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’s nothing in particular I don’t like about Zanac X Zanac but I don’t think I particularly like it much either. Which is strange when I think about how much time I’ve spent playing it this week! This was a Japan-only vertical shoot ‘em up for the original PlayStation by genre stalwarts Compile, and was, in fact, their last release before they went bankrupt. I should be specific too because, as you can maybe tell from the title, this actually features two games, including various forms of the original Zanac for the NES from 1986, and Zanac Neo, the PS1 remix from 2001 I’ve been playing. It’s a generic invasion of Earth story, where you get to choose from three ships (plus a hidden NES one), each with their own play style, collecting power-ups and a choice of seven number-based sub-weapons that can also be maxed out by collecting more of the same, which can be easier said than done when there’s a screen full of other numbered icons to avoid! There are occasional graphical flourishes, especially in some very cool sci-fi backgrounds, but this feels very old-school 2D shooter – including some overly long levels – that was done in far more interesting ways many years before this arrived, for example in Compile’s own Aleste or Spriggan games. What it lacks in any real invention or exhilaration or contemporary flair though, it does make up for in being very competent, which it seems is sometimes just enough!

While we’re talking schmups, I’ll spin us around ninety degrees and quickly mention SNK’s 1998 Blazing Star for Neo-Geo too. This one’s an old favourite, and it wasn’t long before I was back to business as usual, consistently beating the stage two boss without losing a life then getting battered on the frantic third, just like I used to! That said, I still think it’s a bit more approachable than its predecessor Pulstar, and to this day it’s one of the best-looking side-scrolling shooters you’ll ever play, and the soundtrack isn’t far off that either, lurking somewhere between the majesty of Darius Gaiden and the relentless energy of Thunder Force IV. Which is high praise!

Next up is Baseball Stars 2, also for the Neo Geo, and it’s an arcade take on the game from 1992 that I’ve actually owned since 2008 on the SNK Arcade Classics Vol.1 collection for the PlayStation Portable but never even loaded up before now, when it suddenly became very interesting thanks to my recent new-found obsession with baseball! I really should cover the whole compilation in its own right here sometime because apart from the golf game, Neo Turf Masters, and a bit of Metal Slug, I’ve barely ever touched anything else on this thing either and it’s full of absolute classics – Samurai Shodown, King of Fighters ’94, Super Sidekicks 3… Anyway, Baseball Stars 2, and I’m not sure I’ve seen a more visually appealing baseball game than this – not that I’m exactly a connoisseur yet – but I can tell you it’s gorgeous, full of vibrant cartoon detail, madcap animation and comedic pop-outs for key plays, with music and sound effects (including a ton of over-excited speech) to match. It’s loads of fun to play too, with fast and frantic one- or two-player gameplay across two leagues, Exciting (beginner) and Fighting (expert), with various team set-ups, power-ups, button mashing for speed, finesse plays and other very non-simulation stuff! This one’s suddenly a keeper!

I didn’t quite realise what Dr. Fetus’ Mean Meat Machine was when I noticed it first appearing on the Switch eShop the other week so it totally passed me by, but I’m always a sucker for a demo, so when I also noticed it had one this week and took a closer look, I realised it was a Puyo Puyo-style follow-up to Super Meat Boy Forever and was suddenly more intrigued! Despite the name, it’s no mere take on Dr. Robotnik and his own take on the formula though – matching falling tiles is one thing, but as you’d expect with Meat Boy, here you’ve also got to contend with buzzsaws, rockets and all kinds of other instruments of doom as they drop! The merest touch and you’re starting the level again, and while this certainly adds some flavour to the genre, it soon becomes a bitter one, especially when there’s nothing you could have done differently. Meat Boy’s crazy difficulty works fine in its platforming environment but it soon gets frustrating here. Good-looker though, and very slick, just too hard for me to want to see much more than a demo of I think.

Shoutout to my friend Nick Jenkin for my next game, which he covered here on his YouTube channel a few weeks back, and I’ve really been enjoying ever since! It’s a ZX Spectrum homebrew from 2014 called S.I.P. or Special Intergalactic Painter by the prolific Denis Grachev, and you can find this and the rest of his stuff at www.retrosouls.net. It seems to be a remake of something the author first released in 1998, which in turn seems to have been influenced by an ancient arcade game from 1981 by the name of Make Trax, although there’s been loads similar since. Each level is a series of platforms that you can jump between if they’re parallel, and the idea is that you need to paint them by walking across every bit that needs painting. There are various creatures and lots of spikes hindering your progress, so you need to puzzle out the best routes around them to get where you need to be, and keep your wits about you too for some quick changes of direction. It’s simple but very polished, with a lovely, minimal art style and minimal controls, which let you focus on its increasingly fiendish action-platform-puzzling, and it’s all absolutely superb!

There’s not much I haven’t said here previously (several times!) about Winter Games on the Commodore 64 but that’s what I’m closing with this week regardless! Of all Epyx’s “Games” games, this one from 1985 will always be my favourite, and I’ve rarely not been playing it since then, but my excuse for bringing it up again now is that it’s finally working again on Evercade! Long story short, it originally worked fine on The C64 Collection 1 cartridge, then just stopped loading. Same for Summer Games on there, and same on both Evercade EXP (handheld) and VS (connected to the TV). After sharing several videos with the devs and several replacement carts where they worked once but never again, they finally established it was a firmware problem for those two games exclusively, and this week that firmware has been updated to fix it! Anyway, seven alpine events (including one too many ice skating ones), some of the most atmospheric and polished visuals on the system, and just a few seconds of joystick waggling, and I’m thrilled to have it to play on my Evercades again!

By coincidence, I’ve got a deep-dive into Summer Games II on the C64 coming here in a couple of weeks, but before that, be sure to check back next Wednesday when we’re going to be discovering Tower of Evil, the VIC-20’s very impressive take on Atic Atac, alongside a read-through of the June 1984 issue of Computer & Video Games magazine! And in case you missed it last week, I might have got a little bit carried away with my favourite vertical shoot ‘em up, exhilarating gaming in general, and my life with DoDonPachi on PS1 and arcade! Enjoy that, and see you next time!