Yar's' Revenge(s)

Yar's Revenge is a re-imagining, and re-punctuating, of the great 2600 shooter Yars' Revenge. The latter is one of the few 2600 games that can still hold your attention for more than a few minutes, so I really hope the reboot will be good.

But how this

became this

cries out for explanation.

I don't envy any designer the task of having to update a game as old as Yars' Revenge. Most of the story for 2600 games was told through box art and instruction manual text, which themselves often had very little to do with what players saw onscreen. The graphical and mechanical choices that programmers made were determined by the strict limitations of the hardware. Yet in the best cases, of which Yars' Revenge was one, the results were iconic.

Still, what was iconic on the 2600 usually doesn't make much sense in the context of modern game design. Look at the recent remake of another 2600 game, Haunted House. Having the character turn into a disembodied set of eyeballs every time he walks into the dark is an allusion to the eyeballs that served as the player's avatar in the original Haunted House, but in the modern context, where we want an explanation for most of a character's body disappearing, it's more distracting than endearing.

Now personally, I think a giant mechanical fly is a more interesting main character at this point than yet another anime girl in powered armor. But I'm not going to begrudge the people at Killspace Entertainment their creative license. What mattered most about Yars' Revenge was the gameplay; better to focus on getting than right than worrying about how to render the Qotile in 3D. And in the context of a Panzer Dragoon-style rail shooter (which Killspace namedropped as an inspiration), the basic mechanics of Yars' Revenge could actually work pretty well.

So well, in fact, that people may even forget that they're not playing as a badass space fly.