Impulse Gamer: It is approaching 20 years since a young Jordan Mechner, game designer and programmer extraordinaire, risked it all and set up Smoking Car Productions for the game, the Last Express. Having gained phenomenal success through Prince of Persia and its sequel, with huge royalty cheques arriving on the doorstep every month, Mechner put an end to his usual Broderbund games in-house productions to create a game that was on his mind for years. Mechner is also one of few people who have had success both in games and screenwriting - designing and programming Prince of Persia while also screenwriting its arrival onto the silver screen decades later. Mechner knows story and game design and so now, finally, the Last Express has been ported to the iPad.
DotEmu are a publisher gamers should pay special attention to. They are similar to Piko Interactive in the way they rescue classics and bring them to modern platforms. They primarily are known for doing this with the Android and iPhone platforms while Piko sticks with physical cartridge platforms and Steam.
Continue Play's Brian Kale takes a retrospective look at Smoking Car Productions' innovative real-time adventure The Last Express.
"It may not have earned the audience it deserved at the time, but 16 years on The Last Express is appreciated by many for its pioneering ideas and unique style. Jordan Mechner set out to create a brand new sort of adventure game, and the result was something so ahead of its time that only now is it being fully appreciated. The Last Express is unique among the genre – pioneering, adventurous in both artstyle and design, and utterly compelling from beginning to end.
Simply put, The Last Express is a masterpiece."
The Last Express, the nice adventure game developed by DotEmu, is now available for a reduced price on the App Store.
