News that a remake of the near decade old Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is to be bundled in with a special edition of the next, space-bound chapter in the series, Infinite Warfare both pleases and worries us in equal measure.
Is Infinite Warfare so crap that publisher Actvision feels the need to strap on the first (and alarmingly still the best) game in the current run just to bolster sales? Or is it giving fans what they want - a way to play classic Call of Duty without having to trade in a lorry load of old copies of FIFA in order to shave a few pence off a dusty Xbox 360 in CEX's shop window? I guess we'll find out in November.
For now, however, the Call of Duty news got us thinking: What other games would we like to see updated, up-scaled and altogether upgraded on PS4 and Xbox One? As it turns out, quite a few, namely because we're charitable folk who love the idea of parting with £50 for an old game we already paid out for a few years ago.
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If you're confused, it's a bit like those yearly updates of the original Star Wars movies that we happily prised open our wallets for on DVD again and again, simply because George Lucas had CGIed some extra aliens and a burning effigy of Jar Jar Binks into the background.
Credit: Ubisoft
Assassin's Creed
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Far be it from us to put down one of the most popular gaming IPs on the planet, but we get the impression Ubisoft has become a little too reliant on yearly Assassin's Creed releases to help balance its books.
Since the series began in 2007, there have been nine major Assassin's Creed games hit consoles, yet pretty much all of them since the rather awesome Brotherhood back in 2010 have been decidedly dodgy. That's not just us being lippy, either - the fact that Ubisoft has decided to shelve the series until 2017 suggest it's also aware the franchise has become little more than a cash cow of late.
That's why we'd like to see Assassin's Creed go back to its roots, remaking the very first imperfect but nevertheless promising adventure for current consoles. The original Assassin's Creed didn't blow the critics away as early footage suggested it would - that didn't happen until Assassins' Creed II conquered all before it in 2009 - but it did lay the framework for all that has followed.
We'd like to take a return trip though, if Ubisoft could recast Altair's voice so he didn't speak with an American accent - which makes frig all sense for someone living in the Holy Land in the 12th century - then that would be peachy.
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TimeSplitters
TimeSplitters is one of those franchises that, when mentioned in front of those old enough to have played it (ask your dad), it brings a strange smile to their face - the kind you make when you've secretly done a fart no one else has heard.
A madcap first-person shooter that made its mark in the early days of PS2, TimeSplitters built up quite a following and made a name for the studio behind it, the now defunct Free Radical design - right up until it ballsed things up with the much lauded but ultimately wank PS3 exclusive Haze, that is.
Nevertheless, the time travelling action that made up play in TimeSplitters took place in arenas that had much in common with Nintendo 64 classics GoldenEye and Perfect Dark - hardly surprising given half the team working on it had previously earned their crusts at Rare.
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We'd love to see those same names come together to remake TimeSplitters, 16 years on, on today's comparatively hyper-powered hardware. The closest we may end up getting to that, however, is the forthcoming Homefront: The Revolution, due out later this month and in development at Dambuster Studios, the developer that ultimately succeeded Free Radical.
Metropolis Street Racer
If TimeSplitters had the younguns among you frantically opening up Google, then talk of Metropolis Street Racer - which hit the ill-fated Dreamcast back in 2000 - will likely send you straight back there.
Though MSR launched on SEGA's last console just as PS2 was pummeling it into the ground, its then revolutionary take on street racing in a world dominated by Gran Turismo and it's legion of clones ensured it attracted a dedicated, if not sizable, fan base. The trick was, MSR used real streets from some of the biggest cities in the world - London, Tokyo, San Francisco - and turned them into a racing track. It was a bit like taking your souped up Vauxhaul Astra out to race your mates, only in MSR the track wasn't an abandoned B&Q car park in Middlesbrough.
The whole thing was packaged together with radio stations that played fictitious (though entirely legitimate sounding) pop songs and a time zone feature that replicated whatever time it was in the city you were taking on. Turning on your Dreamcast at 9.07pm and seeing a street lamp lit London replicated just as it would look at that time of night was quite something. (Yes, people's dreams were far smaller back then.)
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Though MSR's chosen format, Dreamcast, was to be consigned to history just four months later, the team behind it did find new life on Xbox with Project Gotham Racing, which went on to be a flagship series for Microsoft right up until PGR4 on Xbox 360 in 2007. We'd love to see someone, somewhere, recreate that MSR magic on one of the current consoles, complete with an equally bogus soundtrack. Well, either that or some discarded Samantha Mumba album tracks. You know, something dead classy.
Knights of the Old Republic
There's a small series of independent films you might not have heard of that tells the story of a guy whose dad is pretty badass and kind of runs the galaxy. Oh, and he briefly falls in love with his sister. It's pretty decent.
Of course, for many years the problem with Star Wars (yes, we didn't hide that very well, did we?) was that there were barely any decent video games that let you play out your fantasies in a galaxy far, far away. All until Knights of the Old Republic, which hit the original Xbox back in 2003, made a name for itself, serving as one of the best RPGs of the generation.
With Star Wars now back to its best on the big screen, it seems like it might be a good time to bring back one of its highlights on the small screen. It's almost five years since the last release in the series, the now free-to-play The Old Republic, hit the stands. We think a return to BioWare's first Xbox epic is long overdue. Or should that be long, long overdue?
BioShock
Of all the games we've highlighted here for a remake, this seems like the most likely to come to fruition. As we recently relayed when we looked back at our Xbox 360 highlights, BioShock was just a little bit awesome. Its tale of an abandoned underwater city almost frozen in time, populated by demonic school girls and hulking great Big Daddies took the world by storm when it hit Xbox 360 in 2007.
Neither BioShock 2 - which was handled by a different development team - nor the skybound BioShock Infinite quite hit the same notes, but rather left the original release as something of a lone beast. Interestingly, internet chatter back at Christmas suggested that a remake could well be on the cards.
There's little doubt that a return to Rapture in the form of a fully fledged remake would be welcomed by anyone with something solid between their ears, though talk of a rehash has admittedly gone quiet this year. If BioShock does actually ever make its way to PS4 or Xbox One in the future, it's totally because of this article you're reading right now. Ya hear?
Words by Keith Andrew
Featured image credit: Infinity Ward
Featured Image Credit:Topics: Xbox, PS2, Modern Warfare, Games, Gaming