Time for our regular quick-fire reviews and impressions of what’s been on the go this week, old and new and a bit of both…

This week brought with it the first of those potential game of the year shouts from last year’s rundown, just three weeks in and on Game Pass too! I loved Windjammers and have been waiting for this sequel for years, and so far it hasn’t disappointed, although (quite predictably) the same can’t really be said of my performance in its online modes! Don’t really care about those though, and I’ve had a great time with Windjammers 2’s frantic Tron-Pong solo gameplay, where I’m not doing so badly!! Visually it’s a lot like Streets of Rage 4, which is no surprise as it’s come from the same place, with a stylish hand-drawn art style replacing the Neo Geo pixels of the original, but that game’s near-perfect core mechanics are intact with a load more besides, making it feel as much like a fighter as a tennis game at times. And there’s way more depth to both aspects than I’ve had time to even contemplate yet, but it’s all feeling wonderful so far!

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been playing a lot of shoot ‘em ups recently, and I’ve even been dabbling with bullet-hell too, but I’m mediocre at best so I decided to enlist some expert help. Enter YouTube’s Schmup Junkie and his beginners’ guides, which don’t just tell you how to start, but where to start as well, and that place was Star Parodier on PC-Engine Mini! It’s a sometimes cruel but always joyful vertical shooter, featuring the catchiest music this side of Bubble Bobble and eight stages of bold cartoon visuals; there’s a Bomberman boss fight too! I spent pretty much every possible hour until Windjammers this week just playing this, and despite the rough ride through the last two levels I reckon I’ve got the measure of them enough that if I can amass enough lives early on I can beat this in one go and properly move on to the next lesson…

And we’re staying with the PC-Engine for that, though how this manages to do what it does on there is nothing short of a miracle, Blazing Lazers is another vertical shooter, but not one I’ll be finishing any time soon! Way tougher and way darker, with an Alien-esque industrial sci-fi aesthetic that still manages to have some catchy tunes up it’s sleeve too! Really enjoyed playing this so far, so thanks again to Schmup Junkie for his ongoing wisdom, which I’m sure we’ll return to next time!

Back on Xbox, I have still been plodding away at the wonderful Dead Cells, and I also tried the latest crop of Games With Gold… Aground is a kind of sideways Minecraft RPG, and I can see its pixel art appeal but just don’t have time to get sucked into that nonsense, so I binned it off (for now) mere minutes before I was! NeuroVoider is a similarly pixel arty twin-stick rogue-lite that doesn’t pull off dark sci-fi as well as Blazing Lazers did – just too dark for my taste, and a bit too much effort to see what’s going on as a result. Really close to being loads of fun though, which thankfully this month’s final offering, Space Invaders Infinity Gene, has no problems with! Stylish evolution of the timeless classic and once again makes me wonder why anyone would think that Games With Gold is somehow irrelevant now!

Definitely not irrelevant is what’s coming to Retro Arcadia next week, where over on the ZX Spectrum we’ve got a deep dive into the world of truck racing with Supertrux. See you there!