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…

I finished Starfield! And as promised – when I also promised not to keep going on about it until I was done – here’s my final word… I’ve not played one of those clicker games on my phone for years, but that’s not to say I’ve never enjoyed idly tapping away at the screen for hours on end to make the numbers get bigger… And while there’s certainly more to it than that, I’m increasingly of the opinion that’s where my fundamental enjoyment of Starfield also lies! It’s a compulsion I’ve been trying to fathom since I was just a few hours in – something intangible there, lying beyond the occasional sense of wonder, exhilaration or simply enjoying the facade of being a space pilot, and also in spite of the jank, the glitches and – a couple of very late missions aside – the lack of real immersion or engagement with a lot of what it was trying to do. Just some nicely dressed mundanity making the numbers get bigger – both literally and figuratively – which is just as enjoyable as I remember! The post-game is proper fun too, but don’t worry, not more Starfield talk until game of the year time. Maybe!

It’s been a few months since my top ten favourite horizontal shoot ‘em ups feature, so I really should get on the vertical one I promised would follow, but in the meantime, here’s a sneak preview! Twin Hawk is a fine example of the genre from the arcades in 1989, developed by Toaplan and published by Taito, taking place in a alternate World War II timeline, although the specifics seem to vary depending on which version you’re playing and where you’re playing it! I’m sure it’s all nonsense regardless, but I’m playing on the Toaplan Arcade 2 cartridge for Evercade, where you also get the Mega Drive port as a bonus game if you stick the first volume into the Evercade VS console at the same time! Very good port too but I’ll save that for another time. If you’ve ever played Flying Shark, Twin Cobra, or any of that other Toaplan stuff from this period, it will start out familiar – fighter plane over tropical setting (although apparently here it’s a fictional European country), and lots of planes and gun emplacements and vehicles and increasingly large tanks to shoot before they shoot you, which is going to be the more likely scenario until you start learning where they’re coming from! There’s the usual power-ups to help you out too but what this does a bit differently is the bomb button, which will call in six support planes to fight alongside you until they’re shot down, when they’ll then go kamikaze! Disturbingly you can also command the lot to do that before a shot is fired, or you can replace them with a regular bomb before they form-up in case of emergency. It’s set over four continuous levels that are going to take some beating – although I don’t think it’s the hardest of its kind – which are separated by bosses and a change in background music… The opening music is like nothing you’ve heard in a shooter before either – more like an even more mellow take on the Out Run high score table music! Soon changes into something a bit more lively though, as your plane and its helpers take off across its stunning, almost volcanic but definitely tropical (wherever it’s set!) landscape full of burnt reds and oranges that soon give way to seas and beaches and more militarised areas. Best of Toaplan in all respects I reckon.

Speaking of favourites, every time I notice Gris riding very high as it does in my big list of favourite games, I wonder if it should really be where it is or if it’s a case of recency bias, although it has been there for a few years now! Well, as it’s just come to Xbox Game Pass I decided to settle my doubts once and for all, and I can definitely confirm it deserves to be there, or maybe even a bit higher! To simply call it a platform-adventure from 2018 (when it was also my own game of the year) would be doing it a disservice because while it is that, it’s also a masterclass in subtle but incredibly powerful emotional engagement, possibly only surpassed in video games by the intriguingly similarly minimalist Journey. Its themes of grief are never in your face but carry the wordless narrative as you loosely puzzle your way to bringing colour – one shade at a time – back to a colourless but hugely imaginative and absolutely stunning world. Outrageously good soundtrack too! Beautiful in every sense.

Still on favourites, I think Fantasy World Dizzy on the ZX Spectrum from 1989 might be my favourite in the series, although it still astounds me that all of them were budget releases! It was the third game proper, and refined the somewhat cumbersome inventory system from the earlier games, gave you three lives rather than a health bar, and introduced the Yolkfolk! This time around I’ve been playing the NES version – where it’s known as Mystery World Dizzy – on Evercade for a change (hence the dodgy pic of my TV screen), which was first developed for a Dizzy compilation in 1992 but for budget reasons didn’t see the light of day until it got a fresh lick of paint and was finally released in 2017. The mix of egg-shaped platforming and puzzle-solving using the items you find to progress to the next bit works great too, set in a self-contained but expansive medieval-inspired world as you try to escape the dungeon you find yourself in then work to rescue your girlfriend from the clutches of a wizard in his castle in the clouds by means of a hundred magic stars you need to collect on the way. Dizzy controls like Dizzy, for better or worse, the world is colourful and varied, the puzzles are logical and there’s some really grating background music you’ll be glad to see the back of once you’re done, which I think took me about an hour and a half, which even that couldn’t spoil. Just a joy to play!

Last up this week, I never owned a copy of Batman: The Movie on Atari ST at the time but I’ve tried to since… Several times! Disks aren’t always what they used to be unfortunately, but this time I’ve come up trumps and both of them seem to be intact. This came out on everything alongside the film that was everywhere you looked in 1989, and would be a mega-seller for masters of the tie-in Ocean, as well as what came bundled with an awful lot of Amigas! It’s set over five levels, each representing bits of the movie, and with their own distinct gameplay styles. You start out platforming through the maze-like Axis Chemical Plant with the help of your batarangs and grapple gun, finally sending Jack Napier into the toxic vat that’s going to turn him into The Joker. Speaking of which, what an iconic health bar this had, with Batman’s face gradually turning into his as you take damage! Equally iconic, level two has you racing through Gotham in the Batmobile in glorious 3D, then level three is a more sedate puzzler in the comfort of the Batcave before you take to the skies in your Batwing for level four, cutting loose Joker’s poison balloons. Level five then returns to the platforming format as you clamber up the cathedral for the big showdown with The Joker at the top, not that I’m anywhere near that yet! I reckon this is up there with Ghostbusters on the Commodore 64 and Robocop on the ST or Amiga as one of the all-time great movie licenses! Every level is stunning in its own right, with exquisitely detailed graphics, great sound and really tight gameplay – at least once you get used to grappling around corners in the Batmobile! It’s not the first time I’ve played this but I love it even more now I’ve got it for real, and I’ll definitely be doing a deep-dive on it sometime soon!

In case you missed it last Wednesday, there was another deep-dive you check out right now though, this time looking at R.B.I. Baseball on the NES, and the sport I’ve gone from zero to obsessed with over a few short months, although your prior interest isn’t required! Then on Friday there was the regular monthly look ahead to (mostly) retro-interest new releases for October, with trailers for everything, On The Retro Radar. Massive month too so I hope you enjoy all of that! And likewise I hope you enjoy next week’s main course, when there’ll be spectacular 3D engines, giant poems for instructions and a magical world before frame-rates existed as we rediscover Castle Master on the Atari ST! See you then!