Video games have become an industry of repetition. Every major sport has several new licensed video games coming out every year. Gamers everywhere salivate at the coming of the next Call of Duty or Medal of Honor. The granddaddy of video gaming, Nintendo, has built its reputation on bringing back Mario, Link, Donkey Kong and more year after year for game after game. Sequels rule the roost even more than in Hollywood.

But somehow, amidst all this madness, some of the greatest games of all time fall by the wayside. Brilliant concepts, amazing gameplay and truly unique and original ideas get tossed in the garbage so that the tried and true sequels can keep going.

This is never going to happen no matter what

I’m no expert on how the industry works. Maybe the studios close for financial reasons. Maybe the licensing rights expire. Maybe it’s some kind of dark sorcery. All I know is that there were some pretty amazing video games in my youth that desperately need to be updated for today’s market. They need to come back, embrace the better graphics and game engines, and blow our fragile little minds all over again. Here are 6 video games that I think are overdue for a triumphant return!

6. Panzer Dragoon

Oh for the carefree days of riding dragons and shooting everything that moves. What more could any of us want in life? Panzer Dragoon was a rail-shooter that dabbled in art, music and beauty, or at least the equivalent of beauty in late 90s graphics. Your gun-wielding hero jumps onto the back of his big, blue dragon, and together you fly on a generally controlled path, shooting all of the enemies around you. The magic of Panzer Dragoon was that it was just damn beautiful. I can still remember standing in the game store and being transfixed at the screen. The gameplay was hardly cutting edge, but the overall experience was spiritual.

There hasn’t been a Panzer Dragoon game since 2003, before the dawn of HD graphics. I think that definitely needs to be rectified. Unfortunately, everyone involved in the game has moved on. Just announced this week at E3, developer Yukio Futasugi is making a game called Red Dragon, which looks similar to Panzer Dragoon. So maybe that will have to suffice. And I can think of worse careers to have in life than making beautiful games about dragons.

5. Star Wars: Jedi Power Battles

There will (probably) always be new Star Wars games coming out, many of which are incredible in their own right. But my favorite Star Wars video game of all time is Jedi Power Battles for the Playstation 1, a multiplayer hack’n’slash that came out shortly after The Phantom Menace and features you and your friends running around with lightsabers slicing through battle droids! The game was a ton of fun in its simplicity, and my brother and I played for hours in level after level of droid-destroying awesomeness. You got to pick from five prequels-era Jedi, including Mace Windu and a young Obi-Wan, as well as a ton of unlockable characters, like Darth Maul. Each character had a variety of specific Force and lightsaber powers, but mostly you just sliced your way through the bad guys. The game also had an excellent blocking system that allowed you to bounce laser blasts back into your foes’ faces. Eat blaster fire, stupid robots!

Star Wars has come out with numerous games where you play a lightsaber-wielding Jedi who runs around killing opponents, and most of them have been great. Force Unleashed, anyone? Now imagine if Force Unleashed wasn’t tied to a rigid storyline, and imagine if you could pick any number of Jedi and Sith warriors to play, and imagine if it was co-op, so you and your friends could go hog wild against the forces of evil! I want to play that game. I want to feel the heat of a lightersaber in my hands as I send droids to whatever counts as droid hell!

4. Commandos

There are millions of war games out there, but there was only one Commandos. And I don’t just mean in quality, but in unique gameplay and style as well. Most soldier games are first-person shooters, doing their darndest to recreate real battlefield conditions so that 13-year-olds can shoot each other and swear at each other’s mamas. Other war games are real-time strategy, giving you whole armies to command in the glory of war. Commandos was neither, and yet better than both, at least in my opinion. Commandos, for PC, had the bird’s eye view of an RTS, but instead of whole armies, you instead commanded one single crack squad of highly trained soldiers. Commandos gave you a big, colorful map, filled it with Nazis soldiers, then left it to you to figure out how your guys were going to save the day. Would you send the commandos in guns blazing? Or would you use stealth to take out the guards one-by-one until your team had cleared the whole map and victory was well in hand?

I much preferred the latter.

Commandos was a game of incredible patience, kind of like putting together a puzzle. The maps were very intricate, be they a zoo, a naval yard or occupied Paris, and they were filled with patrolling and stationary guards. Using guns, knives, fists, explosives and especially disguises, you had to take out enough guards to move freely through the map to accomplish your goals, be they rescue a prisoner, transmit Nazi secrets or commandeer a submarine. Commandos was an intricate game of timing and resource management, and was unlike anything else on the market.

So, of course, the developers would suddenly change the game to a first-person shooter in 2006, turning this wonderful series into just another Call of Duty clone. Fans hated Commandos: Strike Force and we haven’t had a new game since.

