Hooked Gamers' Most Wanted Remakes
Feature
At Hooked Gamers, we aren't ready to let the "remake" trend die just because one prince lost his way in the sands. In that spirit, our writers have selected the titles they would most like to see rebuilt from the ground up—games with legacies so potent that they practically demand a modern revival, provided the developers have a steadier hand at the helm.
Singularity (Alex)
Released back in 2010 with almost no press building up to it, the last game Raven Software developed before being sent down the Call Of Duty mines is one of my favorite hidden gems of that era. While by no means a masterpiece, the fact that the devs only had about seven months to cobble together this game from reused assets after the original build that was shown off at E3 in 2009 was scrapped is just astonishing
Especially nowadays considering that garbage like MW3 (2023) and Black Ops 7 are given so much leniency by many gamers simply because the devs were not given enough time.
If Raven Software could make something as fun and unique as Singularity in only seven months, then just imagine what a soft reboot of this game would be like with modern technology and a proper development budget and time.
Seriously, it's like Activision wanted this game to fail just so they would have an excuse to cancel any further projects at the time that were not Call Of Duty.
Sure the game’s story and characters weren't the most original, but the gunplay and fun time power gimmicks are what made this game stand out.
Dragon Age: Origins (Camrin)
Dragon Age: Origins. This 2009 game from BioWare (Arguably best known for their Sci-Fi epic Mass Effect, which this reviewer also adores) is a Dark Fantasy, and paints a very bleak world that is heavily inspired by A Song of Ice and Fire. Players choose their character from three races (Human, Elf, Dwarf) and three classes (Warrior, Rogue, Mage), which break down into a total of six overall backgrounds or Origins for you to pick from - Dwarves cannot use magic, so only Humans and Elves can be Mages and thus have the Magi Origin, for example. These Origins are a mechanic that lets the player settle into the world and their character's identity within it prior to the main story events where they would all intersect into one. This Origin mechanic has never been reused since, and it is incredibly unfortunate since it's such a great way to make your player character feel like a living part of the world prior to the events of the game, instead of just spawning in when you hit 'Start'.
The main gameplay loop of Origins opens up after both the Origin and then the initial area, allowing players to choose what order they want to tackle the main events of the game - recruiting forces across the country of Ferelden to face an evil army of sentient rot, the Blight. In true RPG fashion no one can just drop everything to help you, so you have to help them first - but one of the biggest things Origins lets you do is choose the army that you recruit from each of these areas- all depending on your choices to resolve the quests in that area.
Origins is incredibly difficult to play nowadays, having stopped being optimized long ago, not to mention the general clunkiness and relatively poor graphics compared to what is possible in this day and age. When Mass Effect Legendary Edition released in 2021, remastering the original trilogy of Mass Effect games, this reviewer couldn't stop hoping that perhaps we would get something like that for Dragon Age, remastering Origins, II, and Inquistion. BioWare has since stated that so few people remember how the old BioWare Eclipse engine works that a Legendary Edition is incredibly unlikely, and yet still I hold out hope of one day rejoining the Grey Wardens, of saving Thedas from the Fourth Blight.
Airborne Ranger (William)
The Father of Tactical Stealth
While the original Airborne Ranger was limited by the top-down isometric, 8-bit visuals of the Commodore 64 era, its DNA is found in every modern stealth-action title. A remake could transform the original's tense infiltration missions into a highly detailed, open-ended tactical sandbox similar to Metal Gear Solid V. Imagine the thrill of the initial parachute jump—now a controllable, physics-based descent—where you choose your entry point into a sprawling, procedurally generated enemy territory. By utilizing modern dynamic AI, enemies wouldn't just follow set paths; they would react to found bodies, radio for reinforcements, and change their patrol patterns based on the time of day or weather conditions, forcing the player to truly think like a Ranger to survive.
Resource Management and High-Stakes Extraction
What made Airborne Ranger unique was the "Supply Drop" mechanic—the desperate need to find your pre-dropped gear in the field while avoiding detection. A modern remake could lean heavily into these survival-lite elements, where every bullet and grenade matters, and your gear loadout must be carefully balanced against your movement speed and noise levels. Furthermore, the original's career system, where your Ranger could earn medals or actually "die" permanently, could be expanded into a robust persistent campaign mode. Rescuing a POW or sabotaging a radar site would feel significantly more impactful if the consequences of failure meant losing a high-ranking operative you've spent dozens of missions levelling up.
