Video games have reached a maturity where there's enough of a history that people can't resist plundering it again and again, with many old franchises returning (in may cases welcome, in some, not so much). However, I have to remark that I'm absolutely astonished that Konami have announced that its classic Genesis title, Rocket Knight Adventures , is to be given a new sequel.

Rocket Knight Adventures is a fairly odd title to give a new sequel because it seems to fall right between those obscure classics that hard core gamers love to wax lyrical about -- say, Alien Soldier , which came a couple of years later on the Mega Drive (the Japanese/European Genesis) -- and those titles beloved by all that people have wanted to see return -- like, I don't know, Punch Out!! or something. Coming at a time when people were basically drowning in different company's attempts to make their Mario or their Sonic, main character Sparkster is, weirdly, an opossum in armour with a jetpack, which makes him probably the oddest attempt at a mascot in memory.

But of course, perhaps falling directly between the obscure and the beloved gives Konami a "sweet spot" for a retro revival that is going to strike a chord with a lot of different gamers. After all, Rocket Knight Adventures and it's two sequels ( Sparkster for the Genesis and for the SNES, which have the unusual distinction of being completely different from each other) are pretty great!

The sequel is to be a  2.5D platformer and released on XBLA, PSN and Steam, developed by Climax (the developer behind Konami's recent Silent Hill games) and released in 2010. The game is to be set 15 years after Sparkster (as if the time that has passed in the real world has passed in the game world) and Sparkster is forced to return to war after years of living in peace. As well as platforming stages the game is also to feature side-scroling shooter stages, as seen in the previous games. You can see more details at 1up.com .


As weird as it is to see the franchise return, I'm excited to try the new game. And, notably, I'm holding out hope that the earlier games will make their way to the Wii's virtual console...