Anyone who has paid even the slightest bit of attention in these parts knows that there is a lot of love around for Magic Knight. The little shiny sir, whoes troubles never seem to end, gained a huge following way back in the mid 80’s when David Jones brought him onto the scene in Finders Keepers and he never looked back.
Knight Tyme was the third Magic Knight game, the second to use the much copied ‘Windimation’ menu system and can easily be placed in my top 5 Magic Knight games of all time (or Tyme, if you prefer).
OK, confession time. Of the 4 Magic Knight games, Knight Tyme was, I think, the weakest. I never really got my head around it, to be fair. But when your stable mates are Stormbringer and Spellbound, well, you need something special to stand out. Knight Tyme, for me, didn’t.
The good thing about Pobatti’s remake of said game is that, after 10 years or so of playing the other MK games and ’skipping’ this one, it has opened my eyes again to what a genius David Jones was. It’s actually a great little game, though ‘little’ doesn’t really do it justice. It’s a game with a huge play area, complex and compelling puzzles, lots of humour and some truly unforgettable characters to interact with.
The remake itself isn’t actually a new one. It came out a couple of years ago but was buggy and had ‘graphical issues’ and, along with so many other great games, was lost to RetroRemakes in ‘that January’.
Pobatti has been sprucing it up and bug fixing almost on demand and it looks and plays like the classic it really should have been all those years ago.
If I have any complaints at all about the game it’s that it runs in a tiny 320×240 px window and there is no full screen option. There are reasons for this, explained in the readme, and I am lead to believe that a full screen option may be available in a future update. This is, I understand, still a going concern.
If you’ve never played a Magic Knight game before (though I can’t believe that anyone out there would be THAT foolish!) then I urge you to dive in and give it a go.
Now, If I can persuade Ian to finish Stormbringer………………
спёрто у Retro Remakes
06.04.10
