retro games

Outlaws + Handful of Missions: Remaster thoughts

~ mpklamerus ~ Leave a comment

Developer: Lucasarts, Nightdive Studios
Publisher: Atari
Year: 2025
Genre: FPS
System: Windows

Outlaws is a FPS where you play as ex-Marshal James Anderson, looking to get revenge after outlaws murder your wife and kidnap your daughter. It was originally released in 1997 by Lucsarts and got a remaster from Nightdive. I felt compelled to check it out after The International House of Mojo did a negative review of it. Much like that reviewer, I remembered enjoying it. Was it really that bad? I had access to the remaster through Steam Family Sharing so I thought I would give it a shot and the TLDR is: meh. It’s not as bad as the review says, but also not as great as I remember either.

a sign that says "Stan's Used Coffins"
A fun little Monkey Island reference

I should probably talk about the good stuff first. The cutscenes and soundtrack are amazing. At this point in the life of Lucasarts, we were just starting to see them wind down on doing 2D animation in their games and cutscenes. Curse of Monkey Island also comes out in 1997, but I believe after this year they move fully into 3D and keep moving further into being a company that just makes Star Wars games. They still make quite a few good games after this point, I’m a huge fan of Grim Fandango (1998) and they continue making good Star Wars games, but to a certain fan we’re starting to reach the end of the line for the company. But Outlaws does an outstanding job using these cutscenes to tell the story between levels, and they look great. It’s probably the thing that keeps people thinking about the game. The soundtrack is great as well. It’s by Clint Bajakian and perfectly replicates the feel of classic westerns. I think anyone who is a fan of the game will tell you it’s the presentation that really wins them over.

The game itself feels very good to play. It’s built on the engine used for Dark Forces, so everything feels very solid. The weapon selection isn’t too bad either. It’s a little repetitive with the number of shotguns it offers you, but they did everything they could with the setting they had to work with. It’s built on a very solid foundation, so the game controls very well.

I think where the game starts to run into issues is the level design and mechanics of the game that it has to stick to due to the nature of it being a Western. The level designers did the best they could, but you can only do so much in a world design that still needs to be grounded in reality but plays like a fast-paced shooter. You’ll have very small towns or giant buildings like sawmills that you need to explore, but progress needs to be gated somehow and the only real option they have is from having locks and keys. They had a very limited number of design choices to choose from and it ultimately makes the game feel very repetitive. They tried to mix things up by having you on a moving train at one point, which I always love in FPS, and cliffs in another, which helps. The one level where it starts to get less grounded and you’re doing puzzles while sliding down streams in a lumber mill is my least favorite one, so maybe my theory is wrong. But Lucasarts had great level design in all of their other FPS, and the same folks worked on those, so that’s what I’m going to blame.

Due to it being a western you’re also just stuck fighting the same types of enemies repeatedly. Some may have shotguns or rifles, but there’s not a whole lot they could have done. There’s a boss enemy at the end of each level which is generally just a stronger person with a gun who may shoot faster, but I think those are still neat. They also have you shoot at big spiders at a few points which I absolutely hated as a kid. It’s still an odd thing. But that’s what I mean about them only being able to do so much, it’s a western so you’re shooting at various guys with guns and that’s it. The Mojo review mentions the enemies being very dumb and yeah, they are. They mostly stand there or pace back and forth, and sometimes shoot in the wrong direction, which was odd even at the time of the original release. Since the game was released in the 90’s, there was at least some awareness that the tropes in westerns could be very racist, so they avoid most of that, but not always! The brief moments where they run into those are not great. Most people don’t read manuals but I didn’t really care for the descriptions of some of the boss enemies either.

I think the remastered bits are perfectly fine. The new art for the enemies is built on the concept art and generally fits in ok with the rest of the 2D art in the game. The original game uses prerendered sprites of 3D models which I think can be charming, but I can’t imagine anyone new to the game preferring that over the remastered artwork. Luckily you can just enable and disable whatever you want, so it’s hard to see anyone getting mad over the new artwork. It also remaps the keys to fit in more with the control schemes of modern FPS, but I think there’s mods for the original game that can do this too? The only real part of the remaster that I got excited about was all the bonus materials showing concept art and other behind the scenes materials. It’s nice to see all of this here and preserved. If there’s a reason why you would pick this version up over the old one on GOG, it’s probably this.

