From Timesplitters to Soul Reaver: 19 game franchises long overdue a reboot

How could the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One help relaunch some of the franchises that time forgot?

Some video game franchises run their course and fade away. Some hit a bump, fail to sell the latest version and get rudely cancelled by a chief financial officer. Some are shelved out of the way and seemingly forgotten, only ever appearing again in crusty old retro magazines.

Here at VG247 we love new video games as much as the next man, but there are some series' we'd love to see return after a period in the wilderness. Here then are our picks of the game franchises that are long overdue some love, care, attention, and a reboot up the backside.

Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver

A long-time fan favourite and top of the reboot request line, Soul Reaver's morphing between spectral and material planes felt pretty damn "next-gen" 14 years ago. Combat ended with brutal finishing moves - imagine the justice that NEX-GEN GRAFFIX could do as vampires are impaled, bursting into flames and beheaded.

Uncharted's Amy Hennig (director of Soul Reaver 2) is currently working on Visceral's Star Wars game and Glen Schofield (Blood Omen 2) is in charge of overseeing the big Call of Duty project this year. With those two handling story and action we could have something special but they're both likely to be busy for quite some time.

Likelihood of a reboot: Technically, Nosgoth, the free-to-play online brawler, is a sequel of sorts. It's not a reboot but we've played a fair bit of the beta and we have to admit it's a good game. Don't judge it for what it isn't, judge it for what it is.

Full Spectrum Warrior

You can't move on consoles for military shooters so how come something as realistic and tactical as Full Spectrum Warrior ended up in a body bag? Probably precisely because it was realistic and tactical.

Full Spectrum Warrior was developed in conjunction with the U.S. Army's Institute of Creative Technologies to see if commercial games technology could be used to help enhance military training methods. The game itself puts the player in command of two fire teams, issuing orders without directly controlling individual soldiers. In these days of first-person shooters it's an idea that wouldn't even get past the initial pitch meeting. Unless of course, it was supported by millions of dollars worth of military spending.

Likelihood of a reboot: Obviously the U.S. Army is using video games to subliminally train the youth to fight when the times comes. All it will take is a trigger word during Call of Duty or Battlefield multiplayer to start the uprising. But a new Full Spectrum Warrior? No.

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater

Oh, Tony. Anthony. What are we going to do? There was a time you were at your absolute peak, dominating every mention of extreme sports on home consoles. Many tried to copy and they all failed. But you fell with them, like a hawk with its wings clipped. Over ambition got in the way. Yearly updates sucked the ideas dry. And then some idiot decided to make a plastic skateboard to control a video game and we all laughed our internal organs up all over the floor.

Likelihood of a reboot: I continue to believe that when Tony gets out of his contract with Activision in 2129 someone else will snap him up and make traditional console skateboarding games like the ones we all knew and loved.

Knockout Kings

There was a time when Knockout Kings was an annual franchise, with EA putting a lot of cash into marketing it and eventually morphing it into Fight Night. A clever idea there of keeping a franchise alive by changing its name entirely. It was also at this point that EA was perfecting its licensed soundtrack business and incorporating all the gloss that came with the hiphop music business.

Now in the real-world fighting game genre all we're left with is WWE and UFC. One is old men grappling and the other is young men really, really hurting each other. What happened to the Sport of Kings?

Likelihood of a reboot: All it takes is for public interest to get behind boxing again. The fact Bruce Lee is in the latest UFC game tells us it's a franchise that's leaning towards novelty already, so maybe if UFC drops out of favour there will be space for a new boxing title.

Tenchu: Stealth Assassins

Tenchu games were great stealth action games where the stealth wasn't very well implemented but we forgave them because they were so atmospheric. And with a pinch of Japanese horror in the mix, Tenchu finally felt like we were getting the exciting ninja sim we'd dreamed of; violent kills, stalking and unforgiving combat.

The weakness of Tenchu was the poor AI and the shoddy draw distances. Both of those problems have been all but solved in this robo-future we live in, which makes the absence of a decent Tenchu game all the more painful.

Likelihood of a reboot: From Software has the rights to Tenchu and it's currently making rock-hard Dark Souls and Bloodborne games. If anyone's going to reboot the series it'll be these guys, but certainly not in the immediate future.

Prince of Persia

The third best royal ever (behind ludicrous pop sex dwarf Prince, and Freddie Mercury), it's a mystery why The Prince of Persia isn't womanising, swinging (not like that) and leaping from our consoles in annual releases. At least, it is until we look back and see that after the Sands of Time there came Ubisoft's proto-franchising, a churn of Prince games all of which now blur into one - and not a very good one. Rival Swords, Warrior Within, Two Thrones - didn't these just get gradually worse before the 2008 reboot?

