Retro Gaming Australia

The Metroid II remake project, AM2R, has been ongoing for what seems like eons, but fans can get their first taste of the game thanks to a demo released late last month.

AM2R attempts to marry the gameplay and visual stylings of the 2004 Metroid remake, Zero Mission, with the monochrome Game Boy only release of Metroid II: Return of Samus, giving fans the opportunity to enjoy the oft overlooked second game in the series with some more modern trimmings. Nintendo had at one stage been working on Metroid II DX for the Game Boy Color, but the project was cancelled.

No release date is planned for the final version of AM2R at this stage.

Last week saw the release of a fan remake of Lankhor’s cult classic Black Sect – a 1993 adventure game released for the Atari ST, Amiga and PC.

Black Sect has been remade in Adventure Game Studio and includes additional features to make the game more accessible – extra and modified puzzles, new sound and music, unlimited save slots, updated hint system, new interface, etc. The remake retains the original game’s visuals (for the most part), locations, and the day and night cycle while removing the real-time time limits and dead ends that plagued players previously.

The Black Sect remake can be downloaded here for free.

Source: Retro Collect

A demake project for The Curse of Monkey Island is currently underway, giving the 1997 classic LucasArts adventure game a pixelated makeover.

The fan-made remake seeks to recreate the third instalment in the Monkey Island series in the style of the first two games The Secret of Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge. This entails an overhaul of The Curse of Monkey Island’s art, animation and interface.

The demake has been underway since May 2010, was cancelled in late 2011 and has now been resurrected by a Spanish programmer. The project is still a work in progress and no date for release has been given, but an English version has been confirmed.

Source: Retro Collect

Wolfenstein 3-D recently celebrated its 20th anniversary. Fun was had by all. In celebration of this event, Russian independent developer Chain Studios has released their remake of the game, entitled Wolfram.

Unlike many recent Wolfenstein 3-D upgrades and remakes, Wolfram isn’t just the original game with OpenGL support and nicer textures – it’s been built from the ground up on the studio’s inhouse engine Volatile 3D II. This makes for an almost entirely new game with modern bells and whistles like per-pixel lighting with bump-mapping and parallax mapping; soft stencil shadows; refractions, cubemap reflections, mirrors, ragdoll physics and an achievement system. Hell, you can even aim up and down.

At this stage, only the shareware portion of Wolfenstein 3-D is available for play in Wolfram. You can download it here.

Pokémon: Liquid Crystal, a Pokémon Crystal remake for the Gameboy Advance, is nearing completion and the current build (beta 3.1) is available for download.

The original Pokémon Crystal for the Gameboy Color offered players 251 catchable Pokémon, two regions to explore and 16 badges to earn. A ROM Hack of Pokémon Fire Red, Pokémon: Liquid Crystal is a remake and more – boasting 386 Pokémon to catch, three regions and now 20 badges to obtain. The remake presents the same story as the original, but with some additional twists. Pokémon: Liquid Crystal also features remixed and recomposed music, updated sprites and graphics that look much like the DS Pokémon iterations but without the polygons.

For those keen to play, you can visit the game’s development thread to obtain Pokémon: Liquid Crystal Beta 3.1 – you will need either an emulator or flash card for the Gameboy Advance or Nintendo DS to play it.

Expect to see the completed game by the end of the year.

Source: NeoGamr

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 HD, the unofficial fan remake, has been officially discontinued.

On the game’s Facebook page, Team S2HD’s project leader cited problems with the lead programmer and recent resignations as reasons for the sad news. The keylogger allegedly found in the recently released alpha version of the game didn’t help either.

Many Sonic fans were eagerly awaiting Sonic the Hedgehog 2 HD’s release, so the news of its cancellation has been met with much disappointment.

The recently released alpha version of fan remake Sonic the Hedgehog 2 HD has been quite popular. Unfortunately, it turns out that there was a nasty surprise in the package.

Most anti-virus software will pick the game up as a source of infection – many assumed that this was a false positive, but an employee from one of the major anti-virus houses conducted an analysis of the code to prove that this was not the case. Sure enough, a keylogger was nestled inside the Sonic 2 HD code.

The team at Sonic Retro has put out a PSA to assure users that the keylogger hasn’t “phoned home” as they put it, but it’s still kind of nasty that this could happen.

You may have previously heard about the fan made HD remake of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 that’s been in production for eons – but now you can actually play it.

An alpha version of the game has been released by the team, giving players a sample of what the game has to offer in the game’s first level, Emerald Hill Zone.

It’s short, but sweet and you can get it here.

Wing Commander Saga is a fan-made remake of Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger using the freeware FreeSpace 2 engine. The project has been in development for a long time (apparently almost 10 years), but as this trailer illustrates, it’s looking like it will be worth the wait.

Not that you’ll be waiting much longer – the trailer puts the release date at March 22, 2012 – just under 3 weeks away!