14 DAY TRIAL // Older gamers usually talk about the golden age of gaming as if it happened a long time ago and nothing good has been done since then. They are probably right, for the most part, but there are a few games out there that didn't really get the notoriety they truly deserved. A remake or a sequel for these titles would be an awesome sight to see, especially with today's technology.
There are numerous games that would fall under this category, of titles that would truly benefit from a sequel or a remake. Just like it happens today, some great games don't get the right PR or the right exposure and they fly under the radar. The same thing happened 15 years ago, but back then there were fewer titles launched in the span of one year.
The first game I want to mention is called The Devil Inside. Some of you might have heard of it, but I'm willing to bet that most of you haven't. This game was developed by a studio that doesn't exist anymore called Gamesquad and was published by Cryo Interactive, which shared the same fate.
The players take the role of Dave and its alter-ego and succubus counterpart Deva as they investigate a bizarre mansion. Dave is followed all the time by a television crew and the action is presented as a live feed to a TV station. Besides the action, which reminds players a little bit of the "Alone in the Dark" series, you get commercial breaks and even bullet-time action, way before it was cool.
The idea and the implementation were good, but the graphics engine had some problems and the publisher was a small one. It's one of the great precursors of horror survival games and it's a shame that people forgot about it.
The players were transported to an alien world and controlled a guy called Cutter Slade from a third-person perspective. They started to look for the team that accompanied them in this parallel universe and got entangled in a civil war.
Outcast did a lot of things right and it was using a revolutionary new graphics engine that had numerous features ahead of its time. If you just took the gameplay, the story, the sounds, and the concepts and place them in a new graphics engine in use today, you would definitely get an instant hit. It was that good. Outcast 2 will probably won't happen, but there is a guy who is working on a remake, although his progress has been very slow.
The players get in the role of a young boy called Andy, who has a dog. He gets transported to a mysterious place called the Darklands, where he starts looking for his missing dog, while trying to stay alive. The story is convoluted and way too long to be described here, but I have yet to see another game like it since then.
One of the main attractions of this dark adventure was the numerous ways the kid could die: devoured by shadows, drowned, turned to ashes, eaten by carnivorous plants, crushed by rocks, you name it. All done with superb animations and unique to a particular scene. Heart of Darkness should be required material to play before reviewers try to express an opinion about a modern 2D platformer. Everything would seem boring and uninteresting.
