As the gaming world continues to shift further away from console dominance, here’s a look at a few titles I’d love to get the chance to play on Steam.
I know I’ve written at length on this website about how much my wife and I both prize physical media and the CDs, vinyl and video games from the past that we’ve purchased together over the course of the past six years.
The love for retro gaming will never go away – it’s what introduced me to an incredible media form that has given me so many memories and countless moments of joy throughout my life, and hanging on to everything that gave me those memories in the first place as a kid has made it even more special.
But when it comes to the incredible, AAA-level video games that are released today, featuring seemingly endless worlds and hyper-realistic graphics, it’s no longer all that much of a viable option to play these titles on a console – and it hasn’t been for quite some time.
In addition to what is still a prohibitively high cost for many gamers, the erosion of physical game releases, cloud game storage and download/update requirements have eliminated what were once the undisputed pros to playing on a console with a physical game copy.
At the same time, PC gaming has exploded from what was once a relative niche within the gaming community into what is now a ubiquitious part of keeping up with modern video games, a process that has only sped up since Microsoft has worked to homogenize the PC and Xbox gaming experiences within the past decade.
The result has been a continued surge of new and old titles alike being released for the PC, a trend that also has now persisted for around a decade, with Steam’s skyrocketing of popularity during the same time assisting in the exposure to the average gamer.
While I’ve already had the joy of revisiting games like Tales of Symphonia and Crash Bandicoot: N. Sane Trilogy on PC, there remains a handful of titles from yesteryear that I’d love to experience with the comfort of sitting at my own desk.
As more and more games warrant PC re-releases, here’s a small handful of titles I’d love to see make their way onto the Steam marketplace:
1. Any of the original three Guitar Hero games
I’ve written before on this website about how much I loved the Guitar Hero series during its heyday and the cultural phenomenon that rhythm video games helped create in the late 2000’s to early 2010’s.
A side effect of the gradual shift away from consoles (for everything non-Nintendo, at least) was the abrupt disappearance of rhythm games, which had faded into obscurity in the early 2010’s due to market saturation and a struggling economy recovering from the Great Recession.
Today, the rhythm game community is largely niche and present on the PC, with legacy instrument peripherals from the prime of Guitar Hero and Rock Band now being both incredibly expensive on the secondhand market and generally unreliable.
Yet thanks to the release of games like Fortnite Festival and Clone Hero, modern peripheral controllers are available for today’s players of rhythm games – removing what would be a major barrier to Guitar Hero making its way to Steam.
Although gamers can experience any track from the Guitar Hero games for free on Clone Hero, there’s something to be said about perfecting your scores and grinding through a campaign mode with the original notecharts that came out with the game – an experience that is lost with the prevalent rhythm games of today.
With the series dormant for over a decade now, it would take a conceited revival effort from whatever is left of the Harmonix and RedOctane teams that created the magic players experienced for themselves in the late 2000’s – but I have little doubt in my mind that this is a better bet than trying to revive the series on consoles.
2. Crash Team Racing: Nitro-Fueled
The newest game of the three entries by a longshot, the lack of a PC version of CTR: Nitro-Fueled genuinely feels like oversight more than anything else.
The late 2010’s saw a remastering boom for the Crash Bandicoot and Spyro games, with the original trilogies for both series’ receiving a remaster that was released for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and PC.
The iconic 1999 kart racer Crash Team Racing was given the same treatment with a ground-up rebuild in 2019, though the Nitro-Fueled remaster only saw the light of day on the three consoles – still coming without a PC release.
This decision became even more puzzling after the 2020 release of Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time, which initially hit shelves for the PS4 and Xbox One before receiving ports for the Switch, PS5, Xbox Series X and PC in March 2021.
The lack of a PC release for Nitro-Fueled especially feels like a missed opportunity given the online play available for the title, with a release for Steam having had the potential to bring cross-platform online play to the game, which is not available for the three consoles the game is available on.
With the game now seven years old, a PC re-release could serve as an ideal opportunity to once again build interest in the game and series, especially with the adjacent Spyro series receiving its first brand-new title in 19 years next year.
3. Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars
One of the forgotten modern-era GTA titles, Chinatown Wars was originally released for the Nintendo DS and PlayStation Portable in 2009 as a handheld adaptation of the series, serving as somewhat of a successor to Grand Theft Auto Advance, which was released in 2004 for the Game Boy Advance.
While all modern GTA console games are available on Steam with versions that are more accessible and likely easier to play (thanks to the advent of modern controllers) than their original console counterparts, it comes as a bit of a surprise that Chinatown Wars has yet to make the move onto the PC – despite receiving an iOS release in 2010 and an Android port in 2014.
The game was known for receiving a notable amount of controversy even for a GTA game, due to the player’s ability to buy and sell drugs – though games such as the still-upcoming Schedule I have helped to remove the shock factor from that feature.
Beyond it being a notable absence from the series on Steam, it’s likely not a hot take to suggest that diehard fans of the series would like the opportunity to play the game on a legitimate controller, something that the game has yet to allow with only handheld releases thus far.
Although I’ve still yet to play this game, a PC release would make me significantly more likely to pick it up and play alongside the rest of the series.
Leave a Reply