It seems these days that Steam is bursting with innovative new simple-but-fun retro-styled games. Stuff that goes back to your childhood, even though you're probably only in your early 20s. I'm not in my early 20s, I'm considerably more seasoned. So I'm seeing games both original and remade, that I knew when they were new, games that passed me by, games from my childhood and beyond, all popping back up as the new retro sensation among both the people who shut out the sun with the brightly coloured plastic sunglasses, and the people who shut out the sun by staying indoors all hours, gaining weight and growing scruffy facial hair, as well as many in between.

Minecraft has a great deal to answer for here. Keep it basic, make it fun; the retro gaming experience.

To actually namedrop one of these games, although not one that is available on Steam just yet, Drift Stage is a modern arcade-style racer with 80s looks, 80s feeling music, and from the looks of the videos I've watched, decidedly 80s physics as well, featuring no simulation of weight transfer and seemingly digital steering. The people in the bit where the Venn diagram for car people and gaming people intersect has become somewhat afroth over this game.

Another game that's entered my consciousness through its popularity is RODINA. Available on Steam. Sole developer. What is it? Apparently fills the hole left after an EVE Online subscription runs out, by doing a largely similar thing. Also described (by me) as being "like Minecraft in space" and I'll come back to this comparison later. Not retro. It's a thoroughly modern game, save for a few of the graphics such as fire, which at the current stage of development are just coloured squares.

It's pretty cool. I like it, it involves flying about, landing on planets, shooting things...

Like Zarch.

WTF is Zarch?
Well, it kinda followed on from such games as Defender, Lunar Lander, and Thrust.

Oh dear, you don't know any of these games either?

Zarch is one of the first solid 3D games ever made. It's from the late 1980s, was written in three months, by one man. It was available on the Atari ST, the Commodore Amiga, and the ZX Spectrum; three of the most revered retro consoles of the era. The game is blocky, colourful, simple, challenging, replayable, and totally fucking cool. Except it isn't. Despite having absolutely everything that a retro game requires to be popular among the trendy sun-avoiders, even a freely downloadable Windows version, for some reason it's been totally forgotten.

So I'm putting this little chunk of text out there onto the internet.

If you're into retro-styled games and you're not conceited, Zarch is the daddy.