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…

After having such a great time with the Turtles in Time arcade original last week, I couldn’t resist sticking with The Cowabunga Collection on Nintendo Switch and diving straight into its 1992 SNES port – also included on there – Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time, to give it its full new confusingly numbered title! The story is the same though, with exo-suit Krang nicking the Statue of Liberty while Shredder becomes a Timelord and after an initial outing on the streets of New York, you’re sent back through history then ahead into the future to beat up all kinds of enemies, old and new, in a bid to get everything back to where it should be. However, while that’s all translated intact, there’s a lot different here too, and I don’t just mean a few scaled-back animations and speech samples (although it still looks and sounds great) and slightly less fluid combat (although it was a particularly high bar)! The two surfing levels are now treated as bonus stages, with the Neon Night Riders bit totallt rebuilt to show-off some very cool Mode 7 effects, while it also gets several of its own bosses, and later on there’s a whole new Technodrome stage, featuring a prolonged elevator fight and boss battle, which I think also appears in the Mega Drive Hyperstone Heist game (which takes a lot of inspiration from both versions of this). There’s also new time trial and two-player versus fight modes here, and new music and various other tweaks, but fundamentally its just an absolutely fantastic port of one of the all-time great beat ‘em ups!

A full two years after I first came across a demo for a darkly stylish, vertically-scrolling bullet-hell shoot ‘em up called Angel at Dusk in some Steam preview event or another, it’s finally got a full release, and it was totally worth the wait! The default difficulty might be Very Hard but the slow, Touhou-like pace, as vast and intricate webs of bullets emerge from the game’s infernal depths, is not only surprisingly welcoming – considering the genre – but quickly hypnotic too! That said, it is all in Japanese, so swings and roundabouts, but the controls are pretty intuitive and the scoring mechanics pretty fathomable, even if whatever else is going on isn’t particularly! Its mature, Giger-inspired hell-scapes and body-horror bosses, contrasting with the brightly-lit bullet patterns, do enough of the talking anyway, as does its dynamic and expansive soundtrack. It’s beautiful in its own polished-indie way, and I’m so glad it got here in the end!

Speaking of demos, just a quick note on the Contra: Operation Galuga demo that landed after that Nintendo Switch Direct thing the other week… It’s yet another reimagining of the classic run and gun series, with all-new graphics and sound, new stages, enemies and bosses, updated weapons system and two-player co-op in story mode or up to four in arcade mode. That nonsense story about terrorists on some tropical paradise means eight levels of shooting your way through the jungle, up the waterfall, into the enemy base (on a hover-cycle) and more, some of which might sound familiar, and it sometimes feels familiar too, but only to the point that you’ll probably wonder why you’re playing this and not any of the originals! I know it’s a demo but it’s janky and I’d have loved some modern pixel art over this pretty but pretty soul-less CGI stuff. Like most recent Contra games, unfortunately it’s not really Contra to me.

While no doubt an all-time favourite of mine, and arguably one of the great sports games on the ZX Spectrum, as is often the case, I need to give a shoutout to my friend Nick Jenkin and his recent YouTube review of Basket Master for getting me sucked right back into it after far too long away! Also known as Fernando Martin Basket Master, it’s a one-on-one arcade (but rule-abiding) basketball game by Dinamic Software in 1987, which is also when my brother and me liked the look of the back of the box, pooled our pocket money, then played it to death against each other for several years to come! From the animated title screen, with what might be a big caricature of Fernando spinning a basketball on his finger, it’s polish all the way, with two impressively animated sprites moving smoothly back and forth across a mostly monochrome but perfectly scaled and thoughtfully detailed court, complete with a character-filled smattering of spectators cheering them on at the back. And those replays! Close-up, big-pixelled, and great for boasting about that backwards slam dunk you just pulled off! Solo play is a decent challenge too, with various difficulties and clever but fair AI, and an equally clever one-button tackling, guarding and shooting system that combines with a dynamic energy meter for nicely tactical experience. Sound is what you’d expect but it’s fine, and once the gameplay clicks (which is what the noise of the ball bouncing does!), I can’t think of many better sports titles on the Spectrum!

And that’s probably a good place to call it a day here. In case you missed it last Wednesday, do join me for an increasingly regular trip back exactly forty years to find out what’s going on in gaming this month in Retro Rewind: March 1984 in Computer & Video Games, as we have a flick through the original magazine together. Then next Wednesday, it’s somehow already time for the Retro Arcadia Gaming Pickups Winter 2023-24 Recap, the third in a new seasonal series covering all the retro games and related stuff I shouldn’t have been spending money on over the last three months! Hope to see you then!

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