Back again for our regular Sunday round-up 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’ve been chomping at the bit for Star Trucker to arrive, ever since I came across a demo on PC during some Steam event earlier this year, so I was well chuffed when I heard it was also coming to Xbox Game Pass last week, not so much because I’m a skinflint but because my PC is crap (because I’m a skinflint), and I get to see it at its best after all! It’s literally Elite meets American Truck Simulator, as you haul cargo, scavenge for salvage and interact with a strange cast of traders and galaxy-hopping fellow truckers, all from the comfort of your rocket-powered big rig! Very comfortable it is too, with its retro-futuristic interior – complete with CB radio, old-school car stereo and plenty of sci-fi driving aids (such as the could-be-real-life docking camera) – a pleasure to command from your big old driver’s seat, or you can get up and wander around its compact interior, sorting out your stuff, getting your space suit on and heading outside to patch something up, or doing some maintenance to your critical systems inside, which you need to keep an eye on as much as your precious cargoes! They’re the main draw though – finding a job, planning your intergalactic route then taking to the space highways and just enjoying the ride, before reaping the rewards at the end of the journey for upgrades and essential supplies to keep your rig in shape for the next load. And you can stay relaxed or go for riskier but bigger paydays, where it could be the clock against you or it could be the law, making for some real tension either way, as you balance the demands of the mission against things like stopping to replace the dwindling power unit in your oxygen supply… But maybe it will last just long enough! However you play, it’s a brilliantly realised universe (in a two-man indie dev kind of way), with lively and varied floating space cities, asteroid fields, planets and nebulae keeping things more than interesting everywhere you look, while an Americana-infused, impressively original soundtrack plays over the airwaves, and it all just screams passion project, with an eye for meticulous detail everywhere holding it all together as much as your star truck just feeling great to drive does. And it’s everything I hoped it would be! 

Lead Angle (also known as Dead Angle and Gang Hunter) was last week’s Arcade Archives release on Nintendo Switch (and PlayStation I guess), and is a 1988 rail-shooter by Seibu Kaihatsu, who are possibly better known for Raiden, although I’ve always had a soft spot for this, as well as its similarly mobster-themed but much slower-paced predecessor, Empire City: 1931. Anyway, unlike the likes of Operation Wolf, for example, this one was built to play with a joystick rather than the coolest arcade controller ever, so translates well to a Joy-Con, as you travel across the world to rescue your girlfriend from a mob boss. You take control after her kidnap from a typically Italian roadside cafe, with a view from behind your character’s silhouette like you’d get in old boxing games, while aiming is done with a regular crosshair and you’ve got a limited stock of grenades on top. Occasionally, you’ll also come across more powerful guns to unlock too, while their ammo lasts, as well as other bonus items, as you gun down a certain number of enemies in each level before its boss appears. From Italy, you’ll be on a ship across the Atlantic, then various locations in New York, Kansas and Chicago before a big final showdown with the big, big boss. In each location, rather than simply auto-scroll in one direction or the other, here you move the gameplay back and forth yourself as you hunt down the next group of enemies, and they quickly start to gang up, get more aggressive and pull out all the dirty tricks too! It works really well, even if none of it is especially groundbreaking, and that also goes for the cartoon-pixel visuals and sound to match. Just a plain old good time! 

Having been delayed by about six weeks, Thalamus Collection 1 (on Commodore 64) for Evercade then just missed out on my Summer Pickups feature a few weeks ago by what turned out to be about half and hour but I did manage an in-depth review of the compilation, and all eleven games included, shortly after instead! I just wanted to highlight one of them here that stood out at the time and I’ve not been been able to put down over the last few days either, and that’s the absolutely wonderful Hawkeye from 1988! It’s very C64 but there’s more to its fast-paced gameplay and future-barbarian looks and sounds than it initially lets on, as your half-man, half-robot thing sets out to reclaim the surface of his planet after aliens killed everyone and poisoned the atmosphere, forcing the few survivors underground. You’ll travel through futuristic cities, medieval-looking places, glaciers, deserts and more, looking for the four puzzle pieces (and ammo for your various weapons) that allow you to progress to the next, with the direction you’ll find them in cleverly indicated by a glint in the eye of one of the two hawks either side of the top of the screen. Of course, there’s all sorts of nasties out to stop you, and some guns work better on some more than others, so it’s handy to have switching between them mapped to a button here, rather than the original holding fire and pushing left or right in the heat of battle, although it’s rarely that frantic, and your infinite ammo pistol will work in most instances anyway. Jumping feels good too, as you move back and forth smoothly across a nice variety of well-drawn, thoughtfully coloured and atmospheric platform environments, with some nice parallax effects, lots of animation going on, some cool cutscenes to boot and plenty of high-energy music behind the impactful sound effects. Really great find! 

I did cover first impressions of the Castlevania Dominus Collection here when it arrived out of the blue on Switch a couple of weeks ago, and as mentioned then, I’d started working my way through Dawn of Sorrow. Well, I’ve now seen the true ending, no less, and I have to say, it’s already up there with the likes of Symphony of the Night and Super Castlevania IV as one of my favourites in the series! That said, when I get to playing one of the alternate modes that finishing it unlocked, I think I’ll stick with a regular ending next time because the very last boss fight has the difficulty to match its scale! Anyway, as for the eight or so hours I spent savouring every single location of the vast castle and beyond before that, it’s set a year after the events of Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, which was another big favourite of mine on the Game Boy Advance at the time, where your character, Soma Cruz, finds himself the main attraction in yet another plot by a mysterious cult to resurrect the vampire Dracula. It’s set in and around his enormous castle, which, in true metroidvania style, you’re gradually exploring and uncovering alongside the typically nonsense narrative, obviously with a bit of help from the supernatural powers you gather as you go. These are collected from the souls occasionally dropped by the mass of returning and a few new enemies you’ll come up against, as well as a load of challenging but generally fair boss fights that typically lie in the furthest reaches of each new area you discover. You’ll then visit most of them so often you’ll be intimate with every nook and cranny by the end, but both movement and navigation are a joy, and you’re never that far away from a save room or one of the handful of warp gates anyway. Which reminds me, the seemingly fiddly DS touchscreen controls you occasionally needed in the original are replaced by simpler Quick Time Events here, also relieving potential frustration. Receiving every new ability is such a thrill though, and I couldn’t wait to backtrack to wherever I hadn’t been able to get to before every time, which is always a good opportunity to grind away for missing soul-drops for even more abilities, as well as boost your own stats. I wasn’t sure about the more anime-styled art direction when I started but it grew on me as its own gothic exhuberance emerged, and the soundtrack is pure, Castlevania joy. Just like the rest! 

I have now started the second of the three DS games in the collection, Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin, so more on that soon, although I’m already looking forward to coming back and going through this one again once I’m done with the rest… Maybe a deep-dive here sometime too! Speaking of which, in case you missed it last Wednesday, we were celebrating the start of the new NFL season with an in-depth look at TV Sports Football on Atari ST (and stupid sexy Amiga), as well as how I eventually got to playing it decades on, so do check that out if you haven’t already. Then next Wednesday, we can pick any four Taito arcade games to go on a handheld compilation and then we’ll see what they went for themselves, as we discover Taito Variety Pack on Nintendo Game Boy! See you then!

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