3. Bloody Roar

Every good fighting game needs a gimmick, and for Bloody Roar, it was anthropomorphized animal warriors! Bloody Roar and its three sequels came out during the height of 3D fighter game popularity, alongside the likes of Virtual Fighter, Tekken, Dead or Alive and all the rest. But what set Bloody Roar apart was that its fighters had the ability to transform into animal versions of themselves. They weren’t always animals, like the Ninja Turtles, but could instead change shape in the middle of battle with the press of a button. One moment you’re a typical karate master character mashing buttons, and the next you’re a half-tiger tearing out your opponent’s throat! Or maybe you’re a cheetah or a bat or a boar or a freaky lizard or a badass elephant behemoth!

Bloody Roar is like Ninja Turtles and Transformers combined, with the added fun of going Super Saiyan in the middle of battle. The story is pretty out there, like a convoluted anime, but who cares about the story? Bring on the beastly battles! The developers were going to try to make a new game to come out some time next year, but the studio went belly up and the game was cancelled. Fighting games aren’t as hot right now as they were back in the day, but considering the recent revivals of Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat and Tekken, I would love to see another Bloody Roar. Especially if they finally include a platypus character. That’s a must.

2. Mutant League Football

Imagine the latest Madden NFL game, with all of the graphical and technical superiority that franchise possesses, but all of the characters are bloodthirsty monsters playing on a field filled with firepits and booby traps. That is the genius of Mutant League Football, a gruesome Madden clone that only ever saw a single release in 1993 for the Sega Genesis. How Mutant League has remained dormant for 20 years is beyond me. Why play a game with the Green Bay Packers or the New York Giants when you can be the Darkstar Dragons or the Slay City Slayers? Mutant League is a game where sacking the quarterback may cause him to explode in a storm of blood in guts, where you have to jump over a row of spikes just to reach the endzone, where the ball really could put someone’s eye out, and where ‘kill the referee’ is a legitimate strategy!

Year after year, the Maddren franchise churns out the same old football game again and again. And I realize that Madden players love their franchise as much as I love Warcraft, but who wouldn’t love a little murder and mayhem in their gaming? The joy of Mutant League is in the juxtaposition from the straight-laced, by-the-book Madden to the insane, all-hell-broken loose Mutant League. Use the same game engine and animation style, and let your sick imagination run wild. Imagine a football game where the players are robots, skeletons and drooling monsters; where they wield swords, lasers and jetpacks, all in the name of a first down; where there are mines and acid pits sprawled across the field, and every tackle could mean the death of half a dozen players. Mutant League Football is a joyous bit of madness that came and went too quickly. The world of professional football games has changed in 20 years, and now is the time for the Mutant League to make the wildest comeback of all time!

Nobody’s using the ‘XFL’ brand name at the moment, are they?

1. Avenging Spirit

Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of Avenging Spirit, my friends, because that’s not uncommon. Games don’t get much more obscure than Avenging Spirit, nor do they get much more amazing. Released in arcades and for the original Game Boy in 1991, Avenging Spirit is your typical platformer about a lone hero trying to rescue his girlfriend, but with one brilliant twist: you play as a ghost with the ability to possess your enemies. It’s like an action game version of The Exorcist, only instead of little girls,  you get to possess gun-toting mobsters! The mechanic is brilliant in its simplicity and jaw-dropping in its scope.

Every level is filled with the typical assortment of bad guys that you have to beat up in order to reach the end and fight the boss. It’s Video Gaming 101. But in Avenging Spirit, you have the ability to possess and control any of the dozens of different bad guys you encounter. And the game is filled with different bad guys, including mobsters, kickboxers, karate masters, ninjas, vampires, baseball players, soldiers, sorcerers and fire-breathing lizardmen. You can play them all! And if you find someone you like better, you can switch to them on the fly. For my money, the black ninjas and the guy with the heat-seeking missiles were the two best.

I have no idea why the concept behind Avenging Spirit never continued into any sequels, revamps or even stolen outright for a different game. Avenging Spirit had so many fun options, and many of the best villains were hidden in the levels, so you had to go to great lengths to possess the best characters. What other action game or platformer gives you the option of more than 24 different playable characters? Avenging Spirit toyed with the very building blocks of action games, and it created an incredibly fun, infinitely replayable adventure.

Apparently there is at least one other person in the world who loves Avenging Spirit as much as I do, because Nintendo made it available to download on their eShop Virtual Console in 2011, and someone else made an IOS version for the Apple Appstore. So go out, my friends, and try to find this game. Play it while you can, because I doubt it’s ever really going to come back.

But I can dream.

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I would trade my first born for a modern remake of Avenging Spirit. But sometimes great games are lost forever. What are some of your favorite video games that haven’t been heard from in years?