On October 31st, ModRetro announced two new games for its Chromatic hardware, a modern FPGA equivalent to the Game Boy Color. The first title, available to purchase as of this writing, is Buck and the Cursed Cartridge. The platform title has a surprising star- Buck the Bunny, Gamestop’s former mascot, which had stopped being used in the company’s marketing in 2012 but made a comeback late last year. In the side scroller, Buck the Bunny finds himself trapped in a cursed video game cartridge, itself a nod to urban legends such as the infamous Ben Drowned cartridge of the Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask.
Buck and the Cursed Cartridge comes to stores courtesy of a collaboration between ModRetro, Gamestop, and the independent Game Boy development studio Play Instinct. Buck and the Cursed Cartridge is the sixth title associated with the studio, the previous five having been strong competitors at various Game Boy game jam competitions. While Play Instinct’s first five games are free to play online, at present Buck and the Cursed Cartridge is only available in cartridge form, where it retails for $44.99 in a box with an instruction manual and a Chromatic charm based on Buck.
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Croc: 25th Anniversary Edition is the other new title, although it is not yet available for purchase except as a preorder. Based on the 2000 Game Boy Color platformer Croc, this new edition modifies the original with modernized standards. Croc: 25th Anniversary Edition will now make use of a save battery, preventing the need to use passwords. The controls of the original game have also been improved.
Unlike other titles in the ModRetro Classics line, Croc does not have an especially strong aesthetic reputation. An adaptation of the 1997 3D platformer into 2D, reviews for the game back in 2000 were fairly mediocre. But these reviews were mainly critical of the original game’s awful control scheme. It remains to be seen whether the remake, which has specifically promised to fix this control scheme, will be able to uncover a genuine gem buried underneath poor twenty-five year old ergonomic decisions. Croc: 25th Anniversary Edition, like Buck and the Cursed Cartridge, will retail for $44.99, when it’s released this December.
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