27/06/2007 - Review - Zub

Richard Jordan's finally released Zub, after literally weeks of being in the works, the lazy, slothe-like, turd-master. Of course, I'm not being serious, because at eleven weeks, Zub's development cycle is about fifty times shorter than the average game from Retrospec. I should know, because my involvement in projects is generally what causes them to have their development schedules measured against ice ages instead of calendars.

Wait, what's the game called?

But despite being developed in less than three months, Richard's managed to pack just as much polish and finess into Zub as he did into Atic Atac. And this is also the same style of remake as Atic Atac, keeping the original gameplay almost unchanged - apart from fixing Zub's horrible jumping - and just making the visuals and sonics far more appealing.

I wouldn't normally add a picture of the main menu, but it really is very lovely.
Plus, all the game's levels look identical, so I only need one screenshot of the sods.

Richard was aided in this respect by Pierre Jovanovic who drew the very pleasant graphics about seven years ago for a remake that never happened, and James Redfern who remixed the original game's tunes just the right amount, adding a couple of new ones into the mix to create a very complete audio package.

In fact the only mistep in the development of it was introducing a nasty horizontal push-scroll and getting rid of the bumpy vertical scrolling as you run around.

This is level... Um. Er... Q? As you can see I'm jumping from one platform to another.
Later on, I will be repeating this action.

But even though Richard, Pierre and James put nary a foot wrong, there's a problem - because of all the Pickford Brother's games, Zub is the least of them. It's a neat idea in search of a proper game to live in and it badly needed more development resources. So while it's nice to have another remake in the world which can be considered fairly definitive, it's of something which probably didn't deserve to get remade in the first place. Unlike Feud.

So, by all means download and have a play of it, but I'd be amazed if it flew into your top ten remakes of all time.

Graham