Blizzard remasters three classic games as the Blizzard Arcade Collection

If you're one of the five people who fondly remember Blackthorne as "that game about a 1990s comic book-looking dude who can shotgun an orc behind him without even looking back" then I have good news for you. And also for enthusiasts of two other Blizzard games from the '90s: co-op puzzle platformer The Lost Vikings and vehicle combat derby Rock N Roll Racing. Though DOS versions of the three were previously available for download in Blizzard's Classic Games section, definitive editions are now available as the Blizzard Arcade Collection, announced today during BlizzCon.

Each game in the Arcade Collection comes in its original version (though with a couple of new features like a "watch mode" that lets you view a playthrough you can take control of at any point), as well as definitive editions with key remapping, rewinds to take you back up to 10 seconds, and, for The Lost Vikings and Blackthorne, save-anywhere functionality.

The definitive editions draw together improvements from across multiple versions of each game. The Lost Vikings will have the audio and visuals of its original release, but extra levels and cutscenes from later editions, plus it'll bump the number of players in local co-op from two to four. Rock N Roll Racing gets snow, rain, and other environmental effects, increases the local multiplayer count from two to four, and comes with 16:9 resolution, 384 racetrack variations, new songs and new recordings of the originals. Finally, Blackthorne gets a map with fog of war, and a mountain level that was previously exclusive to the Sega 32x port.

The Blizzard Arcade Collection is only available on PC in The Celebration Collection, a bundle of in-game items for various Blizzard games released to tie into Blizzard's 30th anniversary. If you already own The Celebration Collection, you'll get the Arcade Collection for free.

No word on The Lost Vikings 2: Norse by Norsewest, however, which I wanted to mention mainly because of how good that subtitle is.

BlizzCon is happening now. Here's how to watch it.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.