Welcome to another in a seasonal series of features that I think has got into its stride now, complementing the various forms of weekly deep-dives at Retro Arcadia, in part to keep things fresh but also to take a bit of the pressure off me trying to juggle writing them alongside juggling work and family… Not to mention actually playing the things enough to properly get into them! Don’t worry though, because that’s not to say they won’t still make up the vast majority of what’s here, together with the Weekly Spotlights, the Retro Rewinds, and likewise the reviews when I’m kindly asked to do them (or the mood takes me). As always, the plan is to simply mix in what you’re reading now, once every three months, as a new seasonal flavour. The format is a paragraph or two on each of the games and related things I’ve got hold of since last time, and as usual there seems to be loads, so let’s get on with it!

I’ve been lucky enough that there haven’t been many times when life has got in the way of gaming but when Ico finally arrived on PlayStation 2 in Europe in 2002, we were right in the middle of selling our first house and buying our second, we were six months away from getting married, I’d just started the job I’m still in, and as a result, it kind of passed me by! Not really my thing anyway, as later confirmed by its spiritual sequel-prequel Shadow of the Colossus, which I still find tedious to this day. Then, a few of months ago, I saw a screenshot of a witchy woman with a little girl at her feet in Retro Gamer magazine, and I thought it looked interesting, and before long I found myself about ten minutes on from the opening cutscene, totally surprised by the sudden realisation I’d stumbled upon one of those holy grail moments all of us gamers live for – this wasn’t just something special but was about to disrupt that sacred space at the very peak of my all-time favourites!

Ico is a minimally-told, 3D action-platforming adventure with maximum scale and immersion as “different” boy (called Ico) meets princess girl while they’re both locked up in a castle, which they then try to escape together, in the face of vertigo-inducing obstacles, puzzles and her evil mother’s terrifying magical minions. The gameplay is as sublime as the art style, simple and logical but – in combination with the deceptively intense narrative – emotionally draining, frequently exhausting and utterly wonderful all at once! Seriously atmospheric sound design too! I still don’t know where this will land in my top ten, twenty, whatever yet; I need another play-through, and the dust needs to settle, and there’s the PS3 remaster too… But there’ll be a deep-dive here before long, based on the PS2 copy that took a surprising amount of effort to get hold of on eBay, so I’ll definitely let you know!

I finally got hold of The 400 Mini back in May, just after I’d put my Spring recap together, but there was no way I could go back and do it justice in such a short time, so here we finally are now… While I was pretty well-versed on their other machines at the time, Atari’s 8-bit computers have always been a bit of a mystery to me, so I’m really over the moon with this, and have had a blast discovering the 25 games baked-in here, as well as a few classics of my own finding, and a bunch of Atari 5200 titles that are (mostly) supported too. Getting these running on a USB stick is a bit finicky until you’ve done it a few times but in the main, the rest of the user interfaces, functions like save states, and the games carousel are exactly the same as the Amiga A500 Mini, and if you stick with what it comes with, it’s all no fuss, plug and play stuff. The authentic but surprisingly souped-up classic joystick included is generally alright but there seems to be some weird mapping if you push “hard” left and right in some games, such as Hover Bovver, like it suddenly becomes left or right plus down or something, and things grind to a halt when you’re trying to do the exact opposite and give it some welly instead! Which ain’t great when you’d buy the system for that game alone… You can plug in your own USB controller though, and there’s four ports for these so you can shove one in a spare plus the included joystick for easier navigation of the menus (with its discreetly placed extra buttons for that purpose) if you like, or a keyboard if you’ve got an old text adventure like Zork on the go, or, indeed, fancy a proper game of Star Raiders…

That’s another system seller right there but while you’ll have to provide your own copy of that, the sequel is included, and that’s also a strategic space combat masterpiece with incredible scope and depth that you’ll see echoes of in later games like Elite and Wing Commander! Some very clever button mapping has been done for this one too, so you’ve got everything on the joystick here, although it could really have done with a proper set of instructions built-in because there’s a lot going on! Most of the other games included are fine without though – there’s a decent smattering of some very decent Atari arcade ports like Asteroids, Missile Command, Millipede, BattleZone and Berzerk; there’s all-time classics like (Bruce) Lee and Boulder Dash; cult favourites like M.U.L.E. and Seven Cities of Gold; and even the very impressive 2007 homebrew, Yoomp! Loads more to discover on there too, with less high-profile stuff like Capture the Flag, Elektraglide and Henry’s House, which is probably one of the most brutal platform games you will ever play! I’ve had a great time having a go at all of them, and have even torn myself away from mowing Jeff Minter’s grass in Hover Bovver to try out some other old favourites from other systems like Feud and Ghostbusters. Lovely time and a lovely system that I’m sure we’ll be diving into many more times here in the near future!

