Sword of Fargoal is an ancient Rogue-style game for the C-64, written by Jeff McCord in BASIC (I remember curiously walking through the source code) and published by the long-defunct Epyx, one of my favorite publishers from back in the day. When I was a kid I played the hell out of this game and I’m excited to see some game developers who are even bigger fans than me have gone and remade this awesome game.

I’ve been playing Fargoal LLC’s remake on my iPhone (available here at the App Store for only five bucks!) and it’s clearly a labor of love. Most remakes of classics are disappointing. Someone writes an emulator and they just run the old game on new hardware. It’s 100% authentic and all, but that’s not necessarily a good thing.

You’re all excited to play the game you loved as a kid, and then, five minutes in you realize that..oh..this game is kind of frustrating, annoying even.. It’s not because the game is bad, it’s because the world of gaming has changed since then.

As an industry we’ve moved far past the primitive control techniques and UI’s of the past. We expect to have tutorials and hint screens, auto-save and context-sensitive UI gizmos that help us out.

Old games just didn’t have room for any of that in their 8K or whatever of ROM. While this gave some insane replayability, and created a small sub-industry of invisible ink cheat books, learn-by-dying is just a thing of the past. It’s no fun.

I’m happy to report that the developers of the new Sword of Fargoal did more than just slap some upgraded graphics on this game. They’ve added help, auto-save, and a great control scheme (moving diagonally on the C-64 joysticks was always a dicey affair). But my favorite is a great new feature called the “Smart button” that gives you context-sensitive actions, such as using a teleport spell right when the ceiling is about to collapse on you.

Fargoal LLC has big respect from me. I’m already in love with this game again and now I can bring it everywhere with me. All I need is some OpenFeint (or similar) integration to compete with my brother.

Anyway, go buy Sword of Fargoal immediately. Swoosh! Clang! Thud!!