I guess where I come down on Outlaws is that the game and remaster are fine. I think the other FPS by Lucasarts such as Dark Forces and Jedi Knight are much better due to how much more freedom they had in their design, but I wouldn’t call it a bad game either. I know that’s just a huge ringing endorsement for this game. I would have a very hard time telling people they should pay $30 for this, but if you ever see it on a deep discount and you have nostalgia for the original game then yeah, maybe you would enjoy revisiting the game. Sometimes you just shrug after playing a game and go “that was alright.”

Outlaws + Handful of Missions: Remaster is available on PC (Steam, GOG), PlayStation (PS4, PS5), and Xbox (One, Series X|S).

Living Books: Just Grandma and Me thoughts

~ mpklamerus ~ 5 Comments

Developer: Living Books
Publisher: Brøderbund Software, Inc.
Year: 1992
Genre: Edutainment
System: Macintosh

Yeah, that’s right. I’m reviewing a multimedia cd-rom. Just Grandma and Me is an interactive storybook based on the Little Critter book of the same name. You go through 12 screens of a book about Little Critter going to the beach with his grandma, which the game reads to you, and then you click on things to see funny little animations until you decide to go to the next page. There’s not a whole lot to it but it must work because my kids like it and I liked it when I first played it as a child too.

a little critter looking surprised at a crab while his grandma reads on the beach
Screenshot taken from MobyGames

The first time I played it was when I was 6 years old and in my 1st grade classroom (if you want to know how old I was, it was September, 1993). The teacher put the cd-rom into the classroom’s Macintosh and I was blown away. Little Critter was talking and telling us which buttons we could push, and then started dancing to music. I had never seen a game do this before. This was my first time seeing a cd-rom as well, since we did have a PC (and Amiga before that) at home but they didn’t have cd-rom drives. I was so charmed by the story reading itself to me and all the funny animations that happened from clicking on stuff. Our family did eventually get a cd-rom drive about a month or two later and it came bundled with this game, which I played a lot along with later titles in the Living Books series.

A cd-rom is going to be a little less magical in 2026 (to some folks, not me!) but I think it still holds up, or at least my kids like it. The animations are still charming and it’s got a lot of funny little bits that happen when you click on stuff. Obviously it’s not a thing you’re still going to charge $30 or whatever for, but interactive storybooks are still a thing that kids enjoy and that’s what this is. Later releases of the game include a minigame or two as well as the ability to play in other languages. Plus with it having ScummVM support, you can play it on basically everything.

Fun fact: While he had plenty of success with his books, Mercer Meyer has a long history in computer games too. While most of his games are related to his Little Critter books, he did a few before this, including a text adventure.

Living Books: Just Grandma and Me is available on Steam and mobile platforms.

Spy Fox in “Dry Cereal” thoughts

~ mpklamerus ~ 2 Comments

Developer: Humongous Entertainment
Publisher: Humongous Entertainment
Year: 1997
Genre: Adventure
System: Windows

Something that’s been a lot of fun as my kids continue to grow has been revisiting games from my childhood. The most recent one has been Spy Fox in “Dry Cereal,” a point-and-click adventure by Humongous Entertainment. In the first Spy Fox game you play as a spy (who happens to be a fox, as it says on the tin) that rescue the world’s cows and stop William the Kid (a goat) from stealing the world’s supply of milk. Like everything else by Humongous Entertainment, this was a delight to revisit with my kids.

spy fox and another character dancing, he is standing on her upraised arm. They're on a boat.

The game features the great art and animation you would expect from the studio. Everything still looks great today and the only real bummer about the current state of HE releases is that I do think they would look better at an even higher resolution. But at the same time I feel like that risks being twisted into something awful and we get an AI upscaling everything, so I’ll happily settle for how they look from the 90’s.

