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… And this week I’ve been away on holiday, which involved two very long-distance flights with a load more travel in-between, so it’s all handheld on Nintendo Switch!

I’ll start with the first game on the Tomb Raider I-III Remastered compilation, which I bought especially for the trip while it was half-price (at about £13) in an e-Shop sale a couple of weeks ago. I played a bit of this on the original PlayStation when it first came out in 1996 but it never really grabbed me like its sequel did a year later, which is also included on here, so I’ll let you know how that stands up and currently compares for me when I get to it next! In the meantime, I’ve really had a blast getting back into this one, albeit with a few caveats that I really wasn’t expecting… Firstly, in case you didn’t know, it was a truly groundbreaking third-person 3D action-adventure at the time, with you playing Lara Croft – a female, more acrobatic take on Indiana Jones – trying to recover a lost artifact across various expansive, freeform, exotic, ancient environments offering plenty of climbing, jumping, swimming, puzzling and shooting stuff (including most of the local wildlife!). Blockbuster in all respects but time isn’t always kind to that generation of polygons, and it never is to tank controls, so the perfect subject (together with its first two sequels) for a remaster. In theory! Right, the lighting stinks. I’ve got no idea what they were thinking but thank goodness you can switch between the modern and original visuals with the press of the Start button because half the time it’s honestly impossible to see what’s going on – even in broad daylight! I guess it now looks how you probably remember it looking in your mind today but ridiculous darkness aside, I still found myself playing old-school in the main then occasionally switching out of curiosity; it just seemed more natural that way. As said, not what I was expecting though, and even more so, the same for the controls because the “modern” controls are horrible! Imprecise, annoying and not really fit for purpose, and again, I’m far happier playing as originally intended! Fortunately, the dynamic audio design, and in particular the soundtrack, haven’t been too messed around with, and all the expansions are here, and it’s all perfectly authentic however you choose to play. Absolute bargain too, even if the remaster bit has turned out to be surplus to my own requirements!

I’d also been saving the third of the Nintendo DS games included on the new Castlevania Dominus Collection for my travels, and while I’m not quite done with it yet, I’m not really sure how I feel about 2008’s Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia. It’s set after Symphony of the Night, when the Belmont Clan has disappeared and several new organisations have emerged in their place to keep Dracula at bay, including the Order of Ecclesia, who’ve come up with a bunch of magical glyphs called Dominus (hence the name) based on his power, and a new hero, Shanoa, to unravel the mysteries of the latest resurrection attempt then put a stop to it. You then join her across twenty interconnected, pretty linear and not especially large-scale but suitably gothic locations, with forests, mountains, prisons, monasteries, castles, ghost ships and all the usual suspects beautifully realised; they’ve really gone to town on both pixel-art atmosphere and detail, and that goes for the character, enemy and boss designs too, many of which will be familiar but there’s some cool new ones too, like the floating banshee girl with her multi-layered robes flowing as she turns into this J-horror nightmare! As you’d expect, there’s also a soundtrack as sumptuous as the level designs to play along to, which is plenty of the metroidvania action and a bit of puzzling, as you’d expect, but also with a big dollop of RPG-ing as well, involving powering-up your character, and some quest lines, as well as messing around with the Glyph System, where you collect icons from defeating enemies and various set-piece situations, then equip them, up to two at a time, which will also allow you to combine them to trigger additional special powers, and with about a hundred glyphs to find, that’s a lot to uncover! It’s pretty easy to get your head around, if not so easy to master to make Shanoa’s life a bit easier, and she can really use them help because this game is not easy! You take a beating from the outset, and there’s a lot of busy-work to get through to reach the best of the game too, which I reckon is worth the effort because some of it is very special, but as said at the start, I think I need to finish it, let the dust settle, maybe play Dawn of Sorrow again – which I adored – and maybe re-evaluate it then, so watch this space!

I do hope you enjoyed the most garish ZX Spectrum loading screen ever at the top of the page here! Sorry, but I have been playing a lot of Wanted! Monty Mole and just couldn’t resist! This was the first in the series of brutally difficult 8-bit platformers, and was originally released by Gremlin Graphics back in 1984 but I’m playing on the much more recent Monty Mole Collection. That year, of course, was also when the UK’s infamous miner’s strike began – a relentless battle between workers, trade unions and Maggie Thatcher’s government that began after the latter started closing down pits they deemed uneconomic… And that’s the backdrop for this game, which was mildly controversial at the time (mostly for featuring mining union leader Arthur Scargill), and has you, Monty Mole, trying to steal coal from a South Yorkshire mine to heat his home over the winter, which would soon become a stark reflection of real life as the strike dragged on. Anyway, as well as strikers to contend with, you’ll also come up against flying fish, rampaging cans of hairspray and all sorts of other wacky enemies, as well as a multitude of ways of falling to your doom or getting caught out by dangerous mining equipment, spread over twenty-one flip-screens in various downward directions. Despite its deserved reputation, it’s mostly learnable and there are a few items to puzzle out that can help, although some hazards you’ll have to negotiate seem to be timed randomly, bringing in an element of luck on top of the pixel-perfect leaping around! Beyond the loading screen, it’s visually exactly what you’d expect – weirdly colourful, minimal, surreal and stacked with character – with plenty of blippy sound effects. Interestingly, it’s a complete reimagining of the Commodore 64 version also included here, so I’m looking forward to getting into that next because unlike this one, I never have before!

Good old compilations! I have been messing around with more Adventure for the Atari 2600 on the Atari 50 one too, as well the various versions of Berzerk included on last month’s DLC for it, but I’ve talked about them recently and don’t have much more to say, and I’ve gone long on what I have said anyway, and I’ve been on holiday, so I think I’m good to leave it there for this week! In case you missed it last Wednesday though, I did still manage to get out a Halloween Special, with a deep-dive into actual Halloween, the video game for the Atari 2600, although we did manage to get into every single one of the movies it’s based on too! Then do check back again next Wednesday, when we’re going to have the last of what’s been a regular top ten countdown at the start of the month for the past few of them before we get back into our full-time regular Retro Rewind features again in December! We will carry on with more top tens in the new year though, and in the meantime, next week we’re going to be looking at my Top Ten Favourite Commodore 64 Arcade Conversions, and yes, I did manage to find ten of them, and a few more besides! Hopefully see you then! 

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