After 20 years: Discontinued Dune game comes under a new name

The influential Dune series was originally supposed to be expanded in 2001 with an offshoot for the Gameboy Advance called Ornithoper Assault. However, financial difficulties of the then publisher Cryo Interactive Entertainment, which finally led to bankruptcy in 2002, resulted in the cessation of development work. Last year, the Hungarian development studio Soft Brigade was able to secure the rights to the Ornithoper Assault code, but had to relinquish the Dune naming license.

For the subsequently started Kickstarter campaign the title was renamed to Elland: The Crystal Wars, which can now celebrate its release on Steam. The publisher Retro Room Games is responsible for this, which according to their own statements sees their main task in the preservation of older games. As the company explains on the official Steam page for Elland: The Crystal Wars, the Dune spin-off “finally sees the light of day after twenty years”.

Elland: The Crystal Wars itself not only had to work on the name due to the lack of a Dune license, the setting is also different. Instead of the well-known planet Arrakis, the retro game takes place on the eponymous world Elland, which, analogous to the source material, is supposed to represent a “rough desert world on the edge of the galaxy”. Retro Room Games promises more than 20 varied missions in the flight simulation, which are equipped in several different aircraft, each with its own equipment adapted to the task.

The game itself runs as a GBA emulation, which the publisher says supports common features. Most conventional gamepads should work as a control option and can be configured completely manually. Memory levels can also be loaded and saved at any time. In addition, the image resolution should be upscaled from the 240 x 160 pixel format of the Gameboy Advance to modern sizes.

Source: Steam