Come to think of it, Assassin's Creed took the acrobatic flow and the swordplay and has done a much better job of it on the last and new-gen consoles, so perhaps we shouldn't ask for something that has already been outclassed by its own prodigy.

Likelihood of a reboot: Not while Assassin's Creed is going so strong. The Prince will only ever live on in retroland.

Conflict Desert Storm

Another military war series that lost its way when it could have been sitting at the top of the hill alongside Call of Duty or Battlefield. The Conflict series was third-person and featured four-player co-op, which was ahead of its time (or, more accurately, just not properly supported by the PS2, Xbox and GameCube online systems). The first two games were set during the Gulf war, before it took a brave gamble on Vietnam and then an ill-advised jump to modern day terrorism.

Multiplayer co-op games now come as standard. The Division is one of the latest, and it's not hard to see how Conflict: Desert Storm would fit perfectly within today's tactical online shooter genre.

Likelihood of a reboot: This series has been doubled-tapped in the head and currently lies beside SWAT and Operation Flashpoint.

Medal of Honor

Actually we put this on the list and then couldn't really think of anything that isn't being done already by the Big Two console shooters. Medal of Honor got well and truly trounced when the reboot went up against Call of Duty a couple of years ago.

Likelihood of a reboot: Sorry, our mistake. Let's retire it for good, eh?

Timesplitters

If games like Crackdown can get another roll of the dice then why can't Timesplitters? Oh sure, rumours say Timesplitters 4 might resurface but current IP owner Crytek is too busy chasing MOBAs, F2P and other buzzwords to bother with, you know, making a good old fashioned first-person shooter.

Why would TimeSplitters work on next-gen consoles? Monkeys. Monkey on fire. Invisible monkeys on fire screaming and shooting at you. It was an actual thing on the PS2, it's not going to be hard to do it on the PS Quadruple. The problem with most FPSs is they get samey very quickly. Add time travel and you never have that problem as you flit from level to level, cowboy to caveman to 70s cop and back again.

Likelihood of a reboot: I can't type the words. I'm never going to admit the truth. Timesplitters will return.

Condemned

Is Condemned classed as a franchise? I don't know, but I loved it and the sequel and I'm writing this thing. Horror games went a bit AWOL last gen. Siren, Silent Hill, that bloody awful Alone in the Dark reboot. Monolith decided the way forward for the genre was for you to first-person-punch tramps and ghosts and photograph dead birds. Crackin'!

Likelihood of a reboot: Next-gen tramp punching ("tramp" as in "bum", my American friends. Not next-gen "bum" as in "arse", my UK friends) is what I want. I live in hope.

Midnight Club

Rockstar stopped making Smugglers Run games and shrunk them down to fit into single GTA missions. I worry that as the customisation options and races get more accessible in Grand Theft Auto that Midnight Club will never appear again on consoles, it will just become another mechanic sucked up into the Los Santos, Vice City, Liberty City multiverse.

That would be a real shame because Midnight Club was the only series to consistently capture the credible idea of street racing. Sure, the vehicles were super-pimped, obscene to look at and the soundtrack was beyond obnoxious, but that was the whole point, right? Street racing taken to the Nth degree. Rockstar could do that justice again, no problem.

Likelihood of a reboot: 50/50. The problem with the Rockstar boys is they take FOREVER to make a game and at the moment they're busy hustling GTA for PS4, Xbone and PC.

Shenmue

Was this the one where you drove a forklift around a yard and tried to have sex with sailors or whatever? Everyone asks for this don't they? And no one at Sega even entertains the idea. Get over it, it's not going to happen.

Likelihood of a reboot: You're better off playing it on the Dreamcast and having a crywank about the good old days.

Streets of Rage

Of all the games that get a remake, how come nothing has officially happened for Streets of Rage yet? It makes sense. A multiplayer dust-up in tough city streets. Bones crunching on faces, broken bottles flying through the air, police unleashing rocket rounds into a crowd of people. It's basically Syria.

And another thing. Back in the day female characters were all over the shop. Blaze Fielding was one tough lass in Streets of Rage. Diversity was a given. How did we regress to a game like Assassin's Creed Unity, where playable female characters aren't even considered? Streets of Rage 3 had a playable kangaroo for Christsake!

Likelihood of a reboot: I despair sometimes. I really do.

