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…

There are moments when Still Wakes The Deep, which launched on Xbox Game Pass this week, is a real work of art! It looks absolutely stunning – the best-looking oil rig from the 1970s you’ll ever see, full of authentic period detail, some great North Sea weather effects and impressive character designs. They’re all very well cast too, with similarly authentic voice acting of the sort that will have Americans reaching for the subtitles… Oh yeah, they even included the incredibly obscure Scottish Gaelic as a language option too! This meticulous design is lacking in a couple of very key areas though… Firstly, there’s really not much to the gameplay, with you funnelled first-person through a very linear six or so hours with very little substance to anything you have to interact with beyond button presses, a bit of sub-Alien Isolation stealth and some basic Quick Time Events, and very little to see or do beyond what’s shoved in your face with a heavy dose of very yellow signposting. Which makes all the gameplay jank even more surprising m considering how little of it there is! Anyway, secondly, the whole Lovecraftian horror thing going on, which has you trying to escape the oil rig after it drilled into some kind of otherworldly portal and let all sorts of unimaginables loose, really isn’t very scary! Imagine the dreadful isolation, the suffocating claustrophobia and the relentless terror of such a predicament but no, it’s barely even occasionally unsettling… Well, apart from the bizarre arm waving when you run, or having to reapply accessibility settings every single time you hit a checkpoint! You know what though? I still enjoyed it enough to see it through! For all the things it’s not, your developing predicament is still an interesting one all the same, and the narrative is well-paced and heartfelt and a bit mad all at once, just like the character your playing, and it’s a good time despite itself. Which makes what it could have been an even bigger shame!

Cave’s 1998 disco-DoDonPachi, Fever SOS, is another game that can really shine but the more I play, the more I think the rest is a bit of a wasted opportunity. Also known as Dangun Feveron, it’s a vertically-scrolling, more or less bullet-hell shoot ‘em up with all the usual gameplay trappings you’d expect from the genre pioneers but with a very seventies, Saturday Night Fever theme, which is as absurd as it sounds but like the hamburger with the iced-doughnut bun I had the other week, it really works! The problem is, unlike all the liquid sugar on that thing, I don’t think it’s laid on thick enough, and all too often you’re stuck on a very plain (arguably equally seventies!) scrolling star-field with a bunch of generic enemies shooting generic bullets at you, albeit to an admittedly excellent disco soundtrack! What it needs is disco balls everywhere and not just between levels, and I want dancing and flared trousers and multicoloured flashing floor tiles (or just some flourish to the bullets would do!) – a bit more of the spectacle Cave is also known for! There are some cool special effects though, and environments do get more interesting, and the onscreen chaos will do its best to keep things exciting regardless, with some trademark exhilaration as you sweep impossibly across enemy lines and face some clever (if also generic) bosses. There’s a choice of three ships, each with three power-shot options, a disco-themed special attack, and loads of upgrades and bonuses to collect, multipliers to master and a general risk-reward element to its scoring. And it is fun too, just not as much as it could have been or as much as a lot of Cave’s other output is.

I’ve never been massively into Sinistar but keep going back to because I’m convinced that one of these days it will do an Another World and finally change my mind! Just not today though… It’s a multidirectional space shoot ‘em up by Williams in 1983 with an Asteroids vibe but this time you’re shooting at the space rocks to mine crystals. Just don’t shoot them too much or they’ll just disintegrate into nothing instead. Like Asteroids! Anyway, each crystal is used to build the Sinibomb, and when you’ve got enough of them it will automatically target the evil force known as Sinistar – a big spaceship with a nasty face that’s being built by enemy workers while you’re busy collecting crystals. Eventually it will go down and you’re warped off to do it all over again somewhere else, which works fine but I just find it too busy and less fun than it’s much purer inspiration as a result. It’s pleasantly functional to look at but the real star is some wonderful, Skeletor-like sneering digitised speech whenever Sinistar appears, like “I am Sinistar! Beware I live!” which is undoubtedly another reason I’m always happy to have another go but I’m still just not into the rest of it quite as much. Maybe one day though…

We’ll head over to one more arcade game to finish off this week (and maybe one I can be a bit more positive about!), Data East’s 1993 Hammer Horror side-scrolling beat ‘em up Night Slashers, which I recently found out was getting a remake, so couldn’t resist digging up the undead corpse of the original, which is going to take some topping! It’s a b-movie brawler, where you find yourself saving humanity from an army of monsters, playing as your choice of vampire hunter, martial artist or wrestling psychic cyborg, each with their own set of fighting moves as well as their own special powers, from holy water to a screen-filling flaming phoenix. They’re all unique enough too but while it’s not exactly the most hard-hitting or the most fluid example of the genre, it’s all competent enough to be loads of fun whoever you choose. It’s the horror aesthetic where it really excels though, set up almost like a modern-day Castlevania, with all the fiends out to play, and plenty of familiar bosses, like Frankenstein’s Monster and The Mummy, as well as some really imaginative ones too, like a pair of Aztec gods. It all looks exactly the part too, playing out across a decent variety of mostly creepy environments where even the regular zombies are decaying before you very eyes in horrific, gooey detail, and those twitching body bags in the morgue will always be a cause for concern! Animation is a little stiff but it all feels good in motion, and there’s plenty of variety in enemies and their attacks too, with lots of great special effects adding interest, as well as the high-energy, sometimes spooky synth-rock soundtrack. Fantastic game and I’m really looking forward to the new one to see what else they can do with it!

Right, that’s me done for this week but in case you want a bit more and missed it last Wednesday, I did a really special to me deep-dive into an absolute icon, his movies, his legacy and the almost as iconic martial arts action-platformer he inspired… My Life With Bruce Lee on the Commodore 64! Then be sure to check back again next Wednesday because it’s the end of June so we’re more or less halfway through the year, and that means it’s time for the Retro Arcadia Game of the Year 2024 Halfway Hotlist, with a full countdown of my top ten favourites as they stand right now. And I’ve absolutely loved putting it together too so I hope I’ll see you then!

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