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…

We’re well over a hundred and fifty Weekly Spotlights in now but I don’t remember ever starting with a type-in game before, so let’s do it now, fresh from the pages of the January 1985 issue of Computer & Video Games magazine! It’s Hunchback for the VIC-20 with a 3K memory expansion, which was an unusual size for a game fit into – more typically, it was sometimes 8K but mostly 16K where an expansion was needed, for stuff like Perils of Willy or Submarine Commander. Anyway, as was typical with these type-ins, it was a cut-down take on the arcade game from 1983 of the same name, although such blatant use of the name was less common! You play as Quasimodo, the legendary Hunchback of Notre Dame Cathedral, and you’re trying to rescue your sweetheart, Esmerelda, from the clutches of the evil Cardinal and his guards. You begin by running along the outer wall of the cathedral, jumping over the parapets and dodging the arrows being fired at you until you reach his famous bell on the other side. Once you’re past that, you’ve got to jump more of these things on the second screen but this time there’s a guard with a spear tucked away in each one, so you need to time it while they’re retracted. The third and final screen then has you dodging arrows and jumping over the soldiers standing between you and Esmerelda’s prison cell before you go again. You really couldn’t ask for more of a type-in than this, or, indeed, a VIC-20 arcade conversion! Okay, it’s clearly at the mercy of BASIC, but it looks perfectly authentic, it’s got some sounds and a nice tune, and it plays just fine, in that brutal and unforgiving 8-bit platformer way! The descriptive text in the mag then even told you what variables were behind the different bits of Quasimodo’s body, and the arrows and so forth, so you could get in there and change the colour of his legs and stuff too. So cool!

After stumbling into Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin’s bad ending last week, I’ve finally reached the proper one! Just to recap, this is the second Nintendo DS entry in the series, originally released in 2006 and now included in the new Castlevania Dominus Collection, which I’m making my way through on Switch. And I’m not sure where I stand with it, although I think I’m veering towards neutral! From the outset, I didn’t find the presentation particularly atmospheric, and wasn’t really fussed by the new second character mechanics either. It all played like a proper Castlevania though, and combined with the inter-dimensional portraits you need to find, which add loads of variety to the formula by whisking you off to Ancient Egypt, evil circus worlds and more, it soon found its rhythm and I was having a good time with it. But fun as they are, the regular “Castlevania” bits really are by-numbers, especially when you’ve played it back-to-back with the incredible Dawn of Sorrow, where just how much has been copied and pasted but to lesser effect is very stark. Once you’ve worked out why you got that bad ending though (or have done things in the right order in the first place!), it goes to some interesting places, and mopping up everything you had to miss previously once you’ve found all the good powers is a blast… The two-character thing becomes very fluid too. And suddenly it’s alright, even if it does look like a Pokémon game and you’ve played a lot of it before! All the same, I do have higher expectations for the last of the DS games on the collection, Order of Ecclesia, so I’ll report back on that one here soon! 

I first came across Curse of Enchantia in Bitmap Books’ fantastic Commodore Amiga: a visual compendium, and absolutely loved the screenshot I was seeing of this super-atmospheric old graveyard and its comic vampire inhabitant – my kind of point-and-click adventure! I finally got to actually playing it this week and it’s not quite what I hoped for but it had its moments all the same. It’s by Core Design (the Tomb Raider people) in 1992, where you’re a boy who’s been snatched away to a magical land to be the final ingredient in the titular curse, so you need to put an end to it and get out of there! While I applaud the attempt to do something different with the interface by removing any words and going wholly visual instead, I can’t help but long for a nice LucasArts-style one instead… When you want to do something, you choose a category from the list of ten icons, such as the eye to look or the open hand to use, then choose a specific action in each, like throw or push or give (from another eight possible icons in this example), then you choose what to use from your inventory, then where to use it or who to use it with. This soon becomes very laborious, especially when you’ve got to hand over fifteen individual rocks to some rock-swami, all at the same time! And that’s assuming you’ve found the ones you’re actually allowed to pick up from the thousands you can see but mostly not pick up spread across a whole multi-rock cavern maze, although that’s nothing on picking up a single gold coin from a twenty–foot pile of them later! Puzzles are equally convoluted, such as wearing (yes, wearing) the sweet you might have found (but more likely missed) in a dreadful “action” sequence, which will then trigger a small rock to fall on your head and stick to the sweet, which you can then chuck at a bigger rock to make it fall and create a bridge! I get it, try everything on everything but these are just two examples of dozens that get weirder as you go, from what I guess was mercifully over in about four hours, and it wasn’t all that unpleasant once you’d got your head around what it was asking of you. Or the really clunky mouse controls! Even with bits of sampled speech, sound is minimal and although it can sometimes look gorgeous, it can also look pretty lifeless too. Like a lot of its wordless narrative. Glad I played it but doubt I’ll ever be back! 

I went physical with Atari 50: The Anniversary Collection, and the cartridge has been a pretty much permanent fixture in my Nintendo Switch since it first came out at the end of 2022, so I was over the moon when two new DLC packs were announced this week, and the first then dropped almost straight away! This one is called The Wider World of Atari, and for £6.99 extends the compilation’s wonderful interactive timeline with nineteen new games and eight new video documentary segments, including Pong-guy Al Acorn’s story on the creation of Breakout, the search for rare prototype games, a deep-dive into Berzerk and a spotlight on artist Evelyn Seto, who helped create the famous Atari Fuji logo. It’s all high-production and all worth a watch though, and I love the way the DLC maintains the same high-bar set by the base compilation for this stuff, and continues to tie it all together with bits of trivia, archival images and other source material, and, of course, the games themselves, which you can also just jump into like before if you only want to play them! They’re all on the existing carousel, organised by platform, and include various flavours of Berzerk (with the wonderful voice-enhanced 2600 port always a favourite way to play!), then it’s mostly arcade and 2600 titles, plus a couple on 5200 and Atari 800. Highlights for me include Red Baron, the arcade vector shooter in bi-planes; Avalanche (arcade and 800), which is Breakout with a twist; the remarkable 2600 port of Ancient Egpytian Zaxxon, Desert Falcon; clever depth-charging arcade shooter Destroyer; and a real curio, Football, an ancient (and exhausting!) trackball-based American football game from 1979! Absolutely fascinating all-round, tremendous value, and if you weren’t convinced by this beast of a compilation already then now is the time! And while I’m still left wanting for some Atari ST action and a bit more love for the Jaguar, I can’t wait for the next pack in November!

I think that will more than do us for this week but in case you missed it, last Wednesday’s deep-dive was a really special one for me, so do check out My Life With Grandstand Invader From Space Handheld Electronic Game, and the very beginning of my video game journey! Then next Wednesday, we’re going to be counting down my top ten favourite discoveries on Evercade, although it was a real struggle to stick to just ten this time so some good stuff guaranteed! Which reminds me, I’ll also have two brand new cartridges on there to review this time next week, with The Bitmap Brothers Collection 2 and the Legacy of Kain Collection, which I’m very pleased to announce arrived three days ahead of release date this time so I’ve had a head-start! And I hope you can join me for all of it!

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