Twinworld Game Reviews

Posts Tagged ‘Retro Gaming’

Video games have come a long way over the past 30+ years. Characters such as Mario, Link, Kirby, and even Donkey Kong, have stood strong against the test of time. With each new game that gets released, gamers rejoice and happily open their wallets to experience Nintendo’s newest creation.

What ever happened to iconic characters such as Roger Wilco, Sir Graham, Guybrush Threepwood, or even Larry Laffer? Sure these characters are from famous Point & Click Adventure games released for PC decades ago, but they provided a level of challenge you just don’t get in many games today. This is just the tip of the iceberg though, as there are a TON of excellent games that were released for PC over the past 2-3 decades. Why do you think many of the players go back to playing these games again & again, because of the lack of a satisfying challenge / story in many of today’s games.

Besides Point & Click Adventure games, you have puzzle games such as the Dr Brain series. I used to play Castle of Dr Brain on my Amiga and it really tested your ability to solve various kinds of puzzles. You had binary puzzles, math puzzles, robot programming puzzles, and an actual puzzle just to name a few things you had to solve. Games like these challenged your analytical side and when you solved a puzzle, you got that feeling that you actually accomplished something great.

The Wii and Wii U could easily handle these type of games. We don’t necessarily need remakes of the older games, although that would be pretty sweet (especially with enhanced graphics). For Point & Click style games, the Wiimote is your mouse and you just click at your options on the screen. For the Wii U’s case, you also have your Gamepad in which you could utilize the touch screen for Off-TV gameplay. A new game in the Monkey Island series was released on the Wii as a WiiWare title a few years back, but unfortunately suffered from framerate issues and poor loading times.

There are other great game examples as well which are not Point & Click based, such as Typhoon Thompson. This was quite a fun game back in the day where you controlled the character’s craft by mouse movement. This would work perfectly with Nintendo’s motion controls in the Wiimote / Gamepad. Your character would move according to the direction you tilt your controller, utilizing the buttons for firing etc. We don’t need a fully rendered 3D world to utilize such controls, even a pseudo one such as this is a good example on how to make a motion-controlled game.

There’s other examples such as Speedball 2 by The Bitmap Brothers. This was an excellent sports type game that I spend many hours playing. There’s racing games such as Nitro and Test Drive, platformers such as Twinworld and Chuck Rock, puzzle games like Lemmings and Push Over, adventure games such as Dungeon Master and Ultima… I could keep going, but you get my drift.

There are many quality PC games from the 80’s and 90’s that deserve to be experienced by today’s gamers. Sure there is emulation, but that’s a copyright-related topic for another day. Many of these great classics are being ported, remade, or continued on mobile devices by 1 such video game company out of France, DotEmu. If you want to see quality classic games brought to the Wii U, then you need to let your voice be heard! Reach out to DotEmu (and other gaming companies) and let them know on their Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ accounts that you want to see classic PC games brought to the Wii U eShop.