Retro Gaming, Wonderland-Style: Difference between revisions

Okay, this one was straight-forward. Stinky and Loof certainly like to “gobble” up Rainbow Stars, a maze is an easy level to design, and Return To Wonderland even has its own variety of Ghosts. All that was missing were the Power Pills. In retrospect, we couldn’t tell you why we named the level “Mrs. Pac Man” rather than just “Pac Man”. Maybe because it’s the better game of the two? (Note: The maze setup in our version bares no resemblances to the original game. Oops! That could have been easily fixed.)

Collect all coins and bonus coins while dodging the ghosts then go to the exit while dodging ghosts.

 

This one was trickier. Yes, Return To Wonderland has UFOs, and the classic “shields” of the original Space Invaders game were easily recreated using walls of wooden boxes, but Stinky and Loof had no way of fighting back. Except, of course, to use reflectors to turn the enemy fire back on them. That’ll teach those flying saucers!

Yikes, you can’t get much more Retro than Pong. A ball, two paddles, neither of which had an easy Wonderland equivalent. So we constructed a level with Stinky and Loof on opposite sides of a wall of wood, rolling a heavy stone boulder back and forth (smashing the boxes, perhaps a nod to Pong’s quasi-sequel, Breakout). Instead of Pong’s paddles, Stinky and Loof would push around steel boxes to stop the rolling ball.

Impossible to recreate with Wonderland elements (unless you know of a cheat code to give Stinky a handy air-pump?), we opted instead to play with another core essential of Dig Dug: opening passages into caverns filled with baddies, who will in turn begin to chase you. Chompers, Coilys and Z-Bots took the place of Pooka and Frygar.

Q*Bert’s classic pyramid had to be flattened into a triangle, and the transporters were replaced with teleporters. One thing that remained exactly the same: Coily! The purple snake is one of Q*Bert’s main adversaries and might well have been the inspiration for our own bouncing nuisance. Or is the Wonderland Coily a mental offspring of Gremlin Graphic’s “Thing on a Spring”?

In Space Invaders, we used reflectors to counter the UFO’s fireballs. This time, Stinky was able to use a lone UFO to lob fireballs at the incoming centipede (made up of a string of Z-Bots). You were, of course, able to evade the Z-Bots altogether and just run for the coins, but where would the fun be in that?