An Evercade compilation next, and Intellivision Collection 2, which has been around for a couple of years now but I wanted to get my money’s worth out of the first one before I added twelve more creaking old titles to the pile! Doesn’t stop there being a few good ones in there too though, including a couple of big-hitting fantasy titles, as well as something new to me that I’ve properly fallen for, so let me give you a sentence or two on everything included as a quick taster… Auto Racing is a 1980 top-down racer around five courses that probably works best against someone else rather than the clock. There’s very little to it but it’s attractive enough and fun too, once you’ve got to grips with the sluggish controls. Cloudy Mountain is an impressively deep but still accessible top-down, exploration-focussed dungeon-crawler from 1982 that has loads to keep you coming back and is surprisingly atmospheric. Top tier Intellivision, in fact, as is Hover Force from 1986, a strategic top-down shooter this time, where you’re flying a helicopter over a huge city, switching between views to track down enemies and also keep the fires they’re causing under control. It’s as polished as could be, and I love the opening cutscene in particular but honestly, I love it all! Always be suspicious when you’ve got a choice of two control schemes in a racing game because it probably means neither is great, and that’s the case with Motocross, an isometric dirt-biker for one or two players with three courses and a course designer too. Not bad for 1983 but it’s very primitive, not much fun solo and not much to look at either, plus those rubbish controls whichever way!

Mountain Madness: Super Pro Skiing came in 1988 with a slope designer, thirty-two pre-built ones and a randomly generated one on top. There’s also downhill, slalom and freestyle events, and they all feel good to ski on, and while it was hardly cutting edge even for the time, it’s really good! Reversi is a 1982 take on the board game where you have to capture your opponents pieces but I’ve never understood it, and this barebones effort is unlikely to motivate me otherwise! Sharp Shot is a strange thing from the same year, featuring four equally barebones single-button shooting mini-games – Football, Space Gunner, Submarine and Maze Shoot. There’s not a lot to any of them but string them together for score and there’s some addictive fun to be had here! Stadium Mud Buggies from 1989 is an isometric monster truck racer for one or two players over nine diverse events, including hill climb, tug-o-war, drag race, donuts and so on. It’s another one with terrible controls but if two of you can get your head around them then it’s a nicely presented and full-featured good time. Star Strike next, which is a nearly really good 3D shooter from 1981 based on the Star Wars Death Star trench run, where you need to avoid enemy ships for long enough to drop bombs down five exhaust ports. It looks great and moves fast but it’s just too hard (even on easy), with a single life that could be gone in a couple of seconds, which triggers a drawn out game over sequence that I can’t find any way out of without resetting, which is a real shame.

Similar for 1988’s Super Pro Decathlon, although through no fault of its own – joystick-wagglers (or wheel-wagglers in this case) just don’t work on any flavour of Evercade d-pad which means this won’t work unless you’re on an Evercade VS (the under the TV console variant) with an arcade stick or similar that you’re equally happy to destroy connected. Ten events to master, up to four players and decent presentation if you can do that though. Tower of Doom is undoubtedly the headline act in this collection, a deep action-RPG from 1987 with no less than six pages of the always enjoyable manual included in the box dedicated to it! It’s worth getting your head around though, with a bunch of characters to choose from to carry out seven monster and treasure filled quests, some of which also feature randomised maps, using a forward-thinking item interaction and management system. More top tier Intellivision! Less so our last game, Vectron from 1982, which is a weird combination of strategic shooter and base builder all at once, as you fire at a cursor to lay down energy blocks to build said base while simultaneously fending off enemies trying to pull it down before you can finish. It’s all a bit garish and takes a while to fathom but there’s some fun to be had if you do. And that’s it! A couple of duffers but there always are, and I should also mention it does the best possible job of virtually representing the console’s weird number pad, and overall it’s another collection I’ll certainly get my money’s worth out of!

