I was just going to work quietly on this and release it when it was done, but now I decided otherwise. 🙂
Like most other people I didn’t know this game existed until an article in Retro Gamer Magazine almost 2 years ago, but I do love a good platform game and this one looked fabulous. Unfortunately this game was only available on a pretty obscure platform – the Psion 3.
- Level 1 from the original Psion 3 game
Without a ROM or an emulator to run it on I quickly turned to Ebay and a couple of months later I bought the game cartridge and 2 Psion’s (because 1 apparently wasn’t enough). 😀
I fell in love with the game in no time – one might say “obsessed” and I quickly completed all 64 levels.
I decided I wanted to remake it. It fit the category of games I like to remake perfectly – it’s obscure, and I wanted to do another platformer, so 1½ year ago I began programming it but after a while I shelved it again. I wasn’t satisfied with the my results – especially the movement of Horace and that’s crucial since I’d like the remake to be as close to the original game as possible.
One year later, in january of this year, I got in contact with the programmer of the original game and asked if it was okay if I made a remake of it. It was and now I had the original files so I started to decode the original levelformat. Not too long after that, I mailed him an early demo of the game, and…he loved it.
Currently it’s progressing slowly because my main focus is getting Psycho Pigs UXB finished (and before that I was working on Omega Race 2009).Still, once in a while when I want to look at something else than pigs I’ll take it out and work on it for a few days, before returning to the piggies again, but when I’m done with the oinkers I’ll shift my focus completely to Horace and complete that project.
Here’s a screenshot of the remake of Horace in the Mystic Woods as it looks now.
- Screenshot of level 1 in the remake (without control panel)
