THE ORIGINAL GAME

As many of you will know, the best MSX games were not made in Spain (you know, direct conversions of Spectrum games most of the time) or in the rest of Europe (except in Holland, the bull skin and some other isolated case, it can be said that their sales were hardly representative). The best games, as I was saying, were made in Japan, and almost all of them appeared in cartridge format (here the tape, much cheaper and slower, prevailed).

Konami decidedly supported what was intended to be the standard 8-bit format, and made a multitude of original games and their arcade machines, many of which came to Spain becoming authentic totems to be adored by long-suffering national users.

'The Maze of Galious', a cult game for MSX users around the world, was one of those gems. It is the successful continuation of another Konami program, 'Knightmare', which from what you can see also swept sales. It featured great graphics, super-catchy and exceptional music, and most importantly, bomb-proof gameplay and addiction (the most important aspect of any game, and one that the Japanese master perfectly).


BRAIN GAMES REMAKE

Santi Ontañón, the visible head of this programming group, has lived up to the original, making another small masterpiece, this time in versions for Macintosh, Windows and Linux.

He has not been content with faithfully recreating each of the places from the original game, but has included a huge variety of graphic sets - made by collaborators - and musical versions, which further enhance, if possible, his work.

Another thing that stands out in this project, and in general in all Brain Games projects, is the fact that they are open projects, in which small modifications are always being made to correct bugs, or incorporating new graphics and melodies. This obviously has two aspects: on the one hand, the game is continually being rejuvenated, which many users will appreciate, but on the other hand, it can lead to boredom for people who want to have a definitive version in their hands.

For me, in particular, it causes me enormous doubts to decide on one or another set of graphics, but that does not mean that it is a bad thing, far from it.

Also noteworthy is the fact that the original graphics and sound have been included as one more option, which will provide the most classic users with the possibility of playing the program of a lifetime without having to connect their MSX (although we already know that they love plugging it in).

Actually, and I think I'm not wrong, we are talking about one of the three best remakes made so far for next-generation computers. And that is a lot to say.