Regular readers of Little Mathletics may know of my complete infatuation with independent and homebrew gaming. That’s why I’m so pleased to see that Retro Remakes, who are the indisputable hub of the remaking community, are once again holding their annual competition. They’ve been doing this since 2003, and have managed to collect prizes totalling over £4000 for this year, which is just amazing.
Sponsors for this year include Retro Gamer Magazine and Little Mathletics favourites Garage Games (who are throwing in a few copies of their excellent Torque Game Builder) amongst many others. It’s great to see that people are supporting this competition so much - making remakes is a great way for people to hone their skills while paying tribute to what has come before in the industry.
They’ve also got Barrie Ellis of oneswitch.org.uk, a great site that details “fun ideas and ‘assistive technology’, aimed at moderate to severely learning/physically disabled people”, on hand this year to help out entrants in recognising that not all gamers are of the same ability, which is a fantastic idea.
But the big news really is the £4000 in prizes, which basically means that - as well as the usual 1st, 2nd and 3rd, and graphics awards, and sound, and more - the judges will be handing out awards and prizes to any entry that they feel deserving, and any entry that complies with all the rules of the competition.
You’d be a fool not to enter, so get on over to Retro Remakes and do so. You’ve got until the 31st of August to get your game together, and the results will be announced on their site on the 1st of December. Personally, like a lot of the judges, I’m hoping for a really good remake of Ghostbusters.
[…] Anyways, the latest one up on GameSetWatch today is a talk with Barrie Ellis from OneSwitch. You may remember Barrie’s involvement with the 2006 Retro Remakes competition as Accessibility Advisor. The work he does, not only with OneSwitch and Retro Remakes, but also with the International Game Developers Association’s Game Accessibility Special Interest Group (with whom he’ll be speaking at the Brighton Game Developers Conference this Friday) is nothing short of amazing. It just stumps me how there would not be more thought put into accessibility for disabled gamers. As Barrie points out, it doesn’t need to be big things that change, but even simple things like subtitles and support for colour blind people. But I guess that’s why we need people like Barrie. […]