Perfect Dark

Positive female role models - that's what the games business needs more of. Armed with high-powered weaponry, obviously. Joanna Dark was deadly and intelligent and I miss her. I bought the Xbox remake even though I knew it wasn't going to be very good. But the N64 version? I even bought an Expansion Pak for the system - a chunk of plastic that cost about £70. In these days where it feels we're being fleeced at every opportunity by publishers, Perfect Dark would fit right in.

There are more female games developers in the industry now. Imagine if all those great minds teamed up to reboot something like Perfect Dark. It could blaze a trail across triple A publishing and simultaneously shut up a lot of the moronic voices that don't understand why things really need to change. Come back Joanna, we need you.

Likelihood of a reboot: Is Microsoft honestly too busy making gun games for the boys that it can't make a gun game for the girls and the boys?

Dark Cloud

Single player RPGs seem like a thing of the past. Especially those that add a little city-building magic in there too. Now it's all MMOs and questing with strangers, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, I just miss the days of a deep single-player exploration of caves and dungeons, combined with Dark Cloud's action-oriented combat.

Dark Cloud (and its sequel Dark Chronicle) had survival elements now common in games - players needed to keep an eye on the thirst meter as well as health bar, and questing in dungeons was rewarded with items used to rebuild the villages on the surface. A little bit of Minecraft in my RPG wasn't a bad thing.

Likelihood of a reboot: Dark Could sounds like a perfectly viable property to reboot for a younger generation. Put it in the hands of Shuhei Yoshida and Mark Cerny and see what they come up with.

Space Channel 5

The only reason you don't like dancing games is because you lack confidence. When everyone's out the house I bet you have a little wiggle and it doesn't matter that you're scoring badly because you're having so much fun - you're free! Ulala and her sexy space police know all about it and they want you to dance to save the galaxy.

With the power of Ulala and her amazing dancing friends - including Space Michael Jackson - dance can be fun again (it even included sort-of shooting to keep the boys happy). This could be the game that turns around Kinect. Or at least stops a million units being shoveled into E.T.s landfill site.

Likelihood of a reboot: If we all write a letter to Mizuguchi I'm sure he'd listen and get the rights back from Sega.

Black & White

God. Games. God games. God, games! I could do this all day. But I'm not a millionaire game designer gazing whimsically at the stars, unlike a certain Pierre Molyneux. This game was pure Peter - you play as a god and you manage a creature that grows to the size of a house. You can use your god hand to stroke or slap the creature which influences its behaviour and appearance. It's ridiculous and silly and entertaining like few games could ever be.

There's a lot of power in those new consoles you know. Imagine that powering the mind of your docile or defiant creature. Now imagine you're a god in a universe you're already familiar with. Imagine if in the return of Black & White you were a deity in the Temple of Light or the Temple of Shadows from Fable. Do you see the crossover potential?

Likelihood of a reboot: Peter Molyneux, bored of doing stupid iPad experiments, pitches a new Black & White to his old friends at Microsoft. They say yes, but only if his studio 22 Cans teams up with his old buddies at Lionhead. Black & White & Fable All Over is born. Out on Xbox One in 2016.

Breath of Fire

Another RPG series we didn't realise we missed until it was far too late. Who doesn't like a boy who can morph into a dragon? I was fairly nonplussed about the earlier games but Breath of Fire: Dragon Quest went a little nuts, making the dragon a separate character instead of a part of main man Ryu, introducing a bunch of Russian-speaking dragons and a combat overhaul that alienated fans.

I'm all about burning something down and rebuilding it from scratch (hello, VG247!). It's a shame Breath of Fire: Dragon Quest killed off the series. But there's every reason why this could work again. Hell, reintroduce the content cut from the original version - headless Nina, a professor that looked like Hitler and online play. I'd play that in a heartbeat.

Likelihood of a reboot: It could work but the title has to change. It currently sounds like the name of every RPG on iOS and Android ever.

Onimusha

There was a time when linear action adventures that unexpectedly changed camera positions were the only games you could play on console. Collect a glowing orb, manage a dwindling inventory of bullets, combine plants to make medicine. And then suddenly, almost overnight, the only one left in the genre was Resident Evil. Onimusha was a favourite because it sort of took place in Sengoku Japan - apart from the bits in modern day France - and there was a hell of a lot of bodies being slashed to pieces.

Onimusha would be ideal for the PS4 and Xbox One. The series featured full body motion capture of real actors and the third game even starred proper movie star Jean Reno. And David Cage thinks he's being innovative? Pfffff.

Likelihood of a reboot: Onimusha Soul exists somewhere, but you know what this franchise needs to get us westerners interested again? LIAM NEESON. I'm not even joking.