilizations has taken over for the Master of Orion series, but the game development community has struggled in its attempts to bring us a great fantasy 4X strategy game. We've had some pretty good ones -- Heroes of Might and Magic and Age of Wonders comes to mind -- but none of them that have quite captured Master of Magic.
The beauty of Master of Magic was that it took some of the time-tested elements of 4X strategy games and combined it with a character creation system that allowed for many different tactics to be used in the conquest of Arcanus and Myrror. In terms of how many different ways you could go about winning the game, no other strategy game has come close to matching Master of Magic.
Luckily, there is some hope. Stardock is working on a new strategy game, Element: War of Magic, that very well could be the spiritual successor to Master of Magic. But, until it proves itself, we'll just have to hope.
1. AutoDuel
Autoduel was based on the Car Wars vehicle combat game. For those unfamiliar with Car Wars, it was similar to AD&D with cars instead of characters and with less emphasis on role-playing and more emphasis on blowing up the other guy. Autoduel, released in 1985, took this concept and brought it to the computer.
In many ways similar to living inside of the Road Warrior, you started out with a compact car with little in the way of weapons, and took missions or fought duels in order to get the cash needed to upgrade your vehicle. The missions were really cool because they entailed driving around and getting in fights with roving gangs of cars and either blasting them into dust or just plain outrunning them to your destination.
You could think of it as taking Twisted Metal, creating an entire world, filling it with missions and allowing the player to start with a junkyard car with just a machine gun mounted on the hood and slowly build up until they had an ice cream truck armed to the teeth.
It is definitely a game worthy of being remade.
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