Brandon Boyer

Retro Remakes: What Offworld readers want

No one emerged a clear winner in our straw poll to see which games Offworld readers would like to see remade, though a common thread did appear to emerge. System Shock was actually the first game to garner more than one vote, which is hard to disagree with: Looking Glass's brand of sci-fi horror has yet to be matched in the 15 years now since its original release.

The second game to come in with multiple votes is Apogee's shareware classic platformer Commander Keen (re-released via Steam), alongside the original 2D Duke Nukem games, both minor ground-breakers for bringing console-style platforming to the PC.

And finally, the no-brainer of the bunch: there's almost no one who wouldn't like to see a Monkey Island revival of more classic LucasArts adventures, particularly Ron Gilbert's Maniac Mansion.

Check the comments in the original thread for dozens more suggestions.

Brandon Boyer

Retro Remakes: Minter releases Gridrunner Revolution, Space Giraffe bundle

As promised, Llamasoft have just released their Gridrunner Revolution -- the latest iteration of the long-running psych-shooting classic -- alongside a new demo to experience it gratis.

In celebration of the launch, the 'softies have also bundled together Revolution with the the PC version of their last original shooter, Space Giraffe, for $25, just $5 over Revolution's asking price. Visit Llamasoft for the demo and purchase information.

Brandon Boyer

Retro Remakes flipside: Demaking modern games

The other side to the Retro Remake phenomenon is, of course, the demake (a term, I've just found out via Wikipedia, was coined by Polytron's Phil Fish): taking a modern game and simulating it as if through retro tech.

We've covered (or spawned) a number of these via Offworld in the past: the best examples of which are Kent 'SnowBro' Hansen and Andreas Pedersen's NES Guitar Hero game D+Pad Hero, Bill Meltsner's text adventure version of the same, Champion of Guitars, and CymonGames' ASCIIPortal, a game just released for PC and Mac.

In late 2008, though, the TIGSource Indie Massiv held a Bootleg Demakes competition, the results of which are reams (or, more appropriately, a 200+ meg torrent) of fantastic work: visit their site for more demakes than you can handle, including Oracle's NES-ish version of Aquaria at top.

Brandon Boyer

Retro Remakes: The official repository

Because there's just no way I could adequately cover all of the excellent remakes that have flowed out of the indie/freeware community over the past several years, here's the resource from someone that has, which you should pay close attention to for all your retro remake needs.

The site is, appropriately enough, retroremakes.com and continues to be the best and largest repository of Retro Remake information and downloads: see their massive and growing list of games here, and their list of handheld remakes, simulations of classic Game&Watch and Tiger LCD games.

Brandon Boyer

Retro Remakes: GameCity goes Elite with papercraft ships

Continuing in this week's celebration of 25 years of seminal space game Elite, Nottingham, UK festival GameCity has just announced a special 'My Life with Elite' session that will not only feature appearances by 'very special guests... responsible for creating the game itself', but also, amazingly, a reading of C64 Elite novella 'The Dark Wheel' by author Robert Holdstock, "whilst the Nottingham Trent University Choir perform a new arrangement of Strauss' Blue Danube waltz."

And just to make the event that much more surreal, GameCity has teamed up with Mark 'creaselightning' Bolitho -- a friend, it turns out, of Elite co-creator Ian Bell -- to release a series of papercraft starships from the game, which were originally designed to be sold as part of the C64 package but never made it in.

The first of the 'crafts, the Escape Pod, is already available on the GameCity site (direct .pdf link), with more coming weekly, and all the ships will be hung for the above reading to create "a kind of paper-universe of Elite craft."

One more reason I'm gutted to be missing GameCity this year (and yet another why you shouldn't) -- see the festival's official site for specifics on attending.

Brandon Boyer

Retro Remakes: Monkey Island in Crysis

Both Telltale and LucasArts have done their own part to revive the latter's seminal adventure Monkey Island for a now-gen audience, but VFX artist Hannes Appell has taken it upon himself to do the same, recreating LeChuck's Revenge's Tri-Island Area in Crysis's Cryengine.

The resulting madness has sunk Appell's site, but check back later for before and after shots of his work. [via .Tiff]

Brandon Boyer

Retro Remakes: Square Enix reviving PC shooter Thexder for PSP

It's always nice when developers oblige your theme week: Square Enix has announced -- just ahead of the upcoming Tokyo Game Show -- Thexder Neo, a remake of Game Arts' original PC transforming-giant-robot shooter, brought to the U.S. by Sierra in the late 80s.

