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… And not a Christmas game in sight this time, you’ll no doubt be relieved to hear!

I do, however, have a couple of Christmas presents to go through, starting with the Taito Edition of the new Hyper Mega Tech Super Pocket handheld console by Blaze Entertainment, the Evercade people. Which it’s also got a cartridge slot for in the back! The main attraction is its eighteen officially licensed arcade games 5ougj, including Space Invaders, Operation Wolf, The New Zealand Story, Rastan, Bubble Bobble, Elevator Action and more of a similar vintage, alongside the console version Space Invaders ‘91. Really good value and a great build for the price too, with a vibrant and sharp screen, surprisingly decent sound and excellent battery life, although it is properly pocket sized, which makes me appreciate having girl hands, especially on the shoulder buttons round the back! Not much need for them with the in-built games though, and I guess my only criticism on that front isn’t so much the selection but the screen orientation of some of them, like Volfied, which is portrait and ends up being tiny. You can stretch the screen to full size if that doesn’t bother you though, and there’s various other display options, as well as save states, but, apart from being able to choose an easier difficulty mode for the arcade games that I’ve not tried yet, there’s not much else to tinker with, which is exactly the idea!

I haven’t had a chance to do much more than try out one Evercade cartridge to see how it worked, and haven’t even had a chance to have a go at all the games on here yet, what with all the usual family Christmas stuff to contend with, but fifteen year-old me cannot believe I’m playing the actual arcade version of Operation Wolf in my hands! Apart from that, I have had a really good time reacquainting myself with Football Champ, a side-scrolling arcade football game from 1990 that will never be quite the same on here as when we used to play its slightly tweaked successor, Hat Trick Hero, in the pub in the mid-nineties, but is loads of fun in its own right all the same! You pick from eight national teams then enter a tiered tournament, set out depending on who you chose, getting harder with each game you win, but there also seems to be dynamic difficulty at play while you play too. It’s fast-paced and very simple to get into, although you can set up some lovely set pieces and spectacular goals using just the pass and shoot controls in a fluid sequence. The real winner is the violence you can pull off when you’re not on the ball though, with punching, shirt-pulling and even flying kicks possible, as long as the ref isn’t too close or you’ll be punished! It might not be the headline act in the package but I’m so glad it’s here!

Over on the Evercade VS, Bubble Seahorse Adventures is the latest Evercade Game of the Month (which is available for free until you download the next one), and was originally created for the PyWeek #4 coding competition in 2007. It was expanded and developed for proper release in 2015, and now arrives on Evercade as a native port, where it will no doubt also be included in the next Indie Heroes cartridge on there. Unsurprisingly then, it’s a very simple game, borrowing from both Mario and Bubble Bobble as you help your seahorse on its quest to get to the moon through fourteen multi-stage levels made up of jungles, volcanoes and all sorts of other inhospitable environments, where enemies can be turned into bubbles to float on to supplement your regular jump. You look everywhere and collect everything on the way, and there’s loads of secrets to find on top of the exit, and it’s just so dynamic and so infuriating and so addictive! Some great NES-and-a-bit pixel art and sound to match too. Really didn’t think I’d be into this but it’s the best one of these since Donut Dodo last April! And credit to Blaze Entertainment for the screenshot – the photo I took of my TV screen really didn’t do it justice!

I wasn’t as keen on Panzer Dragoon: Remake, although I did only pay £2.24 for it in the Nintendo Switch sale this week, so I can’t really complain! It’s a 2020 reimagining of the seminal 1995 Sega Saturn 3D shoot ‘em up, with you piloting a dragon over seven occasionally gorgeous levels, from tropical jungles to ruined sunken cities, fighting the “Prototype Dragon” and a selection of flying battleships, giant sandworms, man-sized wasps and more. They attack you from all sides, and often in huge numbers, but as well as a really intuitive lock-on system for your single-button offense, you’ve got 360-degree targetting on the shoulder buttons to fight back with. The whole package is very polished, and it all moves well, and there’s three difficulty levels and various game modes, but it’s fundamentally just not very exciting! Each level ends with a boss, none of which are memorable in the slightest, and only a couple present any real challenge, and otherwise it’s just rinse and repeat target-lock as much as possible at once against a few different backgrounds. Worth a couple of quid all the same!

Last up this week, another Christmas present, Sonic Superstars on the Xbox Series X, which might have came out a couple of months but once you’re past the gorgeous presentation, it’s traditional 2D Sonic gameplay all the way, with all the breakneck platforming combined with exploration you could ever wish for! I only finished its 2017 predecessor, Sonic Mania, on Switch a couple of weeks ago, and it’s been much more of the same so far despite the change in developer, with your choice of Sonic, Tails, Knuckles or Amy Rose (plus more to unlock) taking on Dr Eggman and Fang the Hunter over twenty-six acts and a load of special stages across the wildly varied twelve zones that make up the North Star Islands; can do it with up to four players at once too, should you have the means! Actually, the promotion centred around that a bit too much for me when it first arrived, to the point it put me off at the time, but it really plays great solo too, controlling perfectly whichever character’s move-set you’re using across sprawling but frustration-free landscapes, and if you find the Chaos Emeralds in each area – which aren’t always easy to get at but are generally there for the taking – you’ll be rewarded with selectable and rechargeable power-ups, like clones, bullet-jumps or being able to travel up waterfalls, as well as the super-form once you catch them all. I guess all I’m not keen on is the soundtrack, which isn’t my thing but really isn’t very strong from what I’ve heard either. Loving the rest so far though!

I did get the two new Duke Nukem collections for Evercade too, and a Jaleco one I was missing, as well the Neo Geo Mini with forty SNK arcade games baked-in, and The Art of the Box by Bitmap Books, but I just haven’t had a chance to do spend much time with any of them yet, so we’ll save them for another time, and we’re here every Sunday anyway, so no rush! In case you missed it last Wednesday, there was The Big Retro Arcadia Rundown of Games Completed 2023, a relaxed annual look-back at all the games I’ve completed over the past year, then next week it’s not only the start of a new year but the start of the month too, meaning our regular monthly double-header! First up, on Tuesday, we look ahead to the (mostly) retro-related new releases On The Retro Radar in January, complete with trailers for everything and my own thoughts on each one too. Then on Thursday, it’s the last of our annual festive features when we look at the Retro Arcadia Game of the Year 2024 Predictions, using a similar format of trailers and thoughts for everything on the way this year that I hope might make the cut next December. And there’s loads of them, so I also hope to see you then!