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…

Or maybe not a game at all! Don’t worry though because it’s game-related, and it’s a Sonic the Hedgehog Lego set! I bought this when it came out a couple of years ago, finally got around to making a start on it last Christmas, then forgot it was there until last week when I finished it off! This was the original Green Hill Zone set, which I think is still the only one available but there’s a bunch more on the way very soon that I’m trying desperately to avoid being tempted by right now! It weighs in at 1125 pieces, and at least half of them are tiny and sometimes complex, so it’s definitely an adult build, but it all makes for a very authentic pixel art styled finished set, and that authenticity is also reflected in the “level” design and some fantastic Lego renditions of Sonic and a brick-built Dr Eggman in his Eggmobile. Looks good on my nerd shelves too!

Mario Kart 8 got its penultimate Switch Online Expansion Pass update recently, bringing a bunch of new tracks and characters, and a perfect excuse to go back to this wonderful racer again! Bowser’s wizard Kamek has become my new favourite character – for no other reason than I like his look – and there’s Wiggler and Petey Piranha on offer too, then onto the courses, there’s a total of eight new ones to race… Squeaky Clean Spring is a brand new one too, strangely set in a bathroom but it’s a fun design all the same! There’s also Athens, Vancouver and L.A. from Mario Kart Tour which are all a bit vanilla, much like their source material, then Koopa Kape and Moonview Highway from Mario Kart Wii, which I’ve never played before but seem like fun, then a strangely sunset-less Sunset Wilds from GBA Super Circuit and Daisy Cruiser from GameCube Double Dash, and they’re both really good to race on as always, whatever the time of day! There’s so much on offer with this game now I’ll never get bored but can’t wait for the last bit of DLC when that comes all the same!

I’ve spent most of Moon Patrol’s very long life thinking I don’t particularly like it because I’m not particularly good at it, but since the Irem Arcade 1 collection came along for Evercade a few months back, I’ve got better and might even be starting to like it! Actually, I really like it, and have spent several nights this week with baseball on the TV in the background while I’ve been trying to get to the end of the game’s first loop on my Evercade EXP handheld. And I did too! You’re going left to right in your moon buggy, fighting off aliens and jumping over craters and other obstacles through a series of stages conveniently marked from A to Z. You hit a checkpoint every few of them where you’ll also get big bonuses for getting there quick rather than crawling along like an old woman in a bid to stay safe. It’s very learnable so you do get better the more you play, and as you do it gets more and more addictive, and you end up just keeping going until you see the end! Then it starts again and there’s no way you’re seeing the end of that loop anytime soon! Still a good-looking game too, with crazy colours and parallax scrolling that you’d never believe was about the first of its kind.

I’m not sure how I ended up looking at Ridge Racer 7 for PlayStation 3 on eBay last week but I’m now the proud owner of a copy all the same! It was only £4 including postage though, so I reckon I’ve had my money’s worth out of this 2007 PS3 launch title already. There’s forty cars, twenty-two tracks (in forward, reverse and mirror) and loads of modes, including arcade, various manufacturer and boss trials, and an extensive grand prix campaign. Still runs great too, and I’m also wondering why I never got it at the time because it must have been a proper showstopper! The drifting mechanic at the heart of keeping your car at the maximum speed possible takes a few races to click and a lot longer to master but once you’ve got a feel for it you can really chuck the car around! I’ve mainly been playing the grand prix races so far, which take place in various sets of races across different US states, providing loads of variety in where you’re racing, and while it’s really fun I think it’s pitched slightly too difficult. You can do a perfect run, drifting like a king and just using your nitros as icing on the cake, then you hit the last corner and here come all the other cars for the first time since the opening lap! Still, a few quid on a whim well spent! And as always, sorry for the crappy photo of my crappy TV, although for once it’s not actually all that crappy!

Dig Dug Revival is a very cool new homebrew for the Commodore 64 from LC-Games. It’s a faithful conversion of the 1982 original arcade game from Namco but with the playfields randomly generated each time you’ve eliminated all the enemies on the current level. It plays just the same though (and actually it’s way more fluid to control than the old official C64 version), with you navigating your way underground to keep your distance from the little dragons and tomato-nasties until you’re ready to let loose with your bike pump and inflate them to death or lead them under a falling rock. Get a few under one falling rock and you can rack up some decent bonus points too! There are four difficulty levels but normal feels just about faithful to the original, as does the enemy AI, which causes them to move faster the longer you take, and a few levels in you’ll have different densities of dirt to dig through too. Definitely check it out on the LC-Games itch.io page!

I’m going to finish this week with Falcon, which I took out for a spin on the Atari ST for the first time in nearly thirty years this week. I was amazed to see my old save file still ready for action though, and even more amazed that I managed to land my fancy F-16 fighter jet once I was done flying about shooting missiles at stuff! Thankfully, they included a first flight section in the 150-page manual which also serves as the perfect refresher, but what a genuine thrill to be taking that thing back to the skies all the same! Of course, both the ST and the Amiga were stacked with excellent (but very serious) military flight sims but this one never failed to impress, despite its 1988 release making it a relatively early one. I played it to death around then and I’ve fancied doing it again for ages but have always felt a bit intimidated… Stupid massive manual! Reckon I’ll be sticking with it for a while now I’ve taken the plunge though, and might even get to some of those other ones sometime soon!

In case you missed it last week, be sure to check out my deep-dive into the VIC-20’s very impressive take on Atic Atac, Tower of Evil, where I also took a look through the June 1984 issue of Computer & Video Games magazine because it’s a proper time capsule! I was thrilled to get a comment on there from the developer too! And coming up next week, it’s the start of the August so it’s the regular monthly double-header, starting on Tuesday with On The Retro Radar, with trailers and info on the surprising amount of retro-interest new releases on the way in the coming usually quiet month. Then on Thursday it’s another deep-dive, and this time we’re discovering Fightin’ Spirit on the Commodore Amiga. See you then!