Above is the debut video of the remake, due for release via the PlayStation Network for the PSP (and rumors abound, via the ESRB, of a PS3-playable version as well) on October 1st, with an online mode, reports andriasang, that lets six players race to complete each level's goals.

Brandon Boyer

Retro Remakes: 25 years of Elite

Elite's a name that for most Americans hangs around the murky outskirt periphery of game history, having grown up and around platforms that didn't dominate the States in the same way they did Europe (something its ill-fated NES release may have changed) -- but it's a game that most know was foundational for the industry, even if it wasn't an essential part of their own youth.

Developer Frontier (now behind WiiWare classic LostWinds and upcoming console thriller The Outsider) is celebrating the 25th anniversary of the game's release this week with a blowout series of videos and fan-interviews over the next few days, including the one above, with creator David Braben stepping you its history through the past two+ decades, giving you a better sense of what made it special.

And, of course, of special relevance to this week's theme: there probably hasn't been a single interview Braben's given in the past decade that hasn't asked for a status update on the possibility of a new Elite (I even slipped one in myself a few years back), the latest being over at gi.biz, where he admits, quite rightly, that "it would be mad for us not to work on it".

Brandon Boyer

Retro Remakes: Goldeneye XBLA rumors never say never again

It's been well past a year and a half since the first murmurs of an Xbox Live Arcade remake of the Nintendo 64 classic FPS Goldeneye 007 came to light, and though they eventually died down without ever having settled just who or what might have kept the project from appearing, original developer Rare has just updated with a few more comments on its legacy.

Writing in response to a reader question, Rare adds:

Fate was against us that day. Destiny conspired to raise the hurdles even as we attempted to clear them, resulting in unpleasant groinal injury. I suspect we're long past the stage where an agreement was on the cards, but you never know. Stranger things have happened... somewhere... probably.

While I don't exactly have the full inside scoop, it's quite clear that Rare are fully capable, technologically speaking, to bring their N64 output to life on XBLA (see: exhibits one and two and three), and what I have heard from a source close to the project is that even if it had been released, it likely would have been stripped of most all actual Bond references and licenses -- though specifically with this game it's not at all clear that that'd necessarily be to its detriment and that it couldn't stand just as strong without.

Brandon Boyer

Offworld's Retro Remakes week: what needs to be remade?

As you've probably spotted by now, this morning we've kicked off Retro Remakes week here at Offworld, which will supplement Offworld's regular coverage with a series of posts on essential remakes of classics that you need to play, and the remakes never made that we'd love to see done.

Before we get started then, a quick straw poll on the latter: what's the one game from the past 30 years of classics or overlooked underdogs that desperately deserves the remake treatment?

Leave your answer via the comments below, and we'll round up the results at the end of the week.

Brandon Boyer

A Better Mario Built: Robin Baumgarten tops Mario AI Competition

The very first entry into Julian Togelius and Sergey Karakovskiy's Mario AI Competition 2009 -- Robin Baumgarten's A*-enhanced agent previously featured here -- has emerged the winner, barely scraping ahead of second place.

Above is a slow-motion run of Baumgarten's agent that shows you second by second the mindboggling array of potential moves the agent cycles through in working out what I'm almost positive would be a pretty instantaneous death for me.

Find Baumgarten's source code and further details here, and see the competition's final presentation notes here.

Brandon Boyer

The soul still burns: Senile/Red Spot announce Dreamcast racer Rush Rush Rally Racing

And the other dejected-Dreamcast-lover's 09/09/09 news: developer Senile Team and publisher Red Spot Games have announced the latest unofficial new game for the console with Rush Rush Rally Racing, an "old school 2D racing game" to be released in October via eBay, Amazon, and direct from Red Spot (though the page is apparently under siege by would-be pre-orders at the moment).

Senile says the game will feature a single player grand prix mode, three multi-player modes with 19 different tracks, the requisite (and how long has it been since you've typed these words) VMU, rumble pack and VGA support, as well as an online high score table for those that can still manage to get their consoles connected.

See Senile's official site for more information, and visit Red Spot's page for pre-orders.