Even with a giant list of modern games I need to play, I find myself starting old games that I’ve already completed instead. Maybe it’s a fear of the new, maybe it’s retro love… who knows. But here’s two I just played.
Another Code (or Trace Memory for you yanks) is a really early game for the Nintendo DS – probably rushed for release, seeing as it’s completable within 3 hours. But that doesn’t mean it’s terrible – for the duration of those hours, you’ll find a really cool example of ingenuity that shows off the DS hardware. There’s some great puzzles as well. CING’s ideas developed further in Hotel Dusk a few years later, and it’ll be cool to see the Wii sequel that just came out in Japan get localized.
Jazz Jackrabbit is another game from my youth, and one of the first PC games I ever had. The second in the series takes the best bits from all the best platform games of the era, and adds them into one awesome package. And it’s all designed by Cliff Bleszinski, before he discovered what bloom was and kept making gritty FPS after gritty FPS. You can find it on quite a few abandonware sites (of dubious legality), so I suggest you check it out.
