QuestLord: A Peek at a Brand-New-Yet-Old-School iPhone Game

As mentioned recently, once upon a long, long, long time ago, I used to play video games quite a lot, even though I’ve been far from it since, um, high school. These days, I’m the Crochety Old Dude left in the dust when my young coworker talks about playing Diablo or Portal; yeah, I know the names, but the last time I actually played anything like that was literally when Doom was new.

Which is kind of why a new game developed pretty much specifically for the iPhone or iPad, QuestLord, appeals to me. It’s defiantly old-school, either because of developer Eric Kinkead‘s own personal taste or because the limits of a small screen, I have no idea which (probably both, actually), with a big, sorta-clunky interface, pixelated graphics, NPCs who talk to you via text printed right there on the screen, and beasties straight out of my battered old Monster’s Manual.

In short, the game’s a throwback to those early electronic RPGs, games like Legend of Zelda or Richard Garriott’s Ultima games, which I was totally and completely addicted to back in the day, before I moved away to actual “real” RPGs. Hell, you even save your game by clicking a 3-1/2″ floppy icon. And yeah, it looks like it could be a hell of a lot of fun, at least to me. Check it out:

I dunno Kinkead, myself, although he’s apparently based here in Houston. I saw his blog, Lava Level, a few months back and was intrigued, but I hadn’t seen what he’d been working on lately, so this is pretty damn cool. I’m psyched to see where this goes — heck, if it’s not too ridiculously expensive when it’s released, I’d buy this for my beaten-up iPhone 3G & probably get in trouble at work for being on the phone too damn much…