So Outcast, as you might have heard, is a rare gem amongst video games. It's a classic with a small but dedicated cult following, and nowhere near the commercial success and mainstream appreciation it deserves. To me it's probably my all-time most memorable gaming experience and the greatest game I've ever played - a game I'm still looking back to, even after 15 years, remembering my time with it with fondness. Outcast was one of the first 3D action/adventure games to feature a non-linear open world that you could explore freely. There's an intriguing story, great-looking visuals (for its time), exploration and adventure, but most of all - for me - Outcast is about immersion. Starting from the first seconds after you launch the game, you're thrown into a strange new world, plunged straight into the deep end with no introductions or explanations. You wake up surrounded by strange-looking aliens, with no knowledge whatsoever about what you've gotten yourself into, and how or why did you get there. From that point on you're compelled to explore that beautiful alien world, curious about its inhabitants and intrigued to solve the mysteries that surround the world. Oh, and how you're ever going to get back home. My local PC games magazine at the time could find no faults in the game, so the only negative point they could come up with was "that orange shirt". I think even the shirt looks nice.
Jagged Alliance was one of my favourite games back in the day it was released, and it still holds up with its tight gameplay today. While many old games have aged too much for them to be bearable to look at on a modern game system, new mobile platforms give classic gems such as JA a new life: It runs on DOSBox, and if you own a compatible Android phone you can run DOSBox on it! The game runs on my Galaxy S phone like a charm, and while the user interface is definitely not designed for touchscreen devices, it works surprisingly well on a smartphone. Funnily enough the native resolution of a phone screen nowadays is many times better than what a 1995 game can push, but retro games like this still look way more appealing on a tiny screen than on a modern desktop. Jagged Alliance on a smartphone is a better game experience than anything I could find from the official Android market, and I can heartily recommend it to anyone wishing for some nostalgia and immersive gaming sessions on their mobile device!
