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 talked about it the other week but I’ve now finished Metal Gear Solid on the PľayStation Classic, and hot on the heels on Ico on PlayStation 2, I think I’ve very belatedly found another all-time favourite, so it deserves another mention today! Just to recap, I’ve never liked stealth games so I’d never been interested before but a Retro Gamer article changed all that and here we are, absolutely in love we the thing! Obviously, we’re talking action-stealth by Hideo Kojima in 1998, where you play super-soldier Solid Snake, trying to get into a nuclear weapons facility, rescue the hostages, neutralise the terrorist threat and prevent the end of the world. It’s an incredible, seamless mix of 2D and 3D, top-down, third-person, first-person and in-engine cutscenes, making for this totally cinematic experience unlike anything else I can think of from the time or very much since! Still looks great too, with the PS1 more than holding up for once, it’s polygonal textures adding their own distinctive and surprisingly distinguished character. It takes you to so many different places too, full of believable detail, enhanced no end by some really effective lighting, as well as decent voice acting, some very atmospheric sound effects (those wolves!) and an excellent original soundtrack that all really adds to the drama. Proper James Bond stuff too, with some great gadgets by the end, where you feel totally in command, although the last couple of bosses took some working out! Elsewhere, puzzles are logical, the action well-balanced, there’s some wild fourth-wall curveballs, and I even enjoyed the massive talking bits, the prolonged back and forth and that cone of vision stealth nonsense! I’ve always known it’s one of the greats so better late than never but I’m not embarrassed to say this is another of those holy grail discoveries I live for with this hobby!  

Next up we’ve got Robbo, a 1989 Atari 8-bit puzzler with a bit of Chip’s Challenge and a bit of Boulder Dash about it, that was apparently very popular in its native Poland! Not so popular with me though, which is such a shame because it comes really, really close to being very enjoyable! You play as Robbo, a robot who needs to travel fifty-six planets collecting a specified number of oversized bolts from each (for unspecified reasons) before exiting to the next. Each level is a decent-sized scrolling maze filled with obstacles to push, open, blow up, shoot and so on to get at the bolts, as well as keys, teleporters and other useful stuff. You’ll also need to avoid laser cannons, magnets, traps and various deadly creatures but the biggest hazard to your progress is getting anything wrong because there’s no undo buttons here, and you have to start the entire level all over again, and it stinks! Aside from simple avoidance, progress is mostly very methodical, as you puzzle out what needs to be moved where in increasingly complex layouts. The trouble is, there’s an inherent element of trial and error to this, and you can’t see very far ahead either, so it’s unavoidable that you end up doing the the first bits of every level over and over as you sort out the rest, which seems totally unnecessary when all you’ve done is push a crate into a corner you didn’t know was there! It looks and sounds of it’s time but it’s all very pleasant and colourful, just too frustrating to stick with! 

By amazing coincidence, last weekend I randomly came across an old Intellivision take on BurgerTime called Diner, mere hours before then flicking through the latest issue of Retro Gamer magazine, only to be confronted by it again, spread right across a whole page! Almost like it was meant to be… Actually, it turns out I owned it on the PS2 Intellivision Lives compilation all along but the sheer number of games on there and its dreadful navigation makes a lot of things easy to miss! Anyway, good game! Somehow along the way it transitioned from Masters of the Universe II into a platform-exclusive sequel to Data East’s BurgerTime arcade game from 1982, arriving five years later from INTV Corp. with Peter Pepper returning to once again take on the hot dogs, various fruit and their nefarious leader, Mugsy, who I think is a cup of root beer, as they try to prevènt you getting the food they’ve thrown all over the restaurant back onto its plate in time for lunch. Rather than stamping it all over the dirty floor before you serve it up though, this time out you’re kicking it down stairs and along the floor instead, which sounds far more hygienic! There’s also side orders to prepare, a food eating bonus round, and of course you can also squash the enemy food for extra points, or shake your pepper over them if they trap you as you run up and down the various stairs, lifts and ladders. Each level has a new layout and colour, with isometric pseudo-3D making some of the platforms a bit wider for an extra chance at avoidance, which does make the controls a little loóser than its inspiration / predecessor but it nails the gameplay loop all the same, and it looks nice too – simple but with things like flashing diner signs and wacky character sprites adding a personality of its own, while the chirpy music and sound effects couldn’t be better suited! Really nice find one way or another, even if it wasn’t really! 

FIFA International Soccer on my brother’s Mega Drive was the football game that finally started to loosen the grip that Kick Off on the Atari ST still had on me when I think he got it for Christmas 1993, which would have been right after it exclusively launched on there. Big deal it was too, becoming one of the UK’s biggest selling games that year despite only being around for two weeks of it, and I understand the series has gone on to do alright ever since then as well! This was also the very start of the golden age of the sports video game for me, then moving on into the PlayStation era, where the presentation was consistently like nothing we’d ever seen before but we were still very much playing a video game first, as opposed to the ongoing focus of it being like watching on TV from the PS2 and Xbox onwards. Anyway, that’s still a long way off from here, and instead we have an equally groundbreaking isometric 3D view of about a third of the pitch length and half its width at a time, then scrolling smoothly around as dictated by the ball. There are several modes, including exhibition, playoff and league, and up to four players at once can choose from forty-eight national teams of fictional but often recognisable players, with each either on the same or opposing teams as they wish. We played all of these modes at the time, and always against each other, but thankfully it plays great solo too, with very decent player AI creating a surprisingly realistic flow to each game. And it feels good to control – limited by today’s standards but way more than we’d ever seen when it came out, including some spectacular kicks and nasty fouls, all superbly animated and supported by plenty of atmospheric sampled crowd noise. Hell of a foundation but also still an absolute classic in its own right! 

And that seems like not only a perfect way to mark the start of the new football season but also to finish us off here for this week! In case you missed it last Wednesday though, be sure to check out my deep-dive into FromSoftware’s hauntingly atmospheric Echo Night on PS1, which was love at first terrifying sight for me but did it turn out to be more than just a pretty ghost-face? You’ll have to read it and find out! Then next Wednesday, we’ve got the most, best hidden depth in any game ever, and one of the catchiest tunes too! It’s My Life With Bubble Bobble on ZX Spectrum / Atari ST / Arcade / Everywhere! Hopefully see you then!

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