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’m in a quandary about Return to Grace… Came out on PC last year but only recently arrived on consoles, including Xbox (via Game Pass) where I’ve been playing it, so does it count as a game of the year contender? If it was lower in the reckoning I wouldn’t be so bothered, but with my Halfway Hotlist feature fast-approaching at the end of June, I now need to decide if it can have a place at the business end, where it will then undoubtedly be in with a shout for the main event in December! Anyway, you’ll find out which way I’ve swung in the end soon enough but in the meantime, Return to Grace is a first-person, retro-futuristic, sci-fi walking simulator – which is a genre I’m over the moon still appears now and then – meaning it’s heavy on the narrative, light on the puzzles and even lighter on a bit of platforming. And speaking of moons, the game is set in the 39th century, where humanity has now spread across the galaxy, which, until a few hundred years ago, was kept in order by a super-AI called Grace, until Grace got mysteriously shut down. And that’s where your space archaeologist comes in. It’s well under three hours long and is mostly undemanding and totally unthreatening, allowing you to focus on the well-voiced and increasingly compelling story, as well as enjoy the often gorgeous, sixties-inspired but far-distant setting. And I’d have totally dismissed this if it hadn’t been on Game Pass but I’m so glad it was – absolutely adored it!

Flying around the garden on a sit-down lawnmower does kind of counter the tedium of cutting the grass but it doesn’t take long each Spring for it to quickly turn back into a relentless and thankless task… Unlike Hover Bovver on Commodore 64, which has been going strong since 1983! This is classic Jeff Minter, despite the lack of llamas or camels, with you borrowing the neighbour’s lawnmower to mow the grass on eighteen different lawns, not that I’ve ever seen even half of them to date! The trouble is, you didn’t ask you neighbour first, so he’s after you, and should you run over any flowers, the gardener will be too, so stay out of their way as you go or you’ll lose a life. Neither of them is keen on your dog though, and you can get him to chase them away with a press of fire but only while there’s something left in his loyalty meter, so you want to save that for emergencies. The dog will also get annoyed by the sound of the mower, also on a meter, and when that’s too high he’ll come and let you know about it, meaning you have to stop fast to avoid hitting him then wait for the motor to cool down, leaving you painfully exposed for a few seconds! Holding a direction down will make you go faster but that will also cause the motor to heat up, so you need to keep an eye on that meter too! Combined with the different layouts, which include carefully positioned hedges no one can go through, this all adds up to way more depth than is first apparent, and a fantastic game of cat and mouse! I love the way it plays and how it looks too, using simple textures to excellent (and very C64!) effect, and there’s some delightfully primitive animated cutscenes every time you need to borrow another lawnmower. The relentless Country Gardens folk tune may eventually wear thin though! Doesn’t stop it being an absolute masterpiece, and an option I’ll always take over the real thing!

I’ve been messing around with NBA 2K24 for a few weeks now, since it arrived on Xbox Game Pass, and while I’m still sore about the current 176GB install size at last count, this thing is really, really good fun! And even more so now I’m developing a vague idea of how to defend! I’ve not played one of these in earnest for a few years now, so I’m possibly easy to impress, but I have been lucky enough to see a few New York Knicks games at Madison Square Garden in the interim, and what’s impressed me the most is how just authentic the flow of this game is – obviously, the clock is sped-up by default, but the pacing is great, not least thanks to superb AI everywhere… Even down to spectator level, as your home crowd starts to dwindle through the fourth quarter while you approach inevitable defeat! It’s so realistic, and the in-game presentation is outrageously good too, for the first time using NBA footage on top of traditional motion-capture, which works particularly well in previous era modes where the latter isn’t practical, and results in stunningly good animation. Like all of these things, up-close and personal is still way too uncanny valley though! The audio – especially the commentary – is also just like watching on TV, and you’ve got live rosters and stats and so on to back it all up. Controls are quickly intituitive, with varied dribbles more easily accessible than before and the rest transposing to individual player movement with a real physicality. There’s way more depth, modes and content (including a lot of paid stuff) than I’ll ever be interested in but that’s another strength – it’s simply built for enjoyment, whatever game of basketball you want to play!

After having such a good time with the original arcade game of the same name by Taito in 1987 last week, I couldn’t resist jumping to its 1995 SNES follow-up, The Ninja Warriors! It’s more side-scrolling beat ‘em upping, where this time you can choose from three ninja androids, each with pros and cons and their own equally lethal move-set, as you plough through relentless waves of the future-tyrant Banglar’s goons and bosses. It’s mostly linear left to right through seven stages, taking in military compounds, forests, shopping centres and more, all very slickly presented with lots of detail, some nice lighting and cool environmental effects. Same for the characters themselves, who do move a little stiff but they’ve each got their own personality, and that also goes for many of the big variety of enemies, although there are so many coming at you that they’ll all soon become very familiar! Where this really comes into its own though – and as a result totally outshines the original – is in how you take them down, with a load of attacks unique to each character, some of which will combo, then there’s dashes, blocks, grabs and throws, as well as a metered super move and the opportunity to pick up and chuck stuff too. None of which is massively sophisticated but is all immensely good fun to this day!

That’s all of what I’ve got for this week but in case you missed it last Wednesday, do check out my deep-dive into the interactive FMV pioneer Sewer Shark on Sega Mega-CD or Sega-CD as you prefer, as well as the, er, best of the rest on there! Then next Wednesday, to celebrate the end of an epic journey all the way through all of them for the very first time, I’m going to be counting down my top ten 2D Sonic the Hedgehog games! Hopefully see you then!

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