4) Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes
There aren’t many remakes out there as thorough as this one.
Developed primarily by the, sadly, now-defunct Silicon Knights in conjunction with series creator Hideo Kojima and Nintendo, Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes is, without a shadow of a doubt, one of the best titles to have ever graced the petite purple box that is the Big N’s sorely underappreciated GameCube. Owing to its scarcity today, you’ll have to pay out the wazoo in order to secure a copy of Solid Snake’s first 3D mission, but trust me, it’s worth every last penny.
To save you from having to trawl through an exhaustive list of what The Twin Snakes improves upon in relation to its forebear, I’ll make it simple: just about everything is better. It’s the additional lengths that Konami, Silicon and Kojima went to for the remake that takes it above and beyond the original. That’s not to say the PlayStation version doesn’t have its place – a great number of fans still prefer its own atmospheric identity – of course, but the complete package provided by Twin Snakes’ new cut scenes, re-recorded dialogue (from the original cast) and adopting of features from later games simply makes for a more fluid experience.
It’s worth noting, too, that enemy AI received a significant upgrade in the reimagining, evolving from brain dead status to exhibiting a level of sentience more akin to that of a human, with regular grunts able to communicate the presence of a suspicious-looking box between themselves.
Oh and one last thing. Any game that breaks the fourth wall as spectacularly as Psycho Mantis does gets an A from me. I never did finish Super Mario Sunshine – thanks for the reminder, you gas mask-wearing freak.