As much as some people more or less cease to listen to new music in their 30s, I have noticed a retreat to safe, familiar gaming territory among some of my fellow millennial gamers. Retro collections are started, or resumed; jewel-cases of PS1 classics or cardboard boxes with SNES or Mega Drive games have started to colonise the living-room shelves. People are replaying things from their university days, or sticking to comfort games such as Stardew Valley.
Many of the friends I used to game with never bothered to pick up a PlayStation 5 at its launch, and now that current-generation consoles are becoming prohibitively expensive, they see no need. With thousands of great older games, why bother playing something new? My job, and an insatiable desire for novelty, has kept me in constant contact with new games, but nonetheless, I have been spending a lot of time lately with the titles I played in my youth because people keep remaking them.
Lylat Wars (N64, 1997) and Halo: Combat Evolved (Xbox, 2001) have both had summer 2026 glow-ups, in the form of Star Fox on Switch 2 and Halo: Campaign Evolved on the other consoles and PC. These are games I played for many, many hours back in the day, and I remembered them beat for beat (or so I thought – it turns out I did not remember how to navigate the deadly lava planet that ended my first Star Fox run). I was not enormously enthused by the prospect of either remake, because I’d rather play an original game in either of these series than rehash my rose-tinted recollections from 25 years ago (let’s just gloss over how old that makes us feel, shall we?).
But, it turns out all those years have given me a fresh perspective. Both of these remakes are very good. And not just because I played them at the time and remember them fondly, but because each of them does things that new video games don’t.
They feel novel, because in 2026, they are. When was the last time you played an arcadey on-rails space shooter? When was the last time you enjoyed an atmospheric single-player FPS with intelligent computer-controlled enemies?
These genres have fallen out of fashion – space games are now wide-open exploreathons such as No Man’s Sky (which celebrates its 10th anniversary this week), and multiplayer shooters have crowded single-player ones out almost entirely. In this context, Star Fox and Halo feel fresh. They’re not awkward transplants from another time.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
