Liked this game on the NES, though I never got past the first level. I only played it when my NES-owning friend rented it a few times.
Hard Corps: Uprising is a pretty nice sequel to Contra for HD consoles, made by Arc System Works (Guilty Gear and BlazBlue).
I own this game. I bought it at a used game shop. I have never played it underneath my backlog, but it looks great.
I wish more of the recent Shining games would come ot, and I wish they'd do a full 3-D Shining Force game. I own Shining Force I & II on Steam and Shining Force III (Scenario 1) on Saturn.
Tomb Raider may have broken 1 million sales within its first two days on the market, according to an Eidos rep.
It's too bad they couldn't have kept Yasumi Matsuno and Hitoshi Sakimoto. Final Fantasy XII fit the bill of nearly everything you just described.
While I don't think there will be any more huge graphical leaps or revolutions, there are still room for games to polish up. Two of my favorite games this generation were Valkyria Chronicles and Ni no Kuni - games that could technically have been done on a PS2, but look so incredibly stunning on PS3 that it's hard to imagine them there. I'm not in such a hurry to return to the good old days myself.
This was one of the first PS1 games I bought. It was better than a lot of reviewers at the time gave it credit for and was Square's earnest, if uneven, attempt at a non-linear RPG. Wonderful music too. I have my PS1 copy still, but I think this game would be a success on PSN. Almost all of Square's PS1 games sell well there.
I thought FFX-2 was pretty awesome. It was a great implementation of FF5's job system and I loved the costumes.
In the case of Demon's Souls, Atlus saw an opportunity for the game after Sony passed on selling it in the US. Once that game became a success, there was no way a small publisher like Atlus could have hoped to outbid a megapublisher like Namco.
Atlus did a lot of publishing work on the HD consoles for other small publishers, stuff like Spectral Force 3, Operation Darkness, and the Game of Thrones video game. Their in-house work, however, was devoted to handhelds, but I think Atlus has made a solid reputation for itself this generation. It was an almost completely unknown publisher until the final years of the PS2. Hopefully Catherine's relative success will encourage them to develop more on the PS4.
The PS2 was considered difficult to program for. But since it was so popular, game designers sucked it up and developed for it, and they got pretty damn good at it after a couple of years. They even figured out how to compensate for the PS2's lack of built-in antialiasing. If the PS3 had the same kind of huge popularity edge over the 360 as the PS2, again as I've noted above, developers would have been more willing to find ways.
One of the most commonly cited problems developers had with the PS3 was its memory structure. The PS3 has 256MB of RAM and 256 MB of VRAM, while the 360 has 512MB of RAM. A lot of developers, including John Carmack of Id Software, felt the 360's RAM was much more flexible since it could be allocated as they saw fit for the game or the graphics. On the PS3, if you needed more than 256MB of RAM, you were SOL as you couldn't borrow from the VRAM. Obviously, a lot of developers got a good grasp of the PS3 and made some amazing games for it, but a lot of multiplatform developers optimized for the 360 and left the PS3 version as an afterthought.
I think the PS3 version of Vesperia was more wishful thinking than anything, as Namco never specifically promised that one. I wish they had, though. I own the 360 game, but since I'm a PS3 guy now, I'd love to have the PS3 version. Plus all the added content.
FFvXIII, I think they ought to just fold that one into FFXV at this point, hopefully using the stuff we saw in Agni's Philosophy. I wish Square Enix had considered making Type-0 a HD remaster for the PS3.
