Unfettered Blather

Welcome to the latest installment of Blog Banter, the monthly blogging extravaganza created by bs angel and coordinated by Game Couch. Blog Banter involves our cozy community of enthusiastic gaming bloggers, a common topic, and a week to post articles pertaining to said topic. The results are quite entertaining and can range from deep insight to ROFLMAO. Any questions about Blog Banter should be directed here. Check out other Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

The topic for this month (brought to you by Zath!) is “Which game would you like to see a modern re-make of and why?”

I’m not big on remakes because if a game actually is as good as I remember it then chances are I still own it. In the modern era of High Definition television sets we tend to forget that many great games are remembered so fondly in the absence of full 3D graphics and lens flare. I’ve seen attempts at remakes or “spiritual successors” of many games now and I think so often the magic that made the originals great do not translate well to their shallower offspring. Indeed, I think we get an idea of what the result is when you inbreed gaming software. What I would like to see is a game that was great for its time but has not aged well due to the advances that have been made since it was first released.

This takes me all the way back to Mechwarrior. I mean the original 1989 Mechwarrior released by Activision and made by Dynamix before they were bought by Sierra. Unfortunately, Activision no longer owns the license, FASA is no longer in business, and many of the BattleMech designs were deprecated due to a lawsuit that FASA technically won but decided to only use original designs for afterwards anyway to avoid future lawsuits. A remake would not be without its challenges, but in this case I would be happy if they would distill the essence of the game into a modern version. While we have had many versions of Mechwarrior since the original, none of them have quite tried to tackle the open galaxy aspect of the original. In Mechwarrior there was actually a nice little trading meta-game that existed before we knew what terms like “emergent gaming” and “meta-gaming” were. Battlemechs had no customization, but just being able to afford the biggest and baddest was a challenge by itself.

Although there was a driving storyline, players could ignore the story completely and simply run their little band of mercenaries. They could work for any side they wanted, contracts were negotiable, and pilots actually had some personality. The gameplay was simple and terrain was mostly a joke. There were some neat exploits in the game as well, but you had to use them at your peril. I once discovered the Locust was actually underneath the firing angle of a Battlemaster at point blank. You could literally walk up to it and blast away with your machineguns until it blew up. Of course you had to survive to point blank range and it only worked on one-on-one battles, but it was still a neat trick if you could do it.

I’m not asking for a direct remake here, the legal wrangling alone would make the game cost prohibitive even for Microsoft. Instead I’d like them to give us another Mechwarrior game and give us the open galaxy model again. Let us take the fight where we want and buy the mechs we want. I have not been impressed with the linearity of past offerings of Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries and Mechwarrior 4: Mercenaries. Both very good games but still too restrictive. Let me negotiate my own contracts again! Let me recruit pilots that have an actual face and a personality! Let me choose my own destiny! Give me the original Mechwarrior gameplay but updated with modern technology so that I can get real terrain or urban combat. I don’t care if I can customize the Battlemechs or not. The original Mechwarrior really wasn’t that great of a game, but I think the freedom it allowed meant that players could do more with the game. Why is it that a game in 1989 shackled by the limitations of technology has yet to offer the same kind of freedom and options nearly twenty years later?

Other Blog Banter Participants:
Lou Chou Loves You: Blade Runner
Zath!: Sid Meier’s Re-Colonization
XboxOZ360: Eternal Darkness
Silvercublogger: Mario Paint
Save in Progress: Earthworm Jim
MasterKitty’s Weblog: Zelda: A Link to the Past
Game Couch: Tass Times in Tone Town
Crazy Kinux: The modern re-make of a game
Delayed Responsibility: Crossover Triples, Taking You to School

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