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2003’s action-adventure title Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy is about to pop up on PC, Mac, and Linux by way of THQ Nordic. There’s quite a lot going on with these new versions — more than you might expect from years-later ports of a game most people aren’t likely to remember all that well.
Here’s what to look for in the enhanced release on November 10:
- Support for arbitrary resolutions and widescreen (HD, 4K and beyond), native multi-sampling anti-aliasing (MSAA) and anisotropic filtering (AF) for crisp details at 60 frames per second.
- Rewritten 3D graphics engine in portable and modern OpenGL 3+, based on the original Xbox and PlayStation 2 versions, supporting volumetric soft particles.
- Rewritten audio subsystem for cross-platform reverb and realistic distance scaling, together with stereo, 5.1, 6.1, 7.1 and HRTF sound output thanks to the new OpenAL Soft back-end.
- Optional support for Xbox-style controllers with force feedback.
- Plug-and-play; the player can switch between mouse/keyboard and controller during gameplay at any given time.
- Full keyboard and mouse support. Added support to the interface so that buttons can be clicked and lists can be scrolled. The camera can be controlled with the mouse.
- The game is based on the PAL version of the original game, fixing the notorious savegame bug of the NTSC version.
- Fixed several graphical and collision-related issues that weren’t previously visible at lower screen resolutions.
- Restored HD textures, carefully repainted several GUI elements to remove pillar-boxing and cover the widescreen areas while respecting and following the original artwork.
- No GUI or HUD stretching.
While I lack an affinity for Sphinx having picked it up from bargain bins but ultimately always placed it back down, I will commend THQ Nordic for not just sitting on IPs like this and de Blob.
And, yeah, there’s probably an Assassin’s Creed Origins joke in here somewhere.
