PSN and XBLA Retro Gaming Remakes

The game for Playstation Store Network and XBox Live Arcade releasing this year that I am looking most forward to is the remake of Bionic Commando Rearmed. No, not the next gen game that will be coming out shortly, but a graphical and gameplay upgrade of the NES classic. Behold!



I got this game in 1988 when it first game out for NES. I was a kid at the time, but I remember this was one of the most challenging games that I owned for the system. I played the heck out of it, even though I wasn't any good at it. One of my favorite memories in all the time I played my NES was the day we, my brother and our best friend, managed to get past a level that had been puzzling us for a whole year. We finally got to beat the game and save Super Joe. The sense of accomplishment and triumph after hours of playing this incredible game is still fresh to this day. I am certainly looking forward to the new Next-gen Bionic Commando, but it's this remake of the classic that I am looking forward to the most.

Retro games sell.

Nostalgia sells.

Why else do companies constantly roll out 2D platformers for the Nintendo DS, like Contra 4?

The NDS is perfectly capable of rolling out awesome 3D games, like Legend of Zelda
Phantom Hourglass. My favorite NDS game, a game I played a bunch last year, was Final Fantasy III. It's an old game from 1990 originally designed for the NES. One of our favorite PSP games here at Cinerati was last year's Final Fantasy Tactics: The Lions War, a redo of an old PS1 game from 1997.

This type of graphical and gameplay overhaul has already been executed on another awesome 2D side-scroller for XBox Live Arcade. The game was Prince of Persia and here is a cool side by side comparison of how it looked in 1990 on PC and on Sega Genesis in 1993 and how it looks now now on XBLA.



As long as they keep doing these amazing upgrades for the classic quality games and not overdo it with bad retreads of awful games I will keep buying these downloadable and portable gems of old. These games work well for both the handheld systems and for the downloading networks of the Next-gen systems.

Nintendo is also in on the trend, selling old games from their old platforms as emulation software on the Wii, via Virtual Console.

All I want to know is; Where is my Galactic Super Mario Bros., Nintendo?