It’s also been fun seeing how carefully HE rolled out adventure games for children of all ages. Putt-Putt, Freddi Fish, and Fatty Bear were created for very young kids, 3-8 year olds, Pajama Sam is advertised for that age group too but I would argue is for an age range that is one year old, and Spy Fox is for 5-10 year olds. It’s just a tad bit more difficult than the rest of their adventures but roughly follows the same format and there being a core goal you complete through adventure game solving, one or two mini games you can play on the side, and possibly a real time sequence. I personally think the timed reaction sequences aren’t great and would remove them, but I think the rest of the game works.

The puzzles are trickier than what you would see in Putt-Putt and makes the game take longer to complete, but I don’t think it’s anything impossible for older kids. I think the only bit during the puzzle solving that doesn’t work for me is that Spy Fox has a limited inventory space for gadgets and to try other gadgets, you need to return to your HQ to swap out what you have for other gadgets. It’s a slog. I get why this approach was taken, the alternative is to just get everything and the HQ becomes a lot less interesting after that, but I maybe would have had other reasons to return to HQ and just let them have it all. Other than that though, I think the puzzles are interesting and it’s kinda fun that they start to introduce the idea of note taking to kids in this game.

Anyway, it’s a good game. I don’t know if I would recommend it to grownups to play by yourself but my kids loved it and I had fun playing it with them.

Spy Fox in “Dry Cereal” is available on Steam, Switch, PS4, and mobile platforms but ScummVM support means you can play it on basically everything.

The British Game Generator

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Started making a silly little thing last night and put it on Itch. It’s just a goofy little generator for making ideas for games inspired by 80’s British computer games. Like it says on the page description, I’m poking fun at them but I do have a sincere love for that era of games (well maybe not Dizzy) and I like making my little generators so I thought to try making one in Twine. It’s obviously very early in development and I’m planning on making it look nicer as well as continuing to build on it so it can generate more ideas, but wanted to get it out there before I get distracted by something else. I’ll eventually put it here too because I like the idea of all my games also being hosted here in case something were to happen to Itch.

Welp, Started a Gubble Fan Site

~ mpklamerus ~ 1 Comment

I should probably be working on my weekly indie game roundup post, maybe tomorrow, but instead I started a fansite for the 90s puzzle game Gubble. I thought of doing some kind of very specific fansite for a relatively obscure game for a long time now, at one point I wanted to do one for Pyst, but the Critical Distance fansite jam finally nudged me into starting one. It’s obviously a work in progress. Lots of pages aren’t done yet and I’ll continue adding more to the ones that I’ve already made. It turns out there’s lots I have to say about Gubble. But I’m going to keep it incredibly minimalist. It’s been fun toying with something only using extremely basic HTML and a tiny bit of CSS, and I’m going to keep it that way. Maybe you’ll consider making a fansite too?

BioMenace Remastered thoughts

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Developer: Rigel Gameworks
Publisher: Rigel Gameworks
Year: 2025
Genre: Platformer
System: Windows

side view of a guy with a mullet shooting at a pink blob

BioMenace Remastered is a very recent rerelease of the shareware classic BioMenace, which adds lots of graphics customization options and updates, and a brand new 4th episode of levels. You play as Snake Logan, a man with a mullet and mustache who must stop an evil scientist from destroying the world or something like that. It’s not the most important plot. All you need to know is that you are a guy with a sweet mullet who needs to rescue a hostage on each level and then leave. Sometimes you fight a boss. And it’s great. It’s not even a game I had much nostalgia for, my memories of the game at release were my dad struggling to get the shareware to work on our computer for some reason. The game holds up surprisingly well though, especially compared to some of the other shareware games from that era that I have nostalgia for but may be harder for me to recommend to others.