Red Faction (Jordan)
Every time I think of a potential game remake, I come back to the same one: Red Faction. The original "destruction as a mechanic" game, in many ways the 2001 shooter remains in a league of its own. The story is timeless, of course, as class struggle isn't likely to go anywhere, anytime soon, but you and I both know the real reason I'm saying this: Geo-Mod. At some point, not too long after the original release, and even in the sequel, the ability to destroy just about anything, and in particular dig holes in Voxel terrain either for fun or to create paths, just went away for a long time. Even now, this mechanic lays largely a memory, with the few games that get close being largely different implementations.
I realize this desire is fraught. Not only did Red Faction excel in difficult-to-recreate aspects such as its slightly slapstick humor, it's also a design nightmare. Nobody really wants to forgo the ability to control pacing, sightlines, encounters, and progression in their games in favor of letting the player deform the entire terrain, but that also makes a great case for why a remake is a great place to revisit this idea, rather than crafting something wholly new. Give it to the Teardown or Deep Rock folks, and tell them to go nuts, and it just might be a success.
Golden Sun (James)
In the world of Weyard, the magic of Alchemy forged humanity into a golden age of prosperity, but it was not to be. Peace and harmony gave way to dreams of wealth, eternal life, conquest and war. The destructive power of Alchemy had to be sealed away in secret, deep inside Sol Sanctum in a mountain above the small and hidden town of Vale. But when you and your friends disturb the resting place of the four Elemental Stars and they are stolen and your friends kidnapped, you must travel across the world to save them and prevent the Elemental Lighthouses from being re-lit and ushering in a Lost Age.
Split across two main games, Golden Sun was my first JRPG, and the Game Boy Advance on which it was released was my Super Nintendo. I spent days plumbing the depths of these two games, amazed at the size and scale of the world, the evocative soundtrack and the hero's journey that awaited. I had no idea how the original Golden Sun could fit on a cartridge so small, and absolutely no idea how the much larger sequel, Golden Sun: The Lost Age, could exist in my hands at all. From the characters, to the music, the main quest and sidequests, the Djinn companions, the summons, the story, the optional dungeons, and your magical Psynergy powers and the overworld puzzles you must solve with them.
Golden Sun has it all, and it might even be the greatest JRPG series released on the Game Boy Advance. Re-released in 2024 as part of the Nintendo Switch Online service, both games are once again able to reach new and younger audiences as they reached me twenty five years ago. We have seen an increasing amount of JRPG remakes from this era of games, whether Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Persona, Pokemon or Super Mario RPG, and with Nintendo loving to revitalise and remake games from their beloved franchises, may the Golden Sun rise again.
Abadox: The Deadly Inner War (Samuel)
I will admit, when it comes to remakes and remasters, I am a bit of a grouch. The current crop of remakes represents nothing less than a plague upon the industry. Most are low-effort, safe bets that, at best, allow companies to charge an extra $30 for a game I had already bought in the early 2000s, and at worst, serve as a particularly nasty form of cultural vandalism. Of course, many of these games do wind up being good, but that shouldn't surprise anyone since the original games were already very good. I don't understand why so many people shell out for remakes and remasters when they could very easily download an emulator and play the original for free, but somehow this is a viable business strategy.
Of course, even I will admit that there is a place for remakes, it's just that I don't see the point in remaking a game that was already good to start with. It would be a far better use of time and resources to take a game that was bad and swipe all its best ideas. Hence, why the game I would like to see remade is Abadox: The Deadly Inner War, a largely forgotten NES space shooter.
What sets Abadox apart from all the other space shooters of the 8-bit era, is a unique premise: Rather than fighting an armada of alien warships you are fighting a single, planet-size organism by flying into one of its mouths and working your way through its innards until you can reach and destroy its core, triggering a lengthy final level where you escape from the imploding monster. Abadox is not a particularly good game; it is very short, and the developer attempted to pad its minuscule playtime by making it absurdly difficult. The grotesque horror of the premise is largely wasted thanks to the primitive graphics of the NES. Moreover, there were far better games in the genre available at the time.
However, the world is not exactly swimming with space shooters now, and the biggest issues with the game (its short length, absurd difficulty, and primitive graphics). could be easily corrected with a ground-up remake. It wouldn't take much creativity or effort to translate the game's premise into a genuinely unnerving and visually arresting game. Indeed, Abadox's premise could be successfully lifted into other genres as well. A survival horror game, for instance, set in the innards of a space-faring colossus could be intriguing.
Do you have a favourite game that requires a remake?
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