Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon
In what other game to dancing aliens come to invade the earth in a spaceship shaped like a giant peach? Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon is a delightfully mad product of one of the golden ages of Japanese game design. It had a vaguely Zelda-esque structure of dungeon-like temples, open-world wandering and bright, weird-looking towns populated by extremely weird characters. You play as blue-haired Goemon, his fat pervy chum Ebisumaru, robotic ninja Sasuke, or Yae the female samurai, who can turn into a mermaid. It's amazing.
Why do we want to see it remade? Because we'd be fascinated to see how its weird art style would look with modern technology. And it has a giant kabuki robot called Impact with the most wonderful theme song of possibly any game character ever. (I am machinery! I am a metal being! HEY!)
Released really near the end of the Nintendo 64's life cycle, Donkey Kong 64 was a game from a studio at the absolute pinnacle of its 3D platforming prowess. Featuring multiple Kong characters, excellent baddies, memorable levels and a generous smattering of in-jokes, Donkey Kong 64 was Rare's most polished Nintendo game. Donkey Kong Country Returns was a very successful game for Nintendo last Winter too, so there's probably the appetite for it.
This was a Rare game, of course – and Rare has remastered many of its N64-era classics for Xbox Live Arcade. But Nintendo retains ownership of their Donkey Kong games, and Diddy Kong Racing appeared in slightly altered form on the DS a few years back, so who knows - this could be a possibility.
In Space Station Silicon Valley, you play a robotic chip that can inhabit dead robot animals. The aim of the game, essentially, is to murder more and more powerful animals with the aim of possessing their mighty bodies and retrieving the pieces of your own robot chassis, before fixing your spaceship and escaping the space station. The animals range from sheeps on springs to rocket-dogs, foaming grizzlies and weighty locomotive hippos. It's madly inventive.
It was also more than slightly broken, which was sort of part of its appeal in a way (I remember constructing a precarious stack of dead animals in order to scale a high ledge when the switch I pressed failed to lower a platform like it was supposed to). A remaster could fix that, though, and bring it up to date. There's never been anything quite like Silicon Valley since. It really sticks in the memory, and it deserves another chance.
Alright, so we already have a remade Zelda. Maybe wanting another one is just greedy. But though Ocarina of Time is the N64 Zelda game that captured the mind, the one that revolutionised 3D gaming and rode off into the sunset with all the Best Game of All Time plaudits, there are many of us whose hearts belong to Majora's Mask. Eerie, surreal, understated, a story about the loneliness of a forgotten hero and the bitter malice of an insane misanthrope, Majora's Mask is like nothing else, darker and (dare we say it) more imaginative than Ocarina of Time in its tone and setting. We save doomed worlds all the time in videogames, but it's never felt so personal as it does in Termina, with the leering moon bearing down upon a town whose inhabitants you come to know intimately as you endlessly repeat the same three days in an attempt to save them.
A remastered Majora's Mask could bring across the many improvements that Ocarina of Time 3D made to the N64-era Zelda formula to the strangest, bravest game in the whole series. We'd fall over ourselves to play it.