What Else Could Capcom Realistically Remaster And Remake?

Capcom just indicated it’s open to more remakes and remasters of its classic games, and now everybody’s all excited. Honestly I wonder if there’s a whole lot more Capcom could do in that area, thinking about the market and the conditions surrounding each of its franchises.

First things first: Capcom, just go ahead and put Resident Evil 4 on the Nitnendo Switch. That game seems to be one of the ones Capcom can most reliably drop on yet another platform and get another pretty reliable sales boost, and the last frontier for it is a legit portable version. I’m surprised Capcom hasn’t at least announced this yet.

Anyway, Capcom has actually been pretty keen on its back catalog as of late, with anthologies of the Mega Man, Mega Man X, and Street Fighter franchises. The upcoming remake of Residents Evil 2 was one of the best games anyone showed off at E3 this year. At the prospect of getting more of this, I see a lot of people dragging out their personal favorite Capcom games, begging for remakes and remasters.

Most notably, I’m not sure Capcom will remake another game the way it’s doing Resident Evil 2, with the full big-budget treatment. RE2 is a very unique case for Capcom. It remains one of the the publisher’s most popular games ever, being a multi-million seller in an era when there were relatively few of those, but its age also makes a simple remaster impractical. The original PlayStation-1-era graphics and art don’t hold up at higher resolutions, so no matter what, re-releasing RE2 today meant remaking everything except the basic storyline. I don’t think any other Capcom game that old warrants such an expensive remake.

I think this puts Resident Evil 3 in a jam. Things would be simpler if Sony just made the PlayStation 4 compatible with the PSOne classics it sold on the PlayStation Store for older systems. Maybe another simple port isn’t impossible since games from the same era like Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy IX came out on PS4, but is RE3 anywhere near as popular? I honestly don’t know. The original PlayStation release still sold 3.5 million copies since the 90’s, a bit less than RE2. I’m surprised however that Capcom never released Resident Evil Code Veronica on anything after the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions. Did it not sell well there? RECV’s Dreamcast graphics are probably right on the borderline of what would hold up at 1080p or 4K today, and its use of completely real-time graphics in lieu of the PSOne games’ pre-rendered graphics would make further remasters easier, at least as easy as porting RE4 again.

I don’t know about some other PSOne and PlayStation 2 franchises like Onimusha or Dino Crisis. From what I hear those aren’t quite as popular as RE or Devil May Cry, and they might be at least as expensive to remaster.

What could potentially be really interesting however are Capcom’s older franchises from the NES and Super NES days like Ghosts & Goblins, Final Fight, Breath of Fire, Gargoyle’s Quest, or similar games. I could definitely see them getting the Mega Man Legacy Collection treatment — simple emulated collections on all major platforms. I don’t know where the licensing rights sit in relation to Capcom’s Mickey Mouse games, but we’ve gotten new versions of the Duck Tales game so I’m sure they can work something out. Maybe some of these games could get lower budget remakes or sequels like Strider, Bionic Commando Rearmed, or Duck Tales.

Now it’s my turn to beg from a revival from Capcom I know will never happen: Mega Man Legends. Mega Man fans didn’t accept these games back on the PSOne, but today their gameplay and graphics hold up better than probably most PSOne games. The first Mega Man Legends did a lot of what wowed people in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time a few months before that game came out, and Mega Man Legends 2 feels shockingly modern for a third person shooter from 2000. That’s beside the lovable characters and tragically abandoned story cliffhanger. Surely Capcom could put those together in a Legacy-style collection.

BULLETS:

• A new hack of NBA Jam adds 90’s celebrities: https://www.romhacking.net/news/2070/
• New big update available for Arma 3: https://dev.arma3.com/post/spotrep-00081
• The recently-uncovered story of the Chinese who survived the Titanic: https://www.scmp.com/culture/film-tv/article/2141549/how-six-chinese-men-survived-titanic-disaster-and-racist-us-federal
• Ancient North American trade route discovered: https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/07/ancient-north-american-trade-networks-reached-farther-than-we-thought/
• A video on ancient Egyptian warfare: https://youtu.be/1apMlePN8JE?list=WL
• Another on the history of Thailand: https://youtu.be/OfOMEP_7AJM?list=WL

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