10 Genres That Deserve a Comeback

We aren’t talking about games like Starcraft, and similarly we aren’t talking about games like Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six. What we are talking about are games like Ogre Battle, which progress in real time but feature combat between squads in a turn-based manner. Ogre Battle had an absurd amount of depth and strategy to it along with an interesting story to boot. This entry in our list of 10 Genres That Deserve a Comeback would benefit greatly from modern game development technology.

Tower Defenses may never have made it big but they can still use a comeback. For now, the only tower defense games we really see are flash games on Newgrounds.com. These games used to be the most played mod on Warcraft 3 and Starcraft and you still see tons of tower defense games on Starcraft 2’s servers. So let’s see a company actually try to make an awesome Tower Defense game from scratch.

Remember Final Fantasy Tactics? Remember Tactics Ogre? Remember Kartia? Well, no one really remembers Kartia. Either way, the Grid Based Tactical RPG genre has produced some of the most amazing hits of the early PlayStation era. Where are they now? Have we just gotten bored of them now that our graphics technology has improved? It seems like the only company that is still making these games is Nippon Ichi with their Disgaea series.

We all know that Duck Hunt was one of the most awesome experiences of the NES era. However, light guns have pretty much gone out of style in current day gaming. It might be because HD TVs have too much lag to actually make light gun games work. We have tried to compensate with motion controlled pointer games such as House of the Dead, but it’s really not the same.

In the days of the NES and SNES, shoot em ups like Gradius were all the rage. Now, the only place you’ll find a shmup is in flash games, mobile games, or as a StreetPass game for the 3DS. Either that, or you’ll have to make do with bullet hell games like Touhou project. It would be awesome if we could just get a simple upgradeable shmup experience made with current day technology.

Adventure games have been making a comeback recently with games such as The Walking Dead topping charts, but these games are really more “social adventures” than actual adventure games. It would be great if we saw games like Myst come back, or even Maniac Mansion. Sometimes, all you really want to do is rub one object onto another object until you figure out what the programmers were thinking. That's why Point and Click Adventures are one of the 10 Genres That Deserve a Comeback.

Yes, you heard us. Arcade games need a comeback! We want to see some new games made that don’t have a huge story or multiple expansive levels. We want to see chefs running across oversized hamburgers for no good reason. We want to see plumbers chasing giant monkeys. We want to see little yellow circles eating pellets in dark corridors. More importantly, We want to see new crazy wacked out concepts that give us no reason to play other than besting our friends on the high score list.

Where did all the good flight sims go? For the life of us, we can think of Ace Combat and… really nothing else. It seems like we have the technology to make amazing flight sims. Our controllers have tilt sensors, analog sticks, and touch pads, perfect for the complicated controls of an airplane. We even have complex motion control peripherals that could easily mimic a simple airplane flight stick. It’s time to get dog fighting back into the air.

There is something enjoyable about text adventures. Typing something like “pick up jar,” or “open door,” or “walk north,” makes you feel as if your character’s actions are coming right from your brain. It almost feels like you are creating his actions rather than choosing his actions from a limited list. With our current day technology we could have text parsers understand all manner of statements. Look at Scribblenauts and its huge library of objects you can create just by typing the word. A more flexible text adventure would be an outstanding addition to our current generation landscape. Now consoles just need to let us use USB keyboards more freely.

Finally, the #1 entry in our list of 10 Genres That Deserve a Comeback is the JRPG. There was a time when this genre was king. In the days of the SNES, the best stories and most wonderful gaming experiences were all JRPGs. Many SNES JRPGs are still considered some of the best games of all time, period. Remember Chrono Trigger? Remember Final Fantasy VI? Where are these blockbusters today? One of the only great JRPGs of our current generation was Ni No Kuni, and that took studio Ghibli to do it right! Square seems to have forgotten all about its chocobos and moogles at this point. Capcom has pretty much given up on Breath of Fire. Come on guys! Bring the JRPG back!