When I did a deep-dive on The Pawn for the Amiga a while back, I promised myself I’d try and get the boxed copy for the Atari ST I’d always dreamed of at the time, long before I even owned one, then when I eventually did, I decided there were other, more “modern” priorities! Anyway, almost forty years on, I did finally get it and had a lovely old time playing through it again to boot! It’s a graphical text adventure from Rainbird Software in 1986, when it wasn’t only lauded for its jaw-dropping visuals, but also for its groundbreaking vocabulary and parser system, which were seen as setting the standard for what was left of the genre that followed. Speaking of which, the puzzles did get a bit too Monkey Island for their own good at times first time around, and even though I knew they were coming this time out, I still had a few late-game issues with text instructions (for example when it wouldn’t understand “close door” in a lift and wanted me to “slide” it closed instead) but overall it was just as impressive as the Amiga version, and the atmosphere never let up. I know I said so at the time too, but interestingly, that was once again entirely down to the writing rather than those visuals that I remember blowing me away in Computer & Video Games magazine a very long time ago, although it was still a real thrill to see those iconic sights in my very own copy after all these years!

Something else it took me a while to get to was Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story but good old birthday money… It came out earlier this year and includes forty-two of his games on eight different platforms, spanning several generations, including the ZX81, VIC-20, ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Atari 8-bit, Atari ST and the Atari Jaguar, as well the new Gridrunner: Remastered. As tempted as I am to just list out all the games on the basis they deserve it, in the interests of brevity I’ll mention a few of my all-time favourites like Andes Attack, the original Gridrunner, Hover Bovver (back for a second helping here) and Tempest 2000. Then, of course, there’s all the stuff he’s best known for like Attack of the Mutant Camels, Metagalactic Llamas Battle at the Edge of Time and Llamatron: 2112. We’re also getting his two early light synthesisers, Psychedelia and Colourspace, which have been updated to be played on modern controllers, and a demo of the unreleased Konix Multi-System version of Attack of the Mutant Camels.

And while you can jump straight into those games (sometimes on multiple systems) from a carousel, you’d then be missing out on the native, interactive documentary presentation, where you’ve got history and media and all-sorts alongside the games they’re filling you in on; if you know Atari 50 which preceded this, you’ll know the format. And finally, if you fancy a more traditional documentary, you’ve got that too with The Heart of Neon, all about Jeff Minter and his career that’s pretty much spanned the entire history of video games to date! It’s a hell of a package and has some incredible historic insight, although my honest opinion is that you’re going to need a bit more nostalgia for the subject matter than you did with Atari 50 to get the most out of it… Let’s face it, most of us are here for the games, and while I’m thrilled to see the likes of the VIC-20, ZX81 and ST getting an unusual look in on these things, there’s not a huge amount there I’ll keep going back to that I didn’t play as a kid… Which fortunately was about two-thirds of them, so no real complaints on my side, and it was £25 of someone else’s money I have no regrets about spending!

I’ve never liked stealth games so I’ve never been the slightest bit interested in Metal Gear Solid but a recent Retro Gamer article got me intrigued enough to finally fire it up on the PlayStation Classic, and before I knew it, I had another new all-time favourite on my hands, as well as a whole new series to sink my teeth into, which brings us to Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty on PlayStation 2! This is the 2001 sequel to the one I’ve only just finished, although it was actually the seventh in the series (and fourth by Hideo Kojima), and once again has you skulking around, this time trying to take down a new terrorist threat on an offshore environmental clean-up facility, or something like that – obviously, there’s a lot more to it, with the bonkers narrative taking you to the point that a degree in philosophy wouldn’t hurt at times! There’s a lot more to the gameplay now too, with a proper sneak ability, first-person aiming, much-enhanced cover mechanics, and new tactical mechanics for messing with both environments and the far more intelligent enemies. It all adds up to a far more expansive and freeform experience too, and the presentation is incredible, taking the original’s groundbreaking cinematography to a whole new level, supported by some stunning cutscenes and the most atmospheric and dramatic visuals this side of Silent Hill 2, and we’ve got another killer soundtrack to boot. It turns out that like its predecessor, this game was the absolute masterpiece I’ve been reading about for decades all along, so less than a fiver very well spent for a near-mint, two-disc version, which only turned up a few days before this went live, so I’m really looking forward to getting through what’s left of it and moving on to the next one, which I’ll definitely let you know about next time out here!

