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 mostly enjoyed what I played of Octopath Traveller when it first arrived on Nintendo Switch in 2018 but nowhere near enough to splash the cash and venture beyond its generous demo! Exactly the same was then true of its sequel last year but it wasn’t long before that was also announced as coming to Xbox Game Pass, where it’s finally arrived with the original in tow, so that’s where I’ve started, and I’m now really quite taken with it… Amazing what being effectively free will do for your enjoyment! It’s a Square Enix and Acquire JRPG with a very distinctive “HD-2D” art style, mixing modern, old-school pixel art with high-definition polygonal environments and some fancy special effects. It’s all very slick and complemented by a hell of a soundtrack, although some of the incessant and bizarrely delivered single-word speech that kind of summarises the essence of every piece of text-based character narrative gets old (and weird!) very quick! Anyway, you choose one of eight starting characters, from regular nerdy ones like warrior and healer, to potentially more interesting ones like dancer and teacher, each of whom has a four chapter story arc but you’ll be able to recruit the others to your party later, switch them around and experience their own individual storylines, all spread across the game’s fantasy world where everything will eventually intertwine into a grand tale of fallen gods. Each character has unique skills to develop and sub-classes to explore as they follow their personal quests, which have their moments but aren’t exactly exhilarating and can be a bit samey from what I’ve seen so far. It’s all compelling enough though, as long as grinding out levels is your thing (as it’s sometimes mine! ), and the turn-based battle system, inventory management and so on are straightforward (as long as you were paying attention when they were explained!), and soon become intuitive. I’ve had an increasingly good time whiling away eight or so hours with this so far, and while that’s nowhere near done, I’m very happy so far with all of the rest of above too so far, and will stick with it for as long as that lasts!

When I finally published my Top Ten Favourite Atari ST Loading Screens feature here the other day, I just had to include an honourable mentions gallery of the best of the rest of the shortlist of fifty I’d spent three years putting together then whittling down, and promised I’d get around to featuring a few of them a bit more in these Weekly Spotlights because that was the least they deserved, and one in particular I mentioned as an example was Hong Kong Phooey: No. 1 Super Guy, a cartoon platforming beat ‘em up from Hi-Tec Software based on the classic animated TV show from the early seventies that’s also an old favourite of mine, hence the special treatment! I did also allude to it not being all that great, and while it isn’t particularly, and was probably also appealing to an audience of an age that was unlikely to buy it by the time it arrived in 1990, I’m now of an age where both of those things are easily turned on their heads and I’ve actually had a lot of fun going back to it! It’s all very basic, with your mild-mannered janitor emerging from his filing-cabinet (with a bit of help from the police station cat) as his legendary kung-fu crime fighter alter-ego, and then doing some pretty crude platforming and kicking his way through loads of goons as he tracks down the recently escaped Baron Von Bankjob. It will probably get old long before you get anywhere near him though, but until then there’s plenty of fan service, it nails the Hanna-Barbera vibe with bold cartoon visuals and that stiff-ish movement, and there’s some nice sampled speech and a cool rearrangement of the theme tune playing along with you, which is all good enough for me!

I’ve played a fair bit of Halley’s Comet on the Taito Milestones compilation on Nintendo Switch but kind of forgot it was on the Taito Egret II Mini until I was absent-mindedly flicking through its always impressive games carousel looking for something to play the other day. Spin its clever rotating screen around to portrait mode though, and it really is at home on there! At first glance, it might look like another simple, old-school vertical shoot ‘em up from 1986, but give it a few games and it becomes clear it’s much more than that, and definitely deserves its place among Taito’s better-known “milestones” on that Switch collection! In a similar (but more primitive) way as Toaplan’s later Batsugun, it’s like a prototype Cave shooter, with loads of bullets and loads of firepower to get really powered-up then try to keep that way as you defend various planets across three stages of outer space as well as inside the comet combat. It’s more than just your surviving these stages while you rack up scores too, because if you don’t shoot enough of bits of comet also flying down the screen alongside all the aliens, it’s game over for the planet you’re defending as well as you. An epic Dambusters meets Star Wars kind of melody drives the action along amidst the cacophony of space war, while some really cool visual effects, background transitions, explosions and great use of colour serve up an impressive variety of enemies, including some really forward-thinking bosses. Moves at speed with a well-pitched level of challenge too, and one of the real gems included on this marvellous mini arcade cabinet.

Last one for this week is Breakers, a bit of a cult Neo Geo fighting game from Visco in 1996 that I’ve become pretty fond of since it was put in a modern console collection, together with its sequel, Breakers Revenge, at the start of last year. Now, while you wouldn’t be wrong to note a strong hint of Street Fighter II with a portion of Fatal Fury on top, this is also a very fluid and fast-paced one-on-one fighter in its own right that feels great in action and also happens to look absolutely fantastic! It’s a familiar setup, with eight unique characters, each with their own motivations, entering a mysterious fighting tournament that turns out to be sponsored by an evil spirit who’s obviously up to no good! You’ve also got a familiar mix of martial artists, a wrestler, a fencer, a wild Amazonian, an undead Ancient Egyptian with extendable limbs and more to choose from but each has such a distinct move-set that it’s worth spending the time to find a favourite and work out how to build up their power gauge through character-specific special actions like taunts, rolls and dashes, then unleash their special moves which can be spectacularly chained as long as they connect and that meter isn’t empty. Whether solo or multiplayer, there’s some very impressive balancing going on that also encourages getting to know each character better, and I appreciate the renaming and recolouring that happens when you face your “clone” in single-player tournaments, as well as how the usual best of three formula can go to five rounds if there’s no clear winner in the previous one. Maybe not revolutionary but the gameplay is as deep as it is accessible and so polished, supported by equally polished fighter movement and animation, detailed and diverse dynamic backgrounds, some lovely special effects and decent enough music and sound effects. Not sure it’s one of the most popular but it’s certainly one of my favourites!

I’ll leave it there for this week but in case you missed it last Wednesday, do have a look at the aforementioned Top Ten Favourite Atari ST Loading Screens feature – I’ve had it on the boil for so long I hope you’ll enjoy what’s there, as well as a look at the games behind each one! Then next week, we’ll be switching to Thursday so I can give you launch day review of the brand new Thalamus Collection 1 for Evercade, and a detailed look at all eleven Commodore 64 classics on there, assuming it turns up on time! See you then! (UPDATE: Due to a last minute release date delay to the end of August, in a change to our scheduled programming, this Wednesday we’ll be rediscovering the strangely well-suited submarine simulation classic on the NES instead).

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