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…

Just like last week though, we’re going to start with something that’s not a game at all, and this time it’s the January 1984 issue of Computer & Video Games magazine that recently arrived in the post! I’ve mentioned here before I’m working backwards from where I originally started collecting it at the time, a year or so later than this issue, which I picked up on eBay at a decent price a couple of weeks ago – virtually mint condition too, which doesn’t really bother me but I’ll take it! Anyway, it’s such a fascinating moment in gaming history that I wanted to just give you a really quick flavour of what’s inside… The cover star this month is none other than Sherlock Holmes, and he’s representing a special supplement on adventure games, by which it mostly means text adventures, which also means it’s a mostly dry, text-filled 28-pages, as would be the case for the regular Adventure section for years to come! However, as well as a page on tabletop RPGs and the long-since redundant turn-based RPG you used to play by post, one turn at a time for about £1-2 a go, there’s also a page on what it terms “video games adventure” reviews, which includes none other than Activision’s Pitfall; doesn’t say but I assume it’s the Colecovision release as the original Atari 2600 version had been around for a couple of years by now, and subsequent versions were still a few months off. Good adventure though!

Another stalwart of these mags at the time were type-in game listings, and this month we get no less than nine of them for the Spectrum, Texas, Atari, Dragon 32, BBC B, VIC-20, ZX81 and Sharp MZ-80K, but the highlight has to be ROX 64, which is our first but not last appearance by the legendary Jeff Minter this week! He provided a whopping four pages of BASIC for the Commodore 64 which is going to reward your efforts typing it all in with what seems to be a take on Missile Command where you’re shooting meteors out of the sky. Looks like pretty advanced BASIC to me too, with both sprite and sound synthesis. As it’s a Christmas issue, news is pretty light, but we do learn about a new American software startup called Electronic Arts! Reviews this month include game of the month International Soccer on C64, which fares better than its version of Arcadia (the game that inspired the name of the page you’re reading!) that’s apparently a pale imitation of the Spectrum version! Meanwhile, Ocean’s Kong wins out against three other Spectrum Donkey Kong clones also covered, Bengo does a surpisingly good job of Pengo on the VIC-20 and Transistor’s Revenge is a circuit-board shooter for the BBC and apparently the best game on the platform all year! On the consoles, highlights include my old favourite, Bounty Bob on Atari 2600 and Popeye on Colecovision. And notable in the arcades is the wonderful Pole Position, then there’s the usual competitions and how-to features – tons of them too; this mag’s a whopping 170 pages! I want to finish on adverts though, which do take up a lot of them, and by this point loads of these are huge, full colour ones, and for actual games rather than where to buy your hardware… Alchemist on the Spectrum, Football Manager, Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy, Chuckie Egg and loads of Llamasoft madness! I could go on, but if you like this kind of nonsense there’s actually a bit of an experimental feature similar to this coming in a few weeks, so watch this space!!!

Onto playing games rather than reading about them, and I’m going to start with a few updates on stuff I’m still playing more than anything else but haven’t mentioned recently to avoid being a bore! I’m still not done with the Diablo IV campaign so I still haven’t got the first season pass that relies on you doing so, but I’m still plodding through this stat-heavy, loot-heavy, fantasy hack and slash RPG, and I’m still loving every second! In fact, as a quick follow-up to the Retro Arcadia Game of the Year 2023 Halfway Hotlist a few weeks back, the new Zelda’s current number two spot is under serious threat! Also a few weeks back, I said I’d just about rinsed all I could out of Street Sports Baseball for Commodore 64, which is on The C64 Collection 1 for Evercade. Well, I might have but I can’t stop playing it all the same! I’m still nowhere near done with NeoGeo Baseball Stars 2 on the SNK Arcade Classics Vol. 1 collection for PSP either, but I have now won a game, which I was well chuffed about!

The House of the Dead Remake on Switch might be a bit of a mess but it’s a fun mess, and after trying more times that it probably deserves this week, I finally saw the credits! The biggest issue is that it plays like crap however much you mess around with Joy-Con sensitivity, aim-assist and so on. I hate using any traditional console controller for motion controls too, and the alternative method using this method didn’t change my mind… Especially when the game decided to switch to it all by itself the first time I got to the last level! Really needs a light-gun, or even a Wii controller, because, for me at least,the higher difficulties are redundant otherwise. Really needs a few more levels too – there’s three then a cut-down boss rush (something else I hate!) before the final boss, which was about the only one I thankfully beat first time, albeit deep into my allotted number of however many continues it allows! It’s the most Switch remake ever too – I’m sure the original ran better! But for all of that it’s still House of the Dead, it’s a cheesy as hell rail-shooting blast from start to finish, and once you’ve come to terms with its shortcomings it’s hard not to keep going until that happens too!

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed returning to old favourites and looking for new ones on Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration over the last nine months or so since it first arrived, but the main reason I keep going back now is Tempest 2000 for the Atari Jaguar. Of all the Tempests, this flavour from 1994 is the one I love the most – I just think it nails the psychedelic presentation in the cleanest way of the various later versions, as well as being the most fluid to control of the lot. Either way, this takes the original 1981 tube-shooter to the Jeff Minter max, with more levels, some wild designs, power-ups, bonus levels and more enemies. The soundtrack will always be a bit too nineties techno for my taste but it certainly does its bit in the overall assault on the senses, and there’s no denying how timeless and addictive the formula is once it’s got its hooks in you. Again!

We’re running long so I’ll finish now with even more baseball as my odyssey into a sport I didn’t know I loved until mere months ago continues – sorry, non-fans! Following-on from the deep-dive on R.B.I. Baseball for the NES I’ve just finished (and you’ll also be able to read here in a few weeks), I’ve moved on to trying out its 1990 sequel, R.B.I. Baseball 2 on the Atari ST. Proper polished it is too, with big and bold on-field presentation and some really great touches like the little cheerleaders, the desperate sliding animations and the wacky illuminated scoreboard cartoons recapping the latest key plays. Plenty of speech too, although it’s strangely lacking in ambient crowd noise while the ball’s in play, which is a bit jarring. Gameplay is familiar (particularly if you’ve been cramming forty years of baseball games into a couple of months!) whether batting, pitching or fielding, and the overall game flow is relatively fast-paced but otherwise authentic. The only thing that isn’t quite as fast-paced as it should be is the batting animation, but you soon adapt and ignore it. It’s all licensed so all the teams and player management is there should you want it, or it’s easy just to get into some games… You can even just watch the computer play out a game, which is surprisingly enjoyable to have on in the background too. I’ve been playing on emulation but watch this space for an original copy soon!

In case you missed either of these, last week we had the regular start of the month double-header, starting with On The Retro Radar, featuring trailers and info on the surprising amount of retro-interest new releases on the way in a generally quiet summer month. Then there was also the usual weekly deep-dive, this time discovering Fightin’ Spirit on the Commodore Amiga and a bunch of the best of the rest of the genre on there. And next week, be sure to check back on Wednesday for the next one, when we’ll be having a seasonable big old look at Summer Games II on the Commodore 64. See you then!