Battlezone
This version is a no-brainer for the simple reason most modern controllers have two sticks built in. It makes players feel like they’re in the tank, and they can slowly navigate their way in a landscape populated by the enemy.
I’ve played Battlezone Gold (released 2018) and VR (2016) enough times to know they are graphically richer experiences, but sometimes all I want is the basics. There’s just something to that old vector style look which has me feel like I’m navigating an old vehicle. I also think it’d be cool to use those power-ups from the previous games imagined from a fresh new first person perspective.
Lunar Lander
This classic goes without saying. It’s tough to navigate through those canyons to tucked away landing pads. While much of the game is not about facing an enemy, a greater force makes flying tough–gravity!
It’d be great to see this product get a facelift, and as for introducing new threats, perhaps timers and other forces can be at work to thwart that spacecraft from landing. Some creative ideas will be required, but I can see adding randomised weather being part of the equation.
Star Castle
This predecessor to Yar’s Revenge is simple in its design. Your enemy is behind a moving wall, and it can throw anything it wants at you, but all you can do is fly away and dodge. A lot of the mechanics from Asteroids can be ported over. The only difference is in what moves and what doesn’t.
Just how this game can get an update means adjusting the AI to do more than throw bombs at the player. It can include adding other swarms of problems, be it asteroids and rocks, along with the regular homing missiles at you.
Suffice to say, Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back Reloaded are a pipe dream due to licensing issues. I’d love to revisit this classic and navigate the trench like how Luke Skywalker saw it with his vectorscope. The latter imagined The Battle of Hoth with vector rendered AT-ATs! Although other game developers reimagined it with better graphics, Star Wars Battle Pod really recreated the feel of being in the flight cockpit.
Outside of the realm of vector graphics include Dig Dug, Pole Position, and Gauntlet. A few ideas that come to mind are in simply adding new power-ups to all these games, even though the last one really doesn’t need it. Instead, it’d be more of a port with added elements to allow for multi-player game play on a local level than through the Internet. Bluetooth has made communication between devices easy, and well, there’s a bit of nostalgia whenever I hear, “The warrior has shot the food,” and my valkyrie is feeling rather red.
My most desired title is Tempest. The modern controller seems designed for it, assuming the stick is not simply a switch-based analogue system. To swirl it about and move it according to the shape of the gamefield in this shoot ’em up game is a perfect replacement to the dial used in the original. Even though we got a lot of revisions since the release of the original game, it’s the one I spent the most quarters on.