Underutilized Licenses

Kyle Orland has a pretty interesting article up over at Gamasutra.com. In it he discusses what he thinks are the 20 most underutilized licenses (game, movie, book, television, etc.). For each entry he gives some background on the license, how he thinks it should be made into a game, and then even suggests which development house would be best for it.

You can read it here.

Some of his entries sound pretty dull and it's pretty obvious Kyle's fascination with the Grand Theft Auto series has colored his judgment a bit, but it's a good read. And it gets major points from me for including R.C. Pro Am and the Dark Tower, two things I've been clamoring for a current-gen videogame edition of for a long time. And his suggestion for a XBLA remake of R.C. Pro-Am with HD graphics and new weaponry sounds absolutely superb.

The one big omission on his list was the Alex Kid series. How that series has not seen a single update since the Sega Master System (i.e. when I was 13 years old) is beyond me. Any game that settles boss fights with rock-paper-scissors deserves to have a cult following and be remade at least once every 6 years! And while I agree with Kyle that the movie Goodfellas could make for a good game, it's essentially already been done with the outstanding Russian-developed (go figure) Mafia game. If you haven't played the PC version of Mafia you're really missing out. It's one of the great cinematic action games around. With fantastic classic-car racing too! And by classic cars, I'm not talking about Mustangs and Camaros (gag!) I'm talking 1930's classics! It's an absolutely fantastic game, but just be sure to skip the Xbox port with the same name, as it was a bug-filled shadow of its former self.