There’s not really much more to say about the actual gameplay. It’s all very straightforward but I think it feels good running around and shooting at monsters. There’s a demo on Steam so if you find it enjoyable, the rest of the game is more of that. I mentioned before that I really liked the Crystal Caves remaster and even though this is by different devs, this feels like it builds on that and the Secret Agent remaster by offering even more graphics customization options as well as the extra episode and level builder that seems to be expected from these. If you want to play with the original graphics you certainly can, but the game’s new modern mode looked great to me and I actually stuck with that for most of the time. It even lets you enable and disabled various bits so if you want to play with the original art but in widescreen mode, you can! I believe these devs did a Duke Nukem remaster or rerelease for the Evercade that may have similar options, but I don’t own one so I can’t speak for that.

The additional episode 4 is great. It introduces a lot of new little level design tricks that keep it feeling fresh the entire time and the levels are a bit larger in scope so it takes more time to play through than the original three episodes. There’s a fun little cameo by someone from another shareware game that made me so happy when I saw it.

Anyway, that’s all I have to say about this one. I think the game holds up and this seems like the ideal way of remastering these old shareware platformers. I hope it does well and we keep getting more of them. I know they exist for Crystal Caves, Secret Agent, and Monsters Bash (these being all by Emberheart), with one for Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure on the way, but I’ll keep playing more of them if they’re as good as the ones we’ve already got.

BioMenace Remastered is available on Steam

Crystal Caves HD thoughts

~ mpklamerus ~ 2 Comments

Developer: Emberheart Games
Publisher: Apogee Games
Year: 2020
Genre: Platformer
System: Windows

Crystal Caves HD is a remaster of the 1991 shareware game by Apogee where you play as Mylo Steamwitz, a miner in outer space, trying to become rich. The platformer has you going through levels and grabbing all the crystals in each one while trying to avoid various monsters and traps. There’s also a puzzle element as you have to carefully plan the use of the timed power ups in the level to reach certain areas and the order that you’ll unlock doors and activate platforms. I used to play the original version quite a bit as a kid so it was nice to see this rerelease happen. Emberheart has done a few of them at this point, with Secret Agent and Monster Bash being the other two Apogee remasters they’ve done. I’ve previously played through the Secret Agent one and enjoyed that quite a bit, and the gameplay and additions in this remaster are very similar.

a miner jumping on metal or stone platforms behind a giant green monster
Image taken from Steam page

The remaster adds more color and smoother animation to the original game, music, an entire new episode of levels, and a level creator. I can see the argument for the additional colors removing some charm from the original game but I think it looks nice. The music is fine too but if I did have any criticisms of this remaster I think it’s that the music almost sounds more like something on an older video game console rather than a PC game from this era. This is a very minor gripe though. I think the new levels are very solid and feel like a good continuation of the previous three episodes, and the level editor seems to have been embraced by a very active community with the developer still adding stuff years later.

a screen about how the main character has found success with his burger restaurant, which is floating in space
This ending screen from episode 3, also in the original game, is just Monolith Burger from Space Quest 3, isn’t it?

I’m very possibly too nostalgia poisoned to accurately assess this game but I think it holds up pretty well and Emberheart has done a wonderful job with the remaster, just like they did with Secret Agent. If I had any complaints about the game, not the remaster, it’s that it becomes tedious to marathon the game and it’s why I very slowly played this over a year, but it’s still pleasant to play in short bursts. The developer has also done a remaster of Monster Bash, another Apogee shareware game I loved. I haven’t played it yet but the reception on Steam seems to be very positive and I’m sure it’s great if it’s anything like the other two they’ve done. I haven’t finished it yet but Emberheart also developed the fps Wizordum, which kinda feels like if Catacomb 3D had kept being iterated on instead of ID moving on to Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. If you’re a retro FPS fan, I highly recommend it. There’s also an upcoming remaster of BioMenace that is not by this developer but looks amazing, with it having lots of features I wish this had, like the ability to switch between the old and new graphics. Give the demo a try if you have fond memories of the original.

Crystal Caves HD is available on Steam and GOG.

Support Rebecca Heineman’s GoFundMe

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I was originally going to do an indie game roundup but don’t really have the energy for it today. I’d just like to encourage people to donate to Rebecca Heineman’s GoFundMe. It was originally setup to help cover the cost of fighting cancer but is now for covering hospice and funeral costs. She’s done so much for other folks in video games and has always been very generous with her time so please consider donating if you can. If you’re curious about what she’s worked on, MobyGames has listed plenty of her credits but I’m pretty sure there’s quite a few that aren’t on there.

