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 know I said it was too soon here when Resident Evil 2 Remake appeared on Xbox Game Pass the other week, and Resident Evil 3 Remake is way sooner again, but how could I resist that too when it also appeared on the service the other day?!?! It’s the 2020 remake of the PS1 game from 1999, which it really captures the tense, survival-horror essence of, despite a few iconic omissions that do admittedly help keep the focus on drama and action over the series’ traditional exploration and puzzling, and the blockbuster pacing and modern looks don’t hurt in that regard either. A console generation on, it really does still look absolutely gorgeous too, with some spectacular set-pieces and epic showdowns with the dreaded Nemesis in particular, of course! It’s certainly not the longest, and like its predecessor, a couple more years of stewing since the last time I played it probably wouldn’t have hurt, but what the hell, it’s a blast any time and another very welcome addition to Game Pass!

DoDonPachi is unquestionably my favourite vertically scrolling shoot ‘em up but that’s not to say I’m not also partial to a bit of its predecessor or its sequels, such as the PlayStation 2 release of DoDonPachi DaiOuJou, which I’ve had such a good time going back to this week! I think it first came out in 2002, the year after Cave’s original arcade release, which was the fourth in the pioneering bullet-hell series and – in the best possible way – is mostly more of the same. That includes more bee-related nonsense where a thousand years have passed since the even more nonsense events of DoDonPachi, when your DonPachi Corps was sealed inside the Moon, but now they’re back to take down the recently rebuilt returning robot army threat to humanity again. And this time they’re being helped by Element Dolls, which are actually useful and give you a choice of how you want to power-up your weapons at the start. Best not to worry about any of the rest though, and just focus on the sublime chaos unfolding over five brutal future-Earthy stages! Controls in either ship on offer are effectively narrow and spread shot, which you hold down for big fire with slower, more precise movement, and tap like crazy for regular fire. This does also affect scoring, which is more or less similar to previous games, involving chaining to fill a meter to keep the chain going, which you can feasibly do across a whole level but good luck with that because you’ve got to survive it first! While the environments are lovely but aren’t going to blow your socks off, what’s going on above them will, with the screen constantly full of enemies of all shapes and sizes (including some wild bosses), then explosions and subsequent mass-medal drops to attempt to collect once you’ve shot them, which are a whole other end-of level scoring mechanic, as is not using your bombs if you can help it. The insane bullet patterns being spewed in your direction from every direction might make that a problem for a while though, but every level is learnable, once you’re in tune with your ship and your firepower, and actively reward familiarity and counter-intuitively aggressive play. It’s a total feast for the eyes as well as the ears, even if the music is more bombastic than memorable, and I assume everything is straight from the arcade version. The PS2 game does have a few tricks of its own though – a Death Label boss rush type thing mode, no bullets mode, a training mode, a gallery, and some video content of top players doing the game’s second loop for the true ending. Which is the only way I’ll ever see that but the rest is just fine for me regardless!

Incredible to think that not only is that one already over twenty years old, but my next game this week, Space Invaders Part II, is even more again on top! Apparently the first game did pretty well for Taito, so in 1979 this sequel came along, bringing with it new gameplay mechanics like enemy reinforcements, aliens that split in two and rainbow showers, all bolted onto the iconic core single-screen shoot ‘em up gameplay from the original. It also had an attract mode, which I think was a gaming first, as was being able to save your name on the scoreboard, and having an end of level cutscene of sorts, with the final invader flying off in a space ship and sending out an SOS message! Otherwise, the look and feel (and ominous sound effects) are more or less what you know from the colour version of the original, and as such, that probably makes this my favourite game of proper Space Invaders. Cool challenge mode on this Space Invaders Invincible Collection I’m playing on Nintendo Switch too, where you have to finish a round while triggering the rainbow effect, where you need to destroy all enemies except a single Invader, which then trigger a visible rainbow trail as it starts moving faster. Very nice all round!

As I’m prone to doing from time to time, I’ve got properly hooked on Snowboard Championship on the Gaelco Arcade 1 collection for Evercade, this time after I realised it also plays beautifully on their recent Super Pocket handheld spin-off! It first hit the arcades in 1997, and I’m not sure appeared anywhere else until this cartridge came along. It’s fast, super-smooth, isometrically-scrolling (and pretty much on-rails) racing, where you’re mostly just reacting to turns and obstacles with a left or a right and occasionally pumping a button for a bit of speed. If you know Gaelco’s World Rally (also on this collection), or stuff like 1000 Miglia, it’s like that but on snow, against the clock to progress to the next stage. And it’s so much fun! Not quite SSX 3 levels of tactility and friction but you can really feel the edges of the board on the snow, and the more you feel them the more likely you are to beat the increasingly vicious timer! Really bold and very detailed cartoon style with some impressive snowy textures and strong contrasting colours on all the ramps and vegetation and spectators, as well as your choice of rider, who is so well animated, especially when they pull out the tricks, which are more for interest than anything to do with gameplay beyond successfully hitting a ramp or loop-the-loop or something. Lots more animation and personality in the crowds than you generally see in this kind of thing too. The music is functional synth-rock but there’s plenty of it and loads of sampled speech and effects on top. You’ve got a choice of difficulties, with both regular races and giant slaloms offering more than enough variety, but while there’s probably not a great deal to it overall, what’s there is an absolute delight!

I’ve not spent much time with the SNES of late but am well on my way to making up for lost time with Super Batter-Up, which I’ve no idea how I missed before, given the ridiculous number of baseball games I’ve spent the last twelve months catching up on as a born-again obsessive! Chance finds on random YouTube videos that you then instantly click with are some of the best ones though, and I really clicked with this, and not only because Pac-Man helps you celebrate a home run! That said, there’s not really much else to make this Namco release (known as Super Famista in Japan) stand out, except it plays a solid game of console baseball from 1992! It’s got player name licenses but not teams, although you do have all twenty-six MLB teams from the 1991 season represented as their home cities, and once you’re in a game that doesn’t make much difference anyway. Which reminds me, one other neat touch is that if one of those is Toronto or Montreal, you get the players standing in line for a burst the Canadian national anthem rather than the American one at the start of each game. Apart from some very nice music, it’s pretty functional from there, with a choice of solo and two player single games or a season, which all play out in one of three distinct stadium types. There’s lot of texture on the field and detail in the crowds, which also translates to the players and their kits, whether in close up batting and pitching views or the wider fielding view, where there’s also some nice animated flourishes. Non-player AI is mostly good, although they do occasionally make questionable running decisions, while what you’re controlling is intuitive and familiar if you’ve played any decent baseball game before. It might be another case of not doing a whole lot but what it does it does really well, and while it’s certainly not the best baseball game ever, I can see it becoming a favourite of mine!

Speaking of which, I did also play a lot of Batman: The Movie on Atari ST, but I enjoyed that so much I’ve decided that’s now for an upcoming deep-dive instead, so I’ll call it a day there for this week! In case you missed it last Wednesday though, be sure to check out my deep-dive into Battle Chess on the Commodore Amiga, where we discover if it really can make chess as cool as that game in Star Wars once made out! Then next Wednesday, join me as we go back to a brave new era of high-end budget titles from Mastertronic and rediscover Amaurote on the ZX Spectrum! Hopefully see you then!

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