Released back in 1998 for Nintendo 64 and PC, Glover was a 3D platformer starring a glove and its ball. It’s very much a product of its time, though it has an interesting twist: the sentient glove protagonist needs to guide a ball to the end of each level, so it plays a little like Mario 64 blended with a marble run game.
Piko Interactive, a studio which, in its own words, buys “old intellectual property to make cool stuff”, is re-releasing Glover for PC next month. Using the original Nintendo 64 source code (there was a hugely inferior PlayStation version), Piko Interactive has “completely redone” the game so that it’ll play nice with modern PCs.
Judging by the footage in the trailer above, that has resulted in a higher res version of the original, with a much improved framerate. Some assets retain their ye olde pixelated form, mostly the 2D sprites, but the world itself and the 3D models look vastly improved over the original console version.
Glover was originally developed by Interactive Studios, a British studio that developed and published a huge number of games between 1996 and 2013, including Frogger 2: Swampy’s Revenge and Bratz: Rock Angelz. It could be just me, but Glover is definitely the most recognisable title in its back catalogue, and I distinctly remember seeing screenshots in old ’90s gaming magazines and wanting to give it a go.
The game was decently received upon release in 1998. IGN advised that it wasn’t the best looking Nintendo 64 game, but succeeded nevertheless due to its “intuitive gameplay mechanics and off-the-wall character design.” Gamespot was a bit more lukewarm, noting that it offered a stiff challenge, and required a lot of patience. Glover will hit Steam on April 20.