More Retro, Better Rampage: Retro City Rampage DX
"A top to bottom remastering"
Revisiting old work is a strange and terrible thing. Personally, I like to imagine everything I write vanishes into a virtual paper shredder after about twenty minutes. Vblank Entertainment, however, have returned to Retro City Rampage after two years to spruce it up with a big free update. They describe Retro City Rampage: DX as "a top to bottom remastering of just about everything", rebalancing and tuning weapons and missions, adding fancier graphical whizzbangs, and more. It's due some time next week.
All this began as work on the Nintendo 3DS port then, Vblank main man Brian Provinciano says, "Retooling the game for the 3DS's smaller screen opened my eyes to the core of RCR's play-experience." So he's improving them all.
RCR DX brings - hoo, let's do this - changes to every mission, rebalanced weapons, new zoom modes, a 'Retro+' graphics mode with better shadows and more effects, an '8-bit' graphics mode with a more retro look, new ways to evade the cops, a new weapons menu, tweaked controls, mouse support, an option to run at 60fps rather than 30, Saints Row-style magical garages, and... look, it changes an awful lot, so go read the announcement for the rest. This video shows off some of it too:
Purists will still have the option to play old-style RCR, if they want. I wonder how much all of this will change RCR. It's slathered with references to video games and movies and television and other things wot happened in the '80s, but the core didn't grab me. Our Alec didn't get on with it either.