Pang clone Buster Boy bounces onto the App Store
Another unofficial retro remake looks the biz
Really, as far as gamers are concerned it doesn’t matter whether it’s an officially licensed conversion of a classic game or not, so long as it plays as we remember and sports a few contemporary trappings to spice things up a bit.
And that seems to sum up Buster Boy quite concisely. For all the retro heads out there, this is a pretty comprehensive Pang clone - dubbed Buster Boy in accordance with the US localisation of Pang, which was known as Buster Bros.
The game involves rescuing Tokyo from a destructive rain of large, bouncing balls by popping them into oblivion. Your wee fella runs along the bottom edge of the landscape screen and hurls his harpoon directly upwards into the balloons, which then split in two, then in two again, then again until they finally disappear for good.
The graphics have been spiced up quite a bit, with some nice background shots of the Japanese capital, and all the power ups we used to enjoy in Pang also appear to be present and correct in Buster Boy.
It just remains to be seen whether Capcom - which originally published the Buster Bros coin-op back in 1989 (though the game was actually designed, made and published in the UK by Mitchell, factoid lovers) - will take the huff over such a close resemblance to its arcade game.
Judging by similar cases we’ve seen on the App Store, it could go either way.
