Well, it’s a party now. Bjarni and his vikings are here, and there ain’t no party like a Bjarni viking party! Hey! Ho! Runesoft has announced that the real time strategy game Cultures: Northland is now available in the Mac App Store. The game, which was originally developed by Funatics, tasks the player with building and managing a viking settlement.

Robin Hood: The Legend of Sherwood was released in the Mac App Store on September 15, 2011. I originally reviewed the Mac version for Applelinks back in January of 2005. The PC version was initially released in 2002. I expect we’re going to see a lot more of this; old games getting new life as digital downloads in the Mac App Store, and I’m all for it, especially if the games are as much fun and hold up as well as Robin Hood (mostly) has.

See, now here’s the great thing about the Mac App Store. Games long past, games you may have missed are showing up again as attractively priced downloads. And although some may call them dated, that doesn’t change the fact that what was fun six years ago is still fun today. The latest example of this is Robin Hood: The Legend of Sherwood, a real-time strategy game from Runesoft.

I had a lot of fun with Jack Keane. I’d like to think this has more to do with the quality of the game than with any sense of nostalgia, but I imagine that’s not the case. Those who never got into adventure games or who have never actually played one will likely grow tired of Jake Keane within a matter of moments. But if you prefer your games to be story driven or like your puzzle logic to border on the absurd, then Jake Keane is a fun, entertaining romp worth the few technical glitches and slow moments along the way.

All you fans of pirates (the handsome, comical, romantic kind, not the amputated, murderous, drunken kind that, you know, actually existed) will be pleased to note that Jack Keane, “A hilarious, action-packed adventure game in the spirit of Monkey Island,” will be shipping out to retailers across North American on December 8th. Boy, I sure am glad we can laugh about pirates these days. Why, I think it was only about five or six years ago when I told my best pirate joke at a party and as admonished for being “too soon.”

In Jack Keane, we’ve got a stressed out pirate, a mysterious island, and a monster that eats British secret agents. Seems that covers everything, and yet, there’s more: 250 objects will need to be utilized to solve the game’s puzzles, dozens of off-beat characters will come into play, and you’ll get to play as both Jack and the lovely Amanda, who apparently has a habit of stealing Jack’s crew members from him.

Is there anything that could make this game sound any better? Yes…

Normally, an announcement such as this would go right to the daily Macintosh/iPhone software update round-up, but when it’s pirates and it’s adventure and it’s Freeverse, I have to make an exception.

An article at Apple’s website offers details on Jack Keane, an adventure game developed by Deck13 Interactive and originally published for the PC by RuneSoft. Now, the fine folks at Freeverse will be bringing it to the Macintosh by the end of the month.