I’ve got a few new regular features up my sleeve to complement the usual various forms of weekly deep-dives at Retro Arcadia, partly to keep things fresh but also partly to take a bit of the pressure off me trying to juggle writing them alongside juggling work and family… And not to mention actually playing the things! Don’t worry though, because that’s not to say they won’t still make up the vast majority of what’s here each week, as well as the Weekly Spotlights, monthly On The Retro Radar feature and reviews when I’m asked to (or the mood takes me). No, the plan is just to mix in what you’re reading now as a new flavour of deep-dive every three months… Assuming it works because, as I write, I still haven’t really worked out what I’m doing yet!

Anyway, back to this one, and as just alluded to, this is still a bit of an experiment but actually something I’ve been toying with for the last year or so! I don’t go wild buying things, but I am always discovering new stuff that maybe deserves better than emulation, or filling in a gap in my collections for GameCube or PlayStation 2, for example, or just finding a game I didn’t know about for another system I’ve still got hanging around. Not just games either – books, magazines, collectibles and anything retro-gaming related is all included. It was actually one of those GameCube gaps that got me off my backside too, and we’ll come back to that in a second, but the idea was if I spread this over a “season” of three months, and I’m picking up a couple of things a month on average, then we’ll have a nice, easy to read feature on a bunch of stuff I might not feature otherwise, but, more selfishly, I might stick on a shelf and forget about if I don’t force myself to some something with it! And with that, if you’re familiar with my Weekly Spotlights, I’m going to take a similar approach here with all the things I’ve picked-up over the summer, with a paragraph or two on what we’re looking at, why I got it, where it’s from, how it plays and so – a mini review of sorts, and maybe a bit more besides, so let’s see how it works…

As we’ll see again several times shortly, I’m always on the lookout for old copies of Computer & Video Games magazine that precede my own collection, which started in early 1985, but at the start of June I managed to find a really nice copy of The Computer & Video Games Yearbook 1984. This is regular mag size but with a stiffer cover and 132-pages of mostly type-in games listings, interspersed with some pioneering developer interviews and features on programming, licensing, being good at games and so on. While there are individual listings like Yahtzee for the Dragon 32 and, er, the very blatant “Pac-Man” for the Spectrum (which I’m sure paid full attention to that licensing feature), the bulk of the listings centre around four very impressive games from some big-hitting developers that have been converted for as many machines as possible, including the BBC, Atari, Spectrum, VIC-20 and Dragon. There’s spacecraft adventure The Vezspozian Affair by Keith Campbell, Mike Singleton’s galactic diplomacy game Interstellar Intrigue, energy capture competition The Beacon Star Wars by Ron Potkin, and tactical space action game Pirates & Polyps by Pat Norris. Look forward to trying a few of these sometime so I’ll let you know how they turn out!

My Atari ST, which I bought aged 16 back in 1988, had been suffering from a temperamental power supply for a while, but with a bit of minor repositioning it would usually turn on in the end. Back in June it stopped working altogether though. Dead! Unfortunately, the big capacitors on the ST’s internal power board are known to dry out over the course of decades, so without having any means of testing it, I made this initial assumption, though it was also the cheapest thing to try out first! I also had no intention of messing around with capacitors either, so I chanced a whole replacement board on eBay for £20, on the basis I’d just splash out on a refurbished ST if not. But it worked, as you can see above, with Castle Master running (in preparation for a deep-dive on the way in October 2023) behind the old board in the photo. And I couldn’t be happier!!!

Next up, that GameCube game from earlier, and it’s Crash Nitro Kart from 2003, which I picked up at the start of July after some time waiting for a PAL version to appear at a decent price on eBay. My GameCube went a bit unloved at the time, but over the past five years or so I’ve been building a curated collection of both classics and stuff that just appeals to me, in turn selling some of it once I’m done playing to go towards more, or hanging on to anything that’s really grabbed me. I’m really happy with it now too, but sometimes things still come along that I think I’d like to have, and that’s what happened here. The premise is kart racing for the entertainment of the evil dictator Emperor Velo XXVII, which Crash and co have been forced into after he threatened to destroy the Earth if they didn’t. It’s regular powered-up kart racing in a Crash Bandicoot skin, with six race modes, the main one of which I’ve been playing is Adventure, where you’re unlocking loads of races through five different worlds full of different environments, with all your favourite characters, and challenges and collectibles. All of this, as well as its polished presentation and high-speed fun, more than make up for what it’s lacking in creativity, and is a really nice alternative to Mario Kart: Double Dash in what I think is now qualified to be called my GameCube collection.

Also around the start of July, I got hold of the January 1984 issue of Computer & Video Games magazine – 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 in the mag 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!

As we saw earlier, 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 program code 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 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’m not sure how I ended up looking at Ridge Racer 7 for PlayStation 3 on eBay when I got back from holiday in July 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 now 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!