It’s been relatively quiet on the reading material front this time but I can definitely offer quality over quantity with N64: a visual compendium from Bitmap Books! This came out a few months back (but being a nightmare to buy for I was saving it for that birthday I just mentioned), and follows on from Atari 2600/7800: a visual compendium back in 2020, which is genuinely one of my favourite books of all-time, so not only did I have high hopes, but it’s also joins The 400 Mini this time out in filling two real gaps in my own gaming history! As always with Bitmap Books, you’re getting a premium package, comprising over four-hundred pages of lithographic print, presented in a protective board slipcase with an animated lenticular cover. It’s got those colourful bookmark ribbons I always love too! Inside, as well as an in-depth look into Nintendo’s early adventures in 3D, it’s full of beautifully presented screenshots and game art, together with profiles from developers or journalists involved in the 150 games covered, from Super Mario 64 and GoldenEye 007 to The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Banjo-Kazooie, as well as spotlights on lesser-known titles like Beetle Adventure Racing, Mischief Makers, World Driver Championship and Body Harvest. There’s a stack of interviews with the likes of  Jim Wornell (Nintendo), Michael Mendheim (BattleTanx), Kevin Bayliss (Diddy Kong Racing), Remington Scott (Turok) and Julian Eggebrecht (Star Wars) too! I’ve come to expect very high standards of Bitmap Books and once again, you get what you pay for… And I’m also getting a whole raft of games I need to get into as a result, so keep watching my Weekly Spotlight posts every Sunday for more on those!

Having recently completed Delphine Software’s Another World and Cruise for a Corpse for the first time after decades of just not getting them, I thought it was time for another go at their Flashback, and specifically, the 25th Anniversary version on Nintendo Switch from 2018, which happened to be nice and cheap in a sale! It originally came out in 1993, and is a typically cinematic sci-fi action-adventure-platformer, which you can play in this version either old-school or with remastered sound and visuals, and with a rewind function, which was honestly very welcome for a couple of particularly obnoxious areas near the end where the awkward controls (and subsequently the checkpoints) don’t quite meet the demands of the combat you need to engage in. Apart from that though, having finally persevered beyond the first few screens long beforehand, I’m ready to admit it’s another masterpiece! Turns out it’s not just sci-fi jungles either, but seven varied levels of alien worlds, futuristic cities and dystopian societies, where you’ll need to piece together your lost memories and do something about the threat to civilisation they contain. Each level is flip-screen, with lots of back and forth around what will become comfortably familiar, self-contained areas filled with puzzles to solve, nasties to shoot and platforms to traverse, and while I do think the game can bite of a bit more than it can chew when enemies get more sophisticated, movement is a joy once it clicks, and some of the puzzling is sublime, pitched just right so it’s never frustrating but you feel like a proper boss when you work it out! Top-notch presentation all over too, and the animation is so fluid and lifelike. Not sure what’s changed with me of late to suddenly be into some of this stuff but I’m glad it has!

There was supposed to be the new Thalamus collection for Evercade here too but that got delayed by a month and unfortunately is now going to miss the cut here by a day or two, so we’ll cover that next time as well, although I will hopefully get a proper review in very soon after launch too, so do look out for that in the coming days if you’re reading this live! And with that, I reckon we’ve reached as good a place as any to draw this recap to a close! I hope you’ve enjoyed reading about all this stuff I probably shouldn’t have been buying over the past few months, and don’t forget to join me around the end of November for the next instalment… But as always, don’t tell my wife!

And also as always, I’ll never expect anything for what I do here but if you’d like to buy me a Ko-fi and help towards increasingly expensive hosting and storage costs then it will always be really appreciated! And be sure to follow me on Instagram, X (formerly Twitter) or Threads for my latest retro-gaming nonsense!