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…

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide has been around for a year or so on PC but came to Xbox (via Game Pass) for the first time a couple of weeks ago, and while I don’t generally do online co-op squad stuff, I’ve had a load of mindless fun jumping into a mission and teaming up with three randoms for the odd twenty minute blast through the week! Although 40K isn’t my favourite flavour of Warhammer, I’ll always give any of it a go – which is how I ended up in unfamiliar multiplayer territory – with this one seeing you enlisted by the Inquisition after getting their attention during the game’s opening prison break and the subsequent attack by the Chaos God Nurgle’s followers, who you’ll then be sent on various missions to bring down. It’s standard sci-fi fantasy nonsense that perfectly supports some very polished first-person shooting and melee combat, occasionally let down glitchy online performance but never at the expense of a good time. Not sure how long it’s going to last because there seems to be a big crafting component as well as a bunch of MMO-type stuff I’m never going to engage with, but for now, and for yet another week on the bounce, Game Pass has come up trumps again!

I’m still enjoying Forza Motorsport on Xbox too, as well as MLB Slugfest 2003 on GameCube and Dragon’s Crown Pro on PS4, which has grown on me but not much else new to say since last time, so let’s carry on with an old arcade fighting game from 1992 by the name of Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting, that I’ve been playing handheld on the Evercade EXP, where it’s one of eighteen games in The Capcom Collection, which, contrary to Evercade’s usual cartridge format, comes baked into this latest version of the console. Which is fine if you have one! Anyway, I don’t suppose I have much new to add to the Street Fighter discussion either… This was the third iteration of the original sequel, which played faster, added some new specials, some new looks, and had tweaked the character balance of its predecessor, Champion Edition. All the same, I might have preferred that one here as I’m not an expert and that speed boost dictates more precise inputs that I struggle with in the heat of battle at the best of times, let alone when my heavy attacks are on shoulder buttons! Still love having it handheld regardless though, and the pace soon feels normal again even if the unavoidable button-mapping takes a bit longer to!

Ketsui, Cave’s 2003 vertically-scrolling bullet-hell shoot ‘em up, is outrageously good! In fact, the only thing holding it back from ranking alongside my genre favourite and their own 1997 masterpiece, DoDonPachi, is all the numbers all over the screen every time you shoot something, which I find really distracting – whats wrong with old-fashioned gold stars? Anyway, the stupid numbers are pretty important if you want a good score, with playing up-close and aggressive rewarding you with higher numbers (from 1-5) dropping from dead enemies then racking up bigger multipliers once you beat the boss at the end of the stage, of which there are six, set just after a near-future apocalypse involving the icecaps melting and you having to shoot everything in its wake! All the usual Cave stuff, but this one also has a cool lock-on feature, automatically unleashing a load of homing missiles at everything you’ve just got close enough to lock onto, once again rewarding aggressive play. With a bit of practice and fore-knowledge, gameplay soon becomes majestic and exhilarating chaos however you play though, and whether for score or simply survival, it’s constantly encouraging the impossible while instantly punishing any lapse in concentration. Which is also usual Cave stuff! The environments and the bosses especially are full of detail even if they aren’t their most creative work, although the insanity going on throughout will distract you from that, and sound is trippy and fine but not their strongest either, but they set such a high bar elsewhere and it’s still a thriller by anyone else‘s standards.

Starfield’s post-game might have been the less intimidating option, but I’ve finally uninstalled it (for the second time since I “finished” it) and gone back to Elite Dangerous on Xbox, because in reality that’s all I ever really wanted from Starfield the whole time! The Atari ST version of its original predecessor is the last of my top-ten favourite games of all-time that I’ve not done a deep-dive into here – also for intimidation reasons – but this thing is a bewilderingly different matter entirely, despite sharing the same fundamental space exploration, combat and trading gameplay. Actually, what’s there today has evolved enormously since its original 2014 release too, turning it into this vast, massively multiplayer, persistent universe with multiple roles, factions and mission types available, and even first-person shooting across more star systems than you can even fathom, let alone visit! My own gameplay style is decidedly the opposite in scale though. I’m more than happy just filling up my hold with some innocuous cargo I’ve done the research on to know I can sell for a much higher price a couple of systems away, maybe getting sidetracked by a mission I’ve picked up from a space station I’ve stopped to refuel at on the way, or doing some exploring or mining, and just enjoying pottering about across the galaxies, actively avoiding combat where I can and generally minding my own business! I do love that there’s always more there when it takes my fancy though, wonderfully documented and laid out for me in the comfort of my own cockpit, or by a thousand like-minded nerds who’ve done it before on the internet if I need a bit more, so while you’re totally left to your own destiny from the very outset, you’re never alone in doing so, however hard you try!

Last up this week, Kung-Fu on the NES from 1985, a port of one of my all-time favourite arcade games, Kung-Fu Master by Irem the previous year, and was developed by Nintendo themselves as a launch title for the system. It’s arguably the first ever side-scrolling beat ‘em up, taking cues from the Bruce Lee movie Game of Death but actually a sequel to Jackie Chan’s Wheels on Meals, with his character from the film fighting up a building to rescue his girlfriend. Incredibly – given my fondness for the original – I’d never played this version before but I should have because it’s a good one, and unmistakably Kung-Fu Master despite the name change! The graphics and sound are a perfect NES rendition, and the gameplay feels just right, with simple but precise controls, which is a necessity when you’ve got a parade of enemy goons coming at you from both sides! This is especially true of the harder of the two game modes here, which is probably closer to the challenge of the arcade game and where any longevity lies because while it’s still lots of fun, you’ll be beating the cut-down five stages in the other mode, including their bosses, in pretty short order. And quickly too – I think I’m down to about seven minutes!

That’s going to do us for this week, but if you want more and you missed it last Wednesday, be sure to check out my deep-dive into Grandstand’s groundbreaking Scramble tabletop game, as well as a quick look at some ports and the clones too! Then next Wednesday, we’re going to be rediscovering a spectacular and truly iconic 16-bit flight simulator, Falcon on the Atari ST, which, going back to after all this time, was yet again intimidating (in no small part thanks to its 150-page manual!) but also one of the most exhilarating gaming experiences I’ve had for a very long time. See you then!