Well, Never Mind on RetroAchievements Then

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About a month and a half ago I made a post about how I just learned about RetroAchievements and how it was a fun thing to use when revisiting old games. Well, hmmmm, I’m now deleting my account. It has just been discovered by folks that the site has a bit of a Nazi problem, which kills any interest I had in using the site so I put in my account deletion request, which apparently takes them two weeks to process. The quote retweets list other examples of the site’s moderation team not really caring about what users do. They can say as many times as they want that they’re neutral and just care about preservation but folks, they’re adding achievements to video games and that’s it. They can do whatever they want. You don’t need to add achievements to a far right rom hack.

Oh well, one less account for me to think about I guess and I can go back to not using RetroArch.

EDIT: They’ve since put out an apology and stated the right right rom hack won’t be added to the site which is good. I’m still probably going to let my account delete itself because I don’t really need to keep doing achievements for old games anyway, but I’ve got two weeks to think about it and see if they do anything else I guess.

Ween: The Prophecy thoughts

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Developer: Coktel Vision
Publisher: Coktel Vision
Year: 1992
Genre: Adventure
System: DOS

two weird humanoids with giant mustaches saying "We're UKI and ORBI"

To be a fan of French DOS games is knowing that mechanically the game may not be the tightest thing, but it could be weird enough and take enough swings to be worth it. Some of my favorite games are French DOS games and include: Alone in the Dark, Little Big Adventure, Lost Eden, and The Bizarre Adventures of Woodruff and the Schnibble. I’m a huge fan of Coktel Vision so it was unfortunate that I mostly found Ween: The Prophecy to be a frustrating experience.

The game has a plot about you stopping an evil wizard, but it’s mostly an excuse for you to move to various rooms, in an almost puzzle room level-based format, and solve the various inventory puzzles before moving on to the next room. This is one of those games that quickly wraps up with a block of text when you beat the final puzzle. Unfortunately I frequently found these puzzles to rely heavily on moon logic or sometimes broken, which meant mostly doing trial and error and trying every item on everything, or just pulling up a walkthrough because I got tired of the sluggish response from every action. I took notes while playing and there’s many instances where I just did not understand what was happening in the game or instances of me trying an action, checking a walkthrough to see that I was doing the right action, but was just not trying it enough times for it to actually work. The entire game consists of these inventory puzzles so the game quickly became a huge slog to play. There are one or two points where there are multiple solutions, but those were the only clever bits in the game’s design.

an illustration of a boat and text at the bottom saying "Bad idea..."

Even worse than a game consisting of trial and error puzzles is that the game tells you that you had a bad idea, or that your character is getting frustrated, or something isn’t working. It’s aggressively hostile in a genre called Point-And-Click Adventure, where you often just want to click on something to get a description or to see what happens. Instead of either of those things happening though, you are just scolded. It’s immensely frustrating to play an adventure game where you are actually discouraged from clicking on things. I wasn’t even trying to solve a puzzle. It is just common practice to play around in an environment and click around but this is a game that does not want you to do that. I suppose to the game’s credit, I didn’t come across any softlocks.

It’s so frustrating that the game is so unfun to play because the parts surrounding it are nice. Like just about every other Coktel Vision game, I like the art and music. Charles Callet does a fantastic job on the soundtrack like he did on every other game he worked on. There’s also some really weird FMV in here that other people online seemed to find disturbing but I liked how weird it was. The weirdness is why I usually play French DOS games.

So unfortunately, I can’t really recommend this game. I generally love Coktel Vision’s games, even when the gameplay is a bit clunky like in Inca, because there’s usually a lot of really interesting stuff going on and the game has something to say. Ween: The Prophecy just does not have enough to justify playing through the game.

Ween: The Prophecy is not available for sale anywhere but is probably on your favorite abandonware site and playable through ScummVM.