Last years Retro Remake Competition seemed to entice a lot of pre-registrants, over two third’s of whose games never saw the light of day. One of the more impressive looking ones was Orc Attack by Jim Riley.

I am pleased to reveal that Jim didn’t give up after missing the deadline and has taken the time since to soup up the remake with better graphics/sounds. It’s quite a fun game lobbing hot oil at Orcs but does get just a little tough.

Hot on the heels of Frank’N'Stein that coding wizard Gilby has released his remake of Epic’s Light Heart, cunningly entitled Light Heart 2005, with music by the ever impressive Rockfistus. Never having played the original I was well impressed by what is really a single screen Boulderdash type challenge. The levels get tougher and tougher tho so don’t say I didn’t warn you !!

Had a nice email from Jennifer Reitz and as it was so nicely put I will use it to form the news piece :)

“My name is Jennifer Diane Reitz, and I am a long time lurking fan of Retro Remakes. I wanted to let you fine folks know that I have a game to offer to the pile, as it were.

I and my partner Stephen Lepisto are ‘Accursed Toys’, and once, long ago, we mattered just a tiny bit to gaming. Before we founded and sold ‘HappyPuppy.com’, we made games, mostly for the Amiga and early DOS machines. Our most infamous work was Boppin’, a subversive little puzzle game with a very strange and rude story.

Long story short, we are re-releasing Boppin’ for free, in a version which (finally!) runs under Windows on the PC.”

After six months in the making, from the coding talents of Darkside and Rockfistus, and the sexy graphical skills of Ric Lumb and others, you can finally get your hands on Equinox, the latest remake from Spacetime Games.

It’s a remake of Rafaelle Cecco’s platform shooter Equinox by Mikro Gen. Traverse around eight levels, disarming the nuclear threat by using the various tools dotted around, whilst splatting aliens left, right and centre. Once the level is disarmed its time to find the exit pass and move onto the next one.

I’ve been following this once almost since the start, having tested many a beta version, and can honestly say its a cracker :)

Arthur Scargill’s arch-nemesis Monty Mole gets the remake treatment once more, this time at the hands of Darkside, in a remake of his first outing Wanted: Monty Mole.

Ric Lumb’s beautiful pixellated graphics finally see the light of day in a finished project, having done the rounds of IRC for some 18mths or so since there non-use in another Monty project. Ric spent over a year on them and has since added more for this remake.

Both of the guys have done a splendid job. Grab it now !

Eugene Esterly III (is that the Ali G way of saying it?) has been busy finding a few remakes for consoles, amongst them are: A homebrew 1942 for the GBA, and also for the PSX2 we have Space Invaders and Pong. And back to Win32 for a final link, Extreme Commando is a remake of, yes you guessed it … Commando.

Steve Langley has pointed me in the direction of remakes for the IPOD … yes you read correctly ! Old Spectrum type text adventures such as Colour of Magic, but then this is the tip of the iceberg cos there’s loads of Ipod downloads to view.

Back when I bought my Atari ST (£399 full price!) it came with a version of Bombjack. I’d never played it til this point because it was boring to look at and not really worth my 10p. Once I got down to playing the ST version tho I became seriously addicted. Now we have a new remake to drool over in the shape of Bombjack by Epyx, forum members are raving over it.

Want a head wrecking retro game ? How about XYZ-Bert, a remake of Q-Bert, but in FULL 3D. Instead of one face of the pyramid to re-colour you have a full 3D 4-sided one in this fiendishly addictive Shockwave remake !!

Anyone up for a spot of R-Type, looking at the pics this remake from Mikel Naegele looks a bit odd but having not been able to play it yet I am not really qualified to pass comment. One to keep a watch out for tho !

Laszlo Jozsef mailed us to tell us about his Bomberman remake, the odds are you will get a 404, the site does exist tho cos I have loaded it once or twice. Seems to suffer the same fate as Gilby’s .hu sites tho !

Does Minesweeper count as retro these days? Well if it does then Planet Minesweeper is your one stop shop for remakes of it.

Now maybe those people that wanted to moan about the lack of news will get off my back. Ohh and take a good look at the news post because I don’t see any remakes by the moaners ? Do you ??

Right, you wanted news, here you go ….

Marble Madness fans will be drooling at the screenshots for this remake because it looks truly stunning. All six levels are included, and the author claims it is faithful to the arcade version in every way. Sadly it won’t let me play it without updating my graphics card drivers :(

Nearly fainted when I had an email from “Les Bird”. Soon came around when I realised it was about Levitar 3D, a remake of the old Atari classic Gravitar. Only one scenario to play through at the moment though.

I have vague memories of something called “Score League”, where we played Bubble Bobble, well some played and others like me struggled !! Anyway here we have a remake for your gaming pleasure … I have been warned by my doctor not to play it until the nightmares subside.

Once in a while I like to quote an email. This one is from Russia with love … “Recently we released Acres OF Gold. Game design based on Circler and Perestroyka – most famous arcades in ex-USSR of 80th. Circler were released on BK computers and Perestroyka on PC platform. For all retro players from Russia this title means the same as Asteroids, Invaders, Pacman etc. for the rest of the world!”.

Change of web address for Java Laser Squad. Nuff said.

How about a PSX remake? Anyone remember Devil Dice, well Bas de Reuver does, and whilst browsing he came across Evil Dice, based on the 1998 Sony title.

Back in the day I enjoyed Wing Commander. Maybe it was the neat interactivity, maybe it plugged the gap between Star Wars and Phantom Menace, I don’t know. However now we have a remake Wing Commander Privateer, and to quote from the site “The original Privateer is a well loved game, with incredible graphics and gameplay for its day. Built on an open source codebase, the Remake is a community effort to bring the universe of the original into the 21st century”. Thanks to Matt Teal for that one.

I love getting emails from people with just a link, meaning not only do I have to post it as news, I also have to research the game because no other details are included in the email. Well may I present Dragon Warrior, its an old NES RPG. Research ended.

Strangely I have had 3 people contact me in the last week to tell me about their new remakes, but the emails have been one paragraph with NO links and just scant detail. I have replied to the authors in the hope I can post some news. However, can you all please bear in mind that we need details to be able to post a good news piece ….

So today’s news starts with a direct link to the forum for details of Shane Hockings Cops & Robbers, a remake of an early C64 that was met with mixed reviews. Zzap64 scored it an overall 9%, but thats probably due to the lack of brown’s used. Anyway all the details are in the thread so no point repeating ‘em here.

Looks like the boys at Park Productions are revamping their Robocop 2D remake to bring out a sequel. The demo they have just released plays much better than the original … one to keep tabs on me thinks.

As for the “One Button Competition”, its STILL going to go ahead. Bob is in charge, he will lead the proceedings and create the rules. Us 3 judges will probably stick a couple of prizes in and see if we can rustle anything else up. It’s been delayed because we were waiting for our sponsor to get back to us with some prizes, sadly he didn’t bother. Yes, Mr Bray, you with the glowing red cheeks.

On a final note, it appears the Stuntmania download I posted about the other day is riddled with Spyware … I have had two reports of this now. Be aware.