Does Commodore 64 Emulation still intimidate you, or do you just appreciate C64 "remakes" for Windows?

Here are two games, one an original and the other a faithful reproduction, both as simple to set up and play as installing any Windows program.  Both are worth installing and trying out for a bit of retro fun.

The first, Midwinter Rites, is a "new" game, made with the intent of recreating the gameplay feel of a C64 text adventure.  Everything down to the fonts and background music are true to the Commodore 64, and the game is a good representation of a typical early text adventure such as Castle of Spirits that I reviewed here some months back. 

The Telengard Remake is a very authentic recreation of a popular CRPG from the very early days of the Commodore 64.  If you were a pen & paper RPG fan, then you simply had to buy Telengard, because it was as close to a rules and stats heavy sort of "dungeon crawl" as you were going to get at the time, and was well-advertised in all of the C64 gaming magazines, flaunting that fact.

In the end, I find using the VICE emulator along with disk images from sources around the web to be the way I prefer to enjoy C64 titles, but Midwinter Rites is something different and unique, and the Telengard Remake may appeal to casual PC users who fondly remember Telengard on the C64, but who find the whole idea of emulation and hunting down .d64 and .t64 files a bit too much.

In the weeks ahead I will touch on the world of "Remakes" -- games made for Windows and other platforms that are based on old games from the 1980's but improved in graphics, etc.