There is something to be said about remakes, remasters and other re-releases of videogames; is it only in order to get some more money from the consumer? Are the developers or the rights holders trying to spread the good word about a forgotten gem? Or is it something else? When it comes to Terminal Velocity, the jury is still out.
Almost 30 years after it first came out (28, to be exact), the 3D space shooter originally developed by the long-disappeared studio Terminal Reality and published by 3D Realms (of Duke Nukem fame, amongst others) is coming back, with the help of Ziggurat, a company that is certainly on a mission to restore and redistribute old games.
The story is so simple it’s almost a stroke of genius : after a long period of collaboration, the alien races that were once part of an alliance with the humans from Earth have turned against us; it is up to the player to climb aboard a special spaceship to take the fight to them.
No need for betrayals or morally ambigous characters : Terminal Velocity is from that time were things were simple. You see an enemy, you shoot it, preferably between the eyes. A bit hard to do when you are aboard a space fighter, yes, but a volley of lasers will do, too.
With Fury 3 – and Descent, how could we forget Descent? –, Terminal Velocity is the kind of game you bought, in 1995, to test drive those new 3D capabilities. Instead of « just » going up and down levels in Doom, you could go in every direction you chose… even upside down, or in the cloud layer. And if you were one of the lucky few (thousands?) to have a joystick, you just needed to plug it in the game port (of the sound card, of course), and the sky (space?) was the limit.
Three decades later, however, it is exceedingly easy to discover that each Terminal Velocity is almost the same as the previous one : you navigate a landscape; you follow the arrow and destroy buildings and other space fighters, and you fly to the next mission, be it another stage on the same planet, or another world completely. And that’s it!
Sure, the difficulty ramps up, but there is nothing really new about getting to a lava planet, instead of a forest one. If you are lucky, you will be able to cheese a level (or two, or three) by speeding and bypassing enemy defences and fighters.
And so, is the nostalgia factor important enough to spend 17 canadian dollars on a touched-up version of a 28-year old game? This is no modern remake, but a slightly-modified game that has been modified to run on modern computers. There is probably some extra frames, here and there, and the experience is certainly smooth, but you can also probably count the polygons, or even the pixels on screen.
If that game was sold for a few dollars, it could be a good way to (re)discover an old game. But for almost 20 dollars, there are way better titles available online; nostalgia be damned.
Terminal Velocity : Boosted Edition
Developer : Terminal Reality
Publisher : 3D Realms / Ziggurat Interactive
Platform : Windows (played on Steam)
