Category Archives: Modern Retro

Steel Alcimus, PC

Another excellent Hijong Park retro tribute game – this one possibly his best so far – Steel Alcimus is an overhead helicopter shooter with either twin-stick joypad, or keyboard and mouse controls. I played it with mouse and keys and found the control system to be really quite ingenious.

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Frantic Dimension, PC

Frantic Dimension is another great, free game, made by talented Korean Hijong Park and released on Steam in 2018.

The opening animatic in Frantic Dimension is quite funny – made even funnier by the slightly off-kilter use of English (it’s not a criticism – I like it). 🙂

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Manos: The Hands of Fate, PC

Now this is a game I never thought I’d ever get to play… A game based on arguably the worst film of all time. A film called Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966), and a film that is so bad that it has been known to reduce grown men to tears… And – believe it or not – I’ve sat though it twice. Yes: twice. Anyone who’s seen Manos: The Hands of Fate might want to congratulate me on that feat since sitting through the film twice requires a special kind of skill… Thankfully – as a lover and connoisseur of bad films – I have developed an immunity to [most of] them over the years, and it was with some excitement that I purchased this game on Steam and installed it…

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Golden Hornet, PC

Golden Hornet, by Hijong Park, is an excellent ‘modern retro’-style, ‘twin stick’, helicopter-based shoot ’em up, set in a variety of different scrolling levels.

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VVVVVV, PC

Terry Cavanagh‘s VVVVVV is an extremely smart-but-simple platform/indie game that feels a lot like a Commodore 64 game from the ’80s, although it was actually released in 2010.

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Head Over Heels, PC

Which leads me up to this 2003 remake of Head Over Heels, by Retrospec.

A re-imagining of Ritman and Drummond‘s classic game, with updated visuals and sound. Does it cut the mustard? Does it live up to the greatness of the original?

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Project Zomboid, PC

Project Zomboid is a fantastic, post-apocalyptic, zombie survival horror game that was first released on Steam in 2011 and continues to evolve to this day.

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Shadowrun: Dragonfall, PC

Shadowrun: Dragonfall is a 2014 indie release from Harebrained Schemes, set in the Shadowrun universe.

The developers tried to continue the success of the Shadowrun console games of the early ’90s, and in many respects succeeded.

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