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…

The Evercade Game of the Month returned a couple of weeks ago, bringing with it 2020’s The Curse of Illmoore Bay as a downloadable freebie you can play for a month or until you next update your Evercade VS (under the TV) or handheld console – which is how I’ve mostly been playing on my EXP – then in a year or so they’ll all be collected on the Indie Heroes 4 cartridge. This is the first of these since last year, and is a strangely timed platformer, given its Halloween theming, but every day is pretty much Halloween for me (see my X / Twitter alter-ego @stvnormansays for more on that), so no complaints here! Anyway, back in Illmoore Bay, the guy who always plays Santa every year at the local mall has turned to black magic and unleashed the dark spirit Umbra into the world, agreeing to help bring about the Ghoultide in exchange for rulership of the town. Up to two players (on the VS) have a choice of three characters to stop all this nonsense, across spookily-themed and really good-looking 16-bit-styled stages around the town’s diverse districts, with loads to collect and secrets to find, as well as unlocking new abilities by beating bosses, such as bat-wings to fly, which you’ll need to progress but in turn will also allow you to replay previous levels and get stuff you couldn’t before. Great for longevity, although this thing doesn’t just look old-school – it’s proper old-school cruel too, including sending you all the way back to the start of the level when you lose a life (which you will, a lot), so you won’t be worrying about replay value for a while… Thank goodness for save states on these things! I’ve played worse though, and I like it a lot regardless. Good music too! Hoping for more of this standard to come next month.

I’ve been working on an upcoming top ten feature, where I’ll be looking at my favourite Atari ST loading screens, assuming I can reduce the current shortlist of just over fifty down to the required size! Anyway, that’s involving a lot of dabbling with a lot of games but there are some you just can’t dabble with… Such as this 1988 masterpiece from Argonaut Software and Rainbird, Starglider 2! What a game! Proper showcase of 16-bit power too, with the wireframe wonders of the original now filled-in 3D shapes with solid, shaded colour, just like real life! It also did a very good impression of a seamless, open-galaxy to explore as you travelled through space, descended onto planets and hunted for bits to make a bomb to blow up an enemy space station before they finish building it. It’s way less Star Wars than I’ve suddenly made it sound though, and there’s space pirates and asteroids and you can even go below the surface in some places. Incredible depth all round then, but still had a nice arcade feel and is still a very impressive and very immersive good time… Especially when you get your old Walkman out to enjoy the extended soundtrack cassette you forgot was in the box too!

Q*bert isn’t my favourite arcade game but I do really enjoy its Atari 2600 conversion from 1983 by Parker Brothers. It knows its limitations and plays to its strengths, meaning it’s more concerned with feeling like Q*bert than creating a perfect pseudo-3D playfield or replicating every little feature, although it nails a lot of them! The concept is unchanged too – make your freaky little guy hop around a pyramid, changing the colour of the surface of every cube it’s made up of while avoiding various meanies, then moving to the next when you’re done. It’s certainly scaled back but the increasingly steep difficulty curve is still there, together with the resulting one-more-go addictiveness… If you can get your head around the totally counter-intuitive controls because obviously the original’s four-way diagonal joystick is another concession, even if this version doesn’t seem to know it! And that alone might make this port a very acquired taste but stick with it and it might just be one you can appreciate too!

Hot Wheels Unleashed 2 – Turbocharged came to Xbox Game Pass a few weeks ago, and maybe not knowing anything about it from when it first launched six months or so ago should have rung alarm bells, but having had a huge collection myself as a kid, then having fun setting up all sort of wild tracks with my son when he was younger, I was really looking forward to it all the same! And it’s alright, with plenty of cars to race with, and the kind of Hot Wheels courses you could only have dreamed of when you were shoving bits of orange plastic together all the way down the stairs in 1980! I guess this is one of a couple of problems I have with it though – to me it doesn’t feel like playing Hot Wheels, which is fundamentally racing little cars on little sections of track, slotted together across your living room floor. Here though, the tracks are set in five locations, from your back garden to a petrol station, and it’s all polished enough, and moves very fast, but the huge length of each lap combined with a regular behind the car view on a regular track just makes it like any other racer, so the setting quickly becomes irrelevant, and any sense of scale that should distuingish it is lost on me. Compare that to something like Micro Machines, which was obviously played from a totally different perspective but you were clearly racing toys around the kitchen table! I’m not keen on the handling either – it’s like a less refined Ridge Racer, so another game from decades ago I’d rather be playing! Still, that also cost me £50 and this came with the service, which is also something else we could only have dreamed of at the time, so certainly no complaints, and as a new racer to try, it was fun enough while it lasted.

Another arcade game I’m not a big fan of is Sega’s 1988 side-scrolling, arcade Ancient Greek ‘em up, Altered Beast, so you might be wondering why I spent so long this week playing the vomit-inducing ZX Spectrum port from the following year! Me too, but once your eyes adjust to the bewildering amount of all the Spectrum’s best colours all on the screen at once, and the frequent resulting colour-clash, as well as the beyond-jerky, step-by-step auto-scrolling, then there’s a decidedly average fantasy beat ‘em up to enjoy here! The mighty Zeus has called upon you to rise from your grave and rescue his daughter, Athena, from some evil bloke, and given you some beastly supernatural powers to help you fight all manner of his nasty undead minions across five surprisingly atmospheric stages. Actually, the overall presentation is really good, with some nice animated sequences and a great bit of music it you’re on 128K, with a lot of effort clearly gone into translating the arcade experience as best as possible, at least when you can see what’s going on… It plays kind of alright though, and there’s something strangely compelling about the whole bizarre package that has kept me playing way longer than the arcade original or PC-Engine CD version (which I’ve also played a bit of recently) ever has!

Your eyes probably need a chance to recover after that, so I’ll call it a day for this week! In case you missed it last Wednesday though, to celebrate the end of an epic journey all the way through all of them for the very first time, do check out the countdown of my Top Ten Favourite 2D Sonic the Hedgehog Games, as well as a bonus look through the rest on top! And then next Wednesday, it’s another special one for me as we jump on the hype-train for some of the most iconic sights of the 16-bit generation… Discovering Batman: The Movie on Atari ST! Hopefully see you then!

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