Now a quick recap of everything on the Piko Interactive Arcade 1 cartridge for Evercade, released on 11th August, and containing a wild mix of nine obscure and unusual (and sometimes downright odd) arcade games licensed by Piko in the mid to late 1990s. Usual top-notch Evercade presentation, game information, display options, save states and so on, as well as the wonderfully old-school manual, so let’s have a play… I’ll try and limit myself to a sentence or two on each a game so we can cover all of them here, starting with Burglar X from 1997, a five stage maze game with a fart button to slow down your madcap pursuers as you look for dice to smash for coins before doing a runner before a boss fight. Totally bonkers but very clever with a great cartoon style and really fun, addictive gameplay. Great start! I’ve really enjoyed Diver Boy too, very much an underwater Bomb Jack from 1992 where you’re diving for clams, ideally in the order they open for more points, and looking out for some cool power-ups like a barrel submarine. It’s not original or that much to look at, and what it’s asking of you takes a while to master, but once you do this is another one that’s crazy addictive.

Speaking of master, Dragon Master is the first of two one-on-one 2D fighters here, and while it’s probably the better of the two, unless these are the only fighting games you own I’m not sure why you’d spend much time here. It’s from 1994, you’ve got a choice of eight players, there’s three bosses and lots of other stuff you’ve seen done elsewhere that’s all competent enough but just not very exciting. Fancy World: Earth of Crisis from 1996 is a single-screen platformer that takes you around the world checking energy balls at various cute but deadly animals to stop some mad scientist and his evil plans. It’s Bubble Bobble but it’s really good Bubble Bobble and I’ve been playing tons of this one despite it being totally derivative and not exactly a looker. You could say most of the same for Magic Purple, also from 1996, but maybe a bit more Rod Land than Bubble Bobble, with a duck punching hordes of enemies across six fantasy worlds made up of slightly bigger than single screen platforms. I prefer the presentation here though, as well as the higher challenge, and it’s another winner! Less so that second fighting game, Master’s Fury from 1996, which is even more generic than the last one, doesn’t move great and really isn’t much fun at all. Dreadful music too!

Next is Steel Force, a top-down sci-fi run and gun from 1994, with the emphasis on run as you clear out space pirate bases against the clock, which means play quick and aggressive. There’s a variety of levels, enemies, traps and bosses, and it’s all nicely polished, a bit like a faster-paced Alien Breed. And it’s brilliant! The Legend of Silkroad is a 1999 side-scrolling beat ‘em up and I think is the only game on here I’ve ever played before! It uses pre-rendered graphics and fighting game specials to really good effect, and while it’s not the most fluid or polished example of the genre, there’s loads to sink your teeth into and I reckon I’ll be spending a lot of time with this one. Finally we’ve got Ultimate Tennis, and finally we might have a decent tennis game on Evercade after several absolute stinkers! This one’s from 1994 and is kind of bargain basement Virtua Tennis, taking a similarly (but much less so) accessible arcade approach but, like Silkroad just now, lacking in fluidity and polish, especially in the camera department. It’s fun though, and another I want to spend some time with because I do like a tennis game, when it actually works. And I really like this compilation too! Incredible value, almost all real hidden gems and there’s two fighting games to discover even if you’ll only play them once.

We had a look at the January 1984 issue of C&VG earlier, and now it’s the turn of the December one from that year, though as we’re running way longer than I originally planned, I’ll try and be a bit briefer this time! In the news we hear about the imminent release of Activision’s Ghostbusters – one of the great Commodore 64 movie licenses – and while the Spectrum version lacked a bit of its polish, fear not because we also learn that Sabre Wulf on there is getting no less than two sequels, by the name of Underwurlde and Knight Lore, no less! Game of the Month is Boulder Dash on the C64 and rightly so, and there’s some fantastic versions of Tapper too, as well as loads of ports of stuff like Jet-Pac, Ant Attack and Jet Set Willy to places they didn’t originally belong. Raid Over Moscow gets a decent review too, although a bizarrely large “editor’s comment’ box questions its taste, arguing that nuclear war is not a subject for fantasy! In the arcade section, Return of the Jedi is the headline act, and there’s type-ins for the Spectrum, C64 and BBC, and Daley Thompson’s Decathlon tops the charts, closely followed by Elite, and there’s tons of full-colour adverts for some all-time classics that are ideal for cutting out and putting on your bedroom wall. What a time to be alive!

The last of my summer retro gaming pickups, but certainly not the least, was a bit of an extravagance while I was on holiday in Cornwall a few weeks back, although I’ve been after a replacement Game Boy since my launch day console died back in 2017! The contrast wheel is a bit temperamental and there are a couple of specks of dust under the screen glass but everything else is working perfectly and the unit is in good cosmetic shape overall. I’ve had a blast playing through my old cartridges again too, and there are a few more I’ve got my eye on, so I reckon that’s a good place to finish here, and hopefully when we do the autumn version of this in a few months I can tell you all about them. In the meantime, I you’ve enjoyed reading this pilot episode, and I’ll see you then.