Rather than rebuild Sega Master System classic Wonder Boy III: The Dragon’s Trap from the ground up, developer Lizardcube just painted over the original game with modern graphics, music and sound effects. We need more remakes like this.
Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap, out this week for Switch, Xbox One and PlayStation 4 with a PC version due in June, began as a fan project by programmer Omar Cornut and artist Ben Fiquet, who reverse-engineered the original Sega Master System code. Wonder Boy creator Ryuichi Nishizawa collaborated with the team to bring the game to fruition, with composer Michael Geyre beautifully rearranging the original Shinichi Sakamoto soundtrack.
The end result is a game that looks and sounds like a modern hand-painted 2D platformer, but plays exactly like the brutal retro game fans know and love. Players can swap between 1989 and 2017 graphics with a press of a button, while the original beeps and bloops are just a menu selection away.
You can see it all in action in the video below, recorded during last night’s Facebook live stream.
Having never played the original Wonder Boy III, I’m finding Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap to be quite challenging. The developers did include an easy mode, but I’m not ready to throw in that towel yet.
What a perfect way to give retro games a modern feel. Imagine your favorite old school game from the Nintendo and Sega era, playing exactly the same as it always did but looking like an animated cartoon. Which games would you like to see get this treatment? All of them is an acceptable answer.