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…

After ninety hours I’m done with The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom! Took three attempts at the end-game before I was finally properly prepared though, and I really was done by this point, but up to then I don’t know where to even begin with this! It takes Zelda’s greatest hits and then creates its own on top and then some – a vast, beautiful and mesmerising adventure that can be familiar but is always something new and often like nothing you’ve ever experienced before! Some of what you can pull off with Link’s new abilities, together with the game’s inherent no-right-way-to-do-it philosophy leads to some real moments of exhilaration, not to mention anxiety as you wonder if it’s really going to let you do what you probably shouldn’t be doing. But you should! The Switch might be starting to creak now but you’d never know it here, and you certainly won’t get anything like it anywhere else!

And with that down, the very same day I unwrapped my copy of Diablo IV for Xbox Series X, released on Tuesday, and threw myself into an even bigger time-sink! And to think I had no intention of buying this, but it turned out the open to all server stress test a few weeks ago was the best possible advert! It’s a total nerd-out isometric, hack and slash fantasy RPG with endless evil to slaughter, dungeons to explore, abilities to master and not least loot to pick up and pore over and organise in almost equally endless but surprisingly intuitive screens full of lovely numbers! Huge campaign by the looks of it, some hauntingly atmospheric settings and a decent story so far too, progressed both in-engine and through some very slick cutscenes, and apparently there’s tons more stuff still on the way. Scarily compelling and almost impossible to put down once it’s got you. And it will get you!

Being more of a Kick Off kind of guy – or having spent more hours playing that game than any other game ever to be precise – Sensible Soccer never really registered with me at the time, and it was only getting the Codemasters Collection 1 (mini-review here) Evercade cartridge for my birthday last month that led to my first proper taste of it as I dabbled my way through everything on there. As I soon discovered though, you don’t dabble with something as good as that for long, and despite having the whole new Team17 Collection (big review here) to play on there, it hasn’t left my Evercade EXP all week as I’ve started playing as “Highbury” through a 20-team European league I’ve built. It will never sit in my top three games of all time like Kick-Off does, but I can definitely see the attraction! Easy to pick up, with simple controls covering everything, but there’s real depth and character on top of all the various modes, team selections and regular match strategy too. The top-down presentation was so simple at the time that it hasn’t aged in the slightest either. Lucky I’ve got the Evercade VS console hooked up to the telly too because this thing’s unlikely to leave my handheld for a while yet!

After lots of Summer Games last week, I jumped into its 1985 Commodore 64 sequel this week. Summer Games II is more of the same Olympics-themed athleticism, and like its predecessor mostly relies on timing and rhythm over joystick waggling, which it’s all the better for given the C64 Mini’s joystick! You’ve got eight new events, including cycling, equestrian, fencing, high jump, javelin, kayaking, rowing and triple jump, but you can also load in the eight from the previous game if you have that, meaning a massive sixteen event championship for up to eight players! I’ve just stuck with plain old eight events and playing solo though, which is rewarding enough if you’re saving your records. Equestrian and fencing are a bit crap but – assuming you’ve read the instructions – the rest are loads of fun, although the brutal timing demanded by triple jump makes just landing a jump your main goal there rather than distance. I think my favourite events are cycling, with its clever pedal controls, and kayak, which could have been a great (albeit niche) game in its own right! Neither edition of Summer Games is quite Winter Games but I’ve still had a really good time with both recently, to the point that you need to look out for a Retro Arcadia deep-dive into this second game very soon!

I’ve been messing around with vertical bullet hell shoot ‘em up DoDonPachi as well, but there’s also a deep-dive coming on that in a couple of weeks so I’ll leave it there for today. In the meantime, next Wednesday we’re going to be reviewing the brand new ZX Nightmares book by Graeme Mason and Retro Fusion Books, celebrating the hopeless, the hardest and the controversial ZX Spectrum games we loved to hate! (For the keen- eyed among you, we’ll do the previously advertised Impossible Mission next week instead). And in case you missed it last Wednesday, make sure to check out what’s possibly the longest ever look anywhere at Eddie Kidd Jump Challenge on the ZX Spectrum, which admittedly also has a fair bit about the man himself, even more about Evel Knievel, other related games and a load of cool old toys! Enjoy that, and I’ll see you next time!