If you haven’t heard of Rocket Knight, you probably don’t care that it is being remade. If you like side-scrolling platformers though, you should probably check it out.
Last week, 1up broke the news on an upcoming Rocket Knight remake, but it’s hard to get excited unless you actually know what a Rocket Knight is. Now, the perfect trailer has been released for those that don’t know, showing the Genesis originals in action as well as footage of the remake.
Rocket Knight is a series of 2D games created by Konami in the 90s. The series’ main character is an opossum rocking a jetpack, full suit of armor, and a sword. He typically goes by the name Sparkster, but he probably won’t hate if you call him Rocket Knight.
Lending credence to this anthropomorphic star is his creator, Konami’s Nobuya Nakazato, who also worked on various Contra titles. The remake, simply called Rocket Knight at the moment, is a brand new game in the series, not a re-skin, and is in development for XBLA, PSN, and PC (via Steam).
Many aspects of the previous Rocket Knight games will be tweaked and brought back in the remake, such as the side-scrolling shump-type levels. And, to tap into the spirit of the early 90s, Rocket Knight will have an Arcade mode that will omit the ability to save, allow level-by-level progress only, and will generally make things harder. For casual gamers, there will also be a Free Play mode that will allow saving and the choice of stages through a level map.
Platformers seem to have found a brand new home on digital distribution services. A Rocket Knight remake would probably have never seen a retail release; even on the Wii it probably just wouldn’t sell very well, as I’m sure the Klonoa remake did not. Being able to download Rocket Knight for probably $10 to $15 (not that pricing information has been released yet) makes it much more attractive than a $40 retail game. Rocket Knight is expected in early 2010.
Source: 1up
