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There are some franchises that, no matter how good, fall by the wayside. The clearest and saddest reason is money. If you were granted the power to revive the great dead franchises of your golden playing days, what would you choose? I got to thinking, and hereby present you with my current wishlist. Head on over to the forums and chime in with your own suggestions!
Legacy of Kain
The machinations of fate have intervened at various points in the career of video game luminary Amy Hennig; the cancellation of her Star Wars game being the most recent example. Hennig has now left EA to start her own studio, which has given the long-deprived fans of the Legacy of Kain series a faint glimmer of hope.
Legacy of Kain was special: a tale of vampires and tragic heroes, of cursed lands and unholy crusades, it was powered by writing of the most regal purple. Hennig prized the franchise from the letiguous jaws of Silicon Knights, who developed the first game, Blood Omen; she spirited the series, under the stewardship of Crystal Dynamics, from 1999’s Soul Reaver through to 2003’s Defiance, where it was the machinations of finance that saw the series entombed, and Hennig moving on to write and direct Uncharted.
Before Drake and Sully riled each other with raillery, Hennig’s heroes preferred the Bard’s method of self-expression, the soliloquy. And Christ were we all the better for it. Hennig’s baroque prose described a tale of treachery and hubris; it saw our hero, Raziel, resurrected from death by a tentacular Eldritch horror, and set on a mission of vengeance against his former master, Kain. Of all Hennig’s characters, Kain transfixes the most: a vainglorious and vindictive vampire who remains, despite his genocidal arrogance, delectable. But the writing isn’t the only reason we need more from the series; the world that Crystal Dynamics wrought was a magnificent thing.
Hulking Gothic edifices, Medieval towns gussied up with Teutonic trimmings, and gnarled, knotty forests: the entire landscape was a banquet for the eyes. What’s more, Raziel’s ability to shift to the spectral realm recast everything through a distorted prism. Areas would twist and realign, folding back in on themselves and revealing new pathways in recognisable places – sound familiar? The last we heard on the franchise came in the form of leaked footage of Legacy of Kain: Dead Sun – an aborted project from Square Enix, which looked like a departure from the series’ style. Here’s praying that, by some divine intervention, Hennig’s new studio goes after the rights to the series.
Stuntman
In 2002, developer Reflections Interactive got restless. Having paid homage to the exalted asphalt of the great American car chase movies, with Driver and Driver 2, the studio lurched into cross traffic and swapped paint with a slew of influences from further afield. Stuntman syphoned off Driver’s crying tyres and swaying corners and resprayed the chassis again and again – all with its tongue trenched firmly in its cheek. It used its premise, that you were a Hollywood stunt driver, and swapped genuflecting homage for a warm-natured piss take, with a wry troop of titles.
Hark at the parody parade: Toothless in Wapping (Lock Stock & Two Smoking Barrels), A Whoopin’ and a Hollerin’ (The Dukes of Hazzard), Blood Oath (all John Woo films), Conspiracy (Clancy-esque pot-boiler thriller), The Scarab of Lost Souls (Indiana Jones), and Live Twice for Tomorrow (the wonderful bollocks of Bond). The strength of Stuntman was that the satire was chrome detailing; if you stripped it away, you’d still be left with an unbreakable bastard of a driving engine.
In fact, because it wasn’t broken, developer Paradigm Entertainment didn’t fix it; the follow-up, 2005’s Stuntman: Ignition, was like a pace car – keeping the speed, retracing the route. What we need now, in light of the world-beating panache of the Forza Horizon series, is an eye-watering sequel set around a film festival. Can you imagine? Not just the beatific brio of Reflections’ driving model, defibrillated with a sparkling new game engine, but the opportunity to mercilessly mock the the precious poseurs and method-actor darlings of the movie scene. (I’m envisioning a mission where you have to drive a Leto-esque NPC, who’s playing a crash test dummy, into other cars so he can ‘access his character.’)
Reflections was swallowed up by Ubisoft and returned to Driver with 2011’s excellent pulp thriller, Driver: San Francisco. If The Crew 2 doesn’t shift gears (oof) after its stalled (sorry) launch, perhaps Ubisoft will look at its acquisition book and dust off some old gold.
TimeSplitters
It’s poetically sad that developer Free Radical’s tombstone was engraved with the epitaph ‘Haze,’ because the studio had made its mark doing precisely the opposite with TimeSplitters. The shooter landscape, with few notable exceptions, is one patrolled by mesomorphic marines encrusted in body armour of grimey green; it’s heartbreaking that Free Radical’s final game would tread the same bog as its rivals (while giving its jarheads fluorescent yellow detailing, as if to convince us that the studio’s imagination was still lambent).
We needed no such convincing a mere three years earlier, with the release of one of the best shooters of the fifth generation – TimeSplitters: Future Perfect. Here was a game
where meathead machismo was played for laughs, where the levels were vibrant and variegated, and where the whole thing carried the lightness and snap of a caper.
There was leaked concept art for TimeSplitters 4 that, if brought before a judge, would be evidence enough to make drug charges stick. Free Radical’s artists really let themselves loose with visions fishmen, shotgun-toting conjoined twins, and lobster folk. Unfortunately, we won’t get to see that bonkers s*** brought to life, because Free Radical was sold to Crytek in 2009. The studio worked on Crysis 2 and 3 (and an Xbox 360 port of Warface) before closing its doors for good in 2014. If only we had the time-hopping powers of Cortez, TimeSplitters’ Vin Diesel-esque hero, we could go back and convince a publisher to bite.
Onimusha
Fans of Onimusha are smiling a bittersweet smile with the announcement of not one, but two games: FromSoftware’s Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, and Sucker Punch’s Ghost of Tsushima. The former is set during the Sengoku period, with strong supernatural elements; the latter is set after, in 1274, during the Mongol invasion, and comes bearing stately samurai and a painterly landscape of setting sun and swaying trees. Between the two of them, they just about cover it.
But, for those that know, nobody does it quite like Capcom. There’s something about the ornateness, the exuberant style, and the sheer f***ing madness of their imagination that enthralls. Capcom’s love letter to the Sengoku period married hulking character movement, viperlike swordplay, and enough demonic ghouls to fill a grimoire. For a well-tilled stretch of the PS2’s lifespan, Onimusha was in rude health: Four main entries from 2001 to 2006, with a brace of spin-offs sandwiched in between – one a tactical, turn-based RPG, the other a 2D fighter.
The last entry in the series was Onimusha Soul, a browser-based game released in 2012. Billed as a ‘Sengoku simulation RPG,’ Soul didn’t perform well and Capcom hasn’t shown much interest in reviving the franchise; perhaps now, with the likes of Sekiro, Ghost of Tsushima, and Nioh, they will reconsider. Now is a good time to be a fan of swords and horses and feudal Japan, but there is something missing. For one thing, do any of these games cantering into view have Jean Reno in them? Because Onimusha 3: Demon Siege did, and so, for that reason, we need more.
Half-Life
Oh, f*** off.
