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Creepy ecological parable Archipelagos remade for mobiles

Rob Beschizza at 7:14 am Thu, Feb 7, 2013

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Archipelagos was a 1989 Amiga game set on an expanse of tiny islands. The objective was to purify what remained of the land while being stalked by corrupted trees, which could move only when outside of the player's field of view. Remembered thanks to its tense gameplay and occult atmosphere, it's just been ported to iOS and BlackBerry(!) by original author Paul Carruthers. John Polson interviewed him for the Indie Games weblog; PC and Android cuts are on on the way.

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Ants and Stars: Bruce Sterling and Jasmina Tesanovic visit the Sardinia Radio Telescope in Italy

The Snowden Principle

  • waetherman

    Don’t blink!

    • http://twitter.com/EricJ Eric J.

       My thought exactly. Someone should skin this with Weeping Angels.

      • http://profiles.google.com/hyouko.kun Chris Drouin

        Well, I worked on something like this in my college days:
        http://www.moddb.com/mods/petrified
        (There’s still a server out there for it, if there’s any interest I can post a link)

  • harri manni

    Wow, that made me do a unexpectedwalk down the memory lane! ;)
    But I played it on my Atari ST!

  • http://twitter.com/rezmason Jeremy Sachs

    Someone ought to remake The Sentinel. There’s something very satisfying about solving puzzles in procedural worlds that are populated by obelisks:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sentinel_(video_game)

    • jackbird

      Someone like these guys?

      http://www.addink.net/sentinel/

      http://nexus23.org/warfare2/?p=699

      http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=40174

      https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/capita/id367322717?mt=8

    • Daneel

      I was just coming here to say this!

    • Steve Taylor

       Just what I was thinking – I’ve never played Archipelago but it sounds like spiritual kin to Sentinel. I spent many tense hours playing that one on the C64.

      There was a PC remake many years ago. I remember that (like Archipelago) they went for the more polished graphical style possible on modern computers, and lost a bit of atmosphere because of that.

      I guess I just like very stripped down diagramatic looking games. I should probably time travel back to the Amiga era…

      • Touch Sensitive

        Ouch, I thought of Sentinel the second I saw the article.

        One of the strangest games I purchased for the Playstation (PSX).

        Not the game itself, but the idea of buying such a ‘basic’ game for a console like the Playstation (PSX).

        It seemed so at odds with the other mainstream titles on the shelf.

        Looking forward to trying this particular title out on Android.

  • Dr_Wadd

    Does the remake have the periodic deliberate maps as opposed to the majority procedurally generated ones? I seem to recall the original had a level where the map was the British Isles, and another based on the credits to Eastenders.

  • Dave Lloyd

    ITYM Zarch which was written by Dave Braben (of Elite) as the release game for the Acorn Archimedes (the first computer to use the ARM) which was then ported by Jez San (of Argonaut) to the Amiga…

  • Talia

    Amiga was my first computer.  I had, and enjoyed, this game. I vaguely seem to recall it had pretty cool music or sound effects, too. Glad to see it getting a second life. :)

  • Jorpho

    Loses something without that flat-shaded polygons, doesn’t it?

    • Steve Taylor

       Totally!

  • http://twitter.com/forgotten_pass Frédéric Donckels

    I would love a remake of Tower of Babel for Android

    • http://twitter.com/jmtd Jonathan Dowland

      I’d love a Babel remake for *any* platform!

  • bloodybl

    I played this game on the Amiga, I really loved it’s eerie music and gameplay. I don’t know where you got the idea that the trees only moved when you weren’t looking at them though. I distinctly remember watching one move closer to me every time it sank into the ground.