While it was a surprise that the GOG release of the Croc Remaster comes with Croc: Legend of the Gobbos Classic included for free, I admit I'm disappointed by facing many problems that didn't exist in the 1997 CD-ROM release. A lot of Croc's character noises and particles across the game are missing. I also noticed a missing electricity texture in underwater levels and there are a few sound effects that have lower quality when compared with the original version. There's also one character animation that doesn't play correctly, a strange bug. It's worth noting that the Classic Croc is running in its Software-Only mode, which has a much inferior shading quality when compared with existing known software that improved these visuals with the CD-ROM installation. Now the good attributes I can point out are: the soundtrack playing without optical media and a few new adaptations such as options to play the game in window and/or widescreen modes. Because of the problems I'm wrote above, I can't say that it's time to archive permanently my CD-ROM copy and the same goes to give more than 3 stars rating. If the most serious bugs get fixed, I can increase Classic Croc's rating.
This game is often overshadowed by other popular competitors of the same three-dimensional world and timeline, but it also gets under-credited considering the historic facts that consequently lead to the existence of a widely known title featured by a famous plumber. Croc is the original creation of a British team and one of my most important jigsaw pieces (Intentional pun? Maybe…) that build up my childhood’s puzzle. You help out a young crocodile to rescue his adoptive family while collecting treasure and reverting some transformed creatures back to their own selves. I praise it for its unique art direction style and charm, the humour and the unforgettable and extremely catchy soundtrack. This remastered version did justice to what the game needed in order to answer to the current standards. The models were updated in a balanced way: they only smoothed what they thought it would benefit from that visual improvement (eyes for example), while keeping faithful to the original look of the game that the 1997 era players were used to. The controls and the camera were also improved. Lastly, this GOG release also includes the 1997 game with a few changes and adaptions but the best things out of it are that it’s more lightweight than the CD-ROM release and plays the soundtrack without any optical media requirement and there’s native widescreen and window support. Argonaut Games, Titanium Studios and Big Foot Entertainment did justice with the remastered version of Croc: Legend of the Gobbos and it’s a must-play title for every 3D platformer fan, especially the 90s linear genre, and is also highly recommended to anyone looking to try out for the first time this tímeless and family-friendly classic with a rather simplified gameplay mechanic.
This game is often overshadowed by other popular competitors of the same three-dimensional world and timeline, but it also gets under-credited considering the historic facts that consequently lead to the existence of a widely known title featured by a famous plumber. Croc is the original creation of a British team and one of my most important jigsaw pieces (Intentional pun? Maybe…) that build up my childhood’s puzzle. You help out a young crocodile to rescue his adoptive family while collecting treasure and reverting some transformed creatures back to their own selves. I praise it for its unique art direction style and charm, the humour and the unforgettable and extremely catchy soundtrack. This remastered version did justice to what the game needed in order to answer to the current standards. The models were updated in a balanced way: they only smoothed what they thought it would benefit from that visual improvement (eyes for example), while keeping faithful to the original look of the game that the 1997 era players were used to. The controls and the camera were also improved. Lastly, this GOG release also includes the 1997 game with a few changes and adaptions but the best things out of it are that it’s more lightweight than the CD-ROM release and plays the soundtrack without any optical media requirement and there’s native widescreen and window support. Argonaut Games, Titanium Studios and Big Foot Entertainment did justice with the remastered version of Croc: Legend of the Gobbos and it’s a must-play title for every 3D platformer fan, especially the 90s linear genre, and is also highly recommended to anyone looking to try out for the first time this tímeless and family-friendly classic with a rather simplified gameplay mechanic.
Set up in late Cretaceous era on a fictional North American area, Zniw Adventure players will have to help the protagonist Zniw (an unknown dinosaur specimen) find her way back home after a succession of unforeseen events to find a present for her mother to match the Hatching Day, requiring to talk with different sentient dinosaur species, interacting with objects and solving puzzles. The story evolves to the resolution of a mystery that Zniw needs to solve once caught into a misunderstanding at a certain moment of plot progression. The player needs to explore landscapes, talk with characters, using inventory objects and activating action commands like looking, touching, grabbing, etc. The puzzles have surprised me positively in how non-conventional are these in the sense they aren’t extremely obvious and do require some good thinking, not to mention how they were cleverly designed to suit the prehistoric atmosphere and technology used by the now-extinct reptilians. The game can be cleared in between 10 to 15 hours (average) in total but completing it at 100% might require about 20 and going for more than one walkthrough (once the player finishes the story, the game allows players to repeat it but with everything they’ve unlocked before like the Shiny Pebbles). The team of developers (the core being only two people: the artist and the programmer) managed to deliver an extraordinarily ambitious project in six years of working in their free time and without any budget. The quality of the final product paid of and it’s a love letter to the genre that successes in replicating the atmosphere of the same type of games developed in the decade of the 90s. Zniw Adventure is a solid, good-humored, and charming point-and-click videogame designed for general audience that delight players from all ages, regardless their skill level and is certainly capable to bring new curious people to learn more about those who once have roamed the Planet Earth!
