Back again for our regular Sunday roundup of quick-fire reviews and impressions of everything under the spotlight at Retro Arcadia this week, old and new and a bit of both…

I just got myself a copy of the Star Wars: Dark Forces Remaster on PC, which released a couple of months back then I totally forgot about! Anyway, I think I’m right in saying was the first Star Wars first-person shooter when it first arrived in 1995, and it had plenty to offer the emerging genre too, with a lot of freedom of movement, a lot to interact with – including some cool environmental puzzles – and loads of power-ups and items to find too. And now it’s had a lovely makeover, with some lovely hi-res textures and all-new lighting, cel-shaded cutscenes, as well as support for plenty of mod-cons. You’re a mercenary working for the Rebels just after the Death Star incident (which the first mission covers your previous involvement in), and now you’re trying to take down the Empire’s new Dark Trooper program, which some familiar faces quickly reveal is being used for vengeance reasons. This all takes place over fourteen varied but very old-school levels, although being able to play with a regular controller and in a fairly modern way this time around did counter a bit of the contemporary jank still hanging around! It was always fun though, and you can’t remaster that, so going back to this has been a proper blast all round.

We’re going to slow the pace down now with The Chessmaster 3-D from Mindscape on 1996 on the original PlayStation! There are loads of games in this long-running series but until I played this one, I was only really familiar with the very functional (but very enjoyable all the same!) Game Boy version from a few years before. Obviously, this one is still just as chess as that one is – and no doubt the rest of them are too – but now you can view the board and it’s pretty surroundings from any angle, and there’s a nice bit of realistic sound accompanying the moves, which are very easy to pull off with the controller (and I know I’m talking like it’s some kind of skateboarding grind rather than moving a bishop!) thanks to a semi-transparent hand cursor thing. There’s a choice of boards and chess pieces, twelve different computer opponents and plenty of teaching stuff, but mostly it’s just another really good game of chess that honestly I’m starting to regret I ever mentioned here so let’s quickly move on!

I know Super Mega Baseball 2 has been around for so long now that it’s had no less than two more sequels since (the latest of which is also installed on my Xbox via Game Pass), but the MLB season is well underway again, and the Switch edition was a beast I never really did justice to before, and I got sucked right back in when I noticed its icon on there this week! It’s still a really nice cartoon take on the game too, playing sim-level authentic, with a serious physics engine behind it and way more depth than I’ll ever need, but with arcade accessibility and plenty of pace to boot. Easy to pick-up controls too, growing with your skill level, together with a clever, flexible difficulty system that will keep you going and going. As will the various game modes against the computer or others, not that I’ll ever touch anything beyond solo play (and I’m sure I’m five years too late to the party for much else anyway). I’ll never take advantage of the customisable absolutely everything either – from logos to players to teams to tournament rules – but it’s all there if the lack of licensing bothers you enough to want to do a PES! The batting, pitching and fielding systems will feel familiar if you’ve played any baseball games since the PlayStation 3 (where this series also emerged), with all that modern nuance to ball targetting, winding-up throws and so on. Everything runs so smoothly too, with a bunch of character-filled stadiums hosting the gorgeously animated action, overlaid with a very smart user interface for those all-important stats! The sound is atmospheric, with voices coming from the field rather than TV commentary, although they can get just as old after a few sessions, but like the rest of the presentation and the gameplay itself, it’s all just made for fun, even if it’s not the latest and greatest of its ilk anymore.

Last up this week, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Hillsfar on Atari ST, which is some proper official nerd stuff from Strategic Simulations in 1989, and follows on from its possibly better-known AD&D predecessor, Pool of Radiance. Not that it was really a sequel – more of a side-quest until Curse of the Azure Bonds came along. Either way, it’s a role-playing game set in the high fantasy of Forgotten Realms, where you create a character from various races and classes, which in turn open up a series of unique quests played out in over-world and location-based map views, side-scrolling travelling views (where you get to ride a horse against the backdrop of a lovely pixel-art forest), then there’s a top-down dungeon view for your storyline or treasure-hunting business inside specific locations. It’s pretty much open-world but progress is guided by a series of quest-related narrative missions, occasionally interrupted by random encounters or locations of interest, and you’ve got all the usual stats and dice-roll interactions, plus a bit of simple projectile and hand-to-hand combat, and while maybe not as deep as the other three games that eventually made up the rest of the series, it’s just right for an AD&D dabbler like me to aimlessly grind away in to my heart’s content! I’ve now beaten the cleric quest-line and I’m well into the more challenging (so far) fighter one, then there’s more if you start again as a mage or thief, which I’ll very likely be doing because I really love this one!

Right, that’s the end for today, but in case you missed in last Wednesday, do still join me for a ride on one of Hollywood’s biggest hype trains as we in turn discover one of 16-bit gaming’s most iconic titles, Batman: The Movie on Atari ST! Then be sure to check back next Wednesday as we go on another journey, this time all the way back exactly forty years for everything going on in video gaming in Retro Rewind: May 1984 in Computer & Video Games, straight from the pages of the original magazine. Hopefully see you then!

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