10 EA Remasters We'd Like To See

At this year’s Gamescom, executive vice president of EA Studios Patrick Soderlund strongly hinted the Mass Effect series could be getting the remaster treatment in the near future. Which is good, because that series is at the top of our office list of games EA should remaster.

But what’s the rest of that list look like? With EA possibly looking at its catalog for games to update for current consoles, we thought it’d be a good time to look back on the company’s history and see what games might get a second wind in full HD.

Jade Empire
We hadn’t seen a game like Jade Empire when it came out, and we haven’t seen too many like it since. The mystical Chinese setting, the combo-focused combat mixed with BioWare’s signature moral choices, and emphasis embodying one of a few characters instead of creating your own made the game an impressive feat back in 2005. We’d love to see remaster of the game that updated the graphics and made it easier to dive into.

Burnout 3: Takedown
Burnout: Paradise might be the one everyone might want to play, but Burnout 3: Takedown edges it out with the ease and immediacy with which you could enter races. It was also the first game to implement the series’ Crash Mode, which made even our most frustrating losses into appealing wrecks.

Def Jam Vendetta
The licensing would be a pain to deal with, but we think EA has a shot at bringing this game in some form or another. We’re willing to bet DMX, Ludacris, Redman, and Method Man would be willing to work something out. It was a fun wrestling game that did something interesting with the licence it had, and we’d love to see what an update would look like today. Would Vince Staples even want to fight Chance the Rapper for the chance to take on Drake? We can only hope.

Mirror’s Edge
Mirror’s Edge seems ripe for a remaster. In fact, it probably should have been remastered last year, as a way to promote its sequel, Mirror’s Edge Catalyst. But the original stands on its own (albeit with some quirks), and at the time of its release, we hadn’t seen anything like it. It may not warrant a full-priced release at this point (especially on PC), but we’d love to see show up on the current round of consoles in some form or another.

Need For Speed: Most Wanted
Lots of Need For Speed games fought for a spot on this list, but 2005’s Most Wanted was a high mark for the series. The racing was rock-solid, cars were fun to tweak and the story of working your way up the Blacklist was as much motivation as anyone playing a racing game needed to keep playing. The cutscenes were also tremendously cheesy, which gives it an edge over just about any other game in the series.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2
You could make a great case for packaging several Battlefield games together and releasing them as a set, but if we had to pick just one game to encapsulate Battlefield on the last set of consoles, it’d have to be Battlefield: Bad Company 2. The story and characters weren’t as great as in the first Bad Company, but the multiplayer suite was superb, offering everything from the series’ signature open maps to a strong co-op mode. Not that we’d complain if they brought over the first Bad Company, Battlefield 2, and Battlefield 1943, though.

Skate 3
A lot of people want Skate 4 to happen, but we haven’t heard much from EA on bringing back its skate simulator for a while. Remastering the series' last entry seems like a decent middle ground to appease fans without having to go through the process of making an entirely new game. And maybe once the remakes are out there, it’ll show whether a new Skate game would actually sell.

SSX 3
EA tried to recapture the magic of the SSX series with a sequel/reboot a few years ago (you can read our review of it here), but it wasn’t quite as successful as the older games. You know how you can recapture the magic of those older games? By releasing them. And if we had to pick just one, it’d be SSX 3, since its open world was the last thing the series needed to cement itself as one of the greatest snowboarding games of all time.

Dead Space Trilogy
Usually we’d pick one game to remaster over a series, but releasing all three Dead Spaces games as one package makes so much sense. Each game is its own entry, but together they tell a surprisingly fascinating horror story (even if Dead Space 3 sent the whole a little too far off the rails). And if they want to quietly “remaster” Dead Space Extraction without the motion controls and release that as well, we wouldn’t mind.

A Bunch of Old Sports Games That Probably Won’t Get Remastered
You hear about modern sports games being too intricate to just have fun with, and that’s true. I’m not much of a sports guy, but I’d love the chance to play FIFA World Cup 98 or NBA JAM again without having to reach for an old console or system. But, considering how many contracts EA would have to go through to get those games re-released at all, we probably won’t see them ever again. Alas, we will never to get to relive the glory of Zinedine Zidane's most glorious year in soccer.