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’ll start with a bit more from last week’s The First Console War DLC for the consistently incredible Atari 50 compilation on Nintendo Switch, which I’m increasingly of the opinion might be my favourite compilation ever! Anyway, while I’ve once again been messing around with all sorts on there, I’m going to pick out one of my top ten favourite Atari 2600 games (now there’s an idea for a feature!) because I’ve barely put it down, and that’s Dark Cavern! Originally called Night Stalker on the Intellivision in 1982, this port for the 2600 from the same year might be lacking some of the (relative!) graphical flourish of the original but I reckon it plays far more fluid and quickly becomes more tense too, as you try to survive the titular dark cavern for as long as you can, taking down the constant stream of robots, spiders and “blobs” entering its tunnels with your limited-ammunition pistol, which you can replenish with occasional ammo drops, assuming you can get to them in time. It’s single-screen Berzerk in a Pac-Man kind of a maze, and that’s quite the combination as far as I’m concerned! Presentation is Atari 2600 circa 1982 in all respects, and although I wouldn’t say no to a few cobwebs like you got elsewhere, this is so much fun to play and screen decoration is very soon forgotten as you take this vaguely strategic cat and mouse shootout all over the screen until you realise your twenty bullets are gone and then it’s desperation until the next lot appears! I could genuinely play this all day and it’s a real highlight among the hundred-plus games here now, let alone on this new DLC!

Quick shoutout to my friend Nick Jenkin, who might not have been very into Retrograde on the Commodore 64 in his recent YouTube channel review, but still managed to get me more hooked on it than ever before! It’s become a real favourite of mine of late – grinding away for coins for power-ups for more coins and other necessary supplies in a Dropzone-meets-Fantasy-Zone fashion during the first bit of each level is real gaming comfort food (which is another decent shout for a full-on feature)! You’re on a mission to save your planet from alien invaders operating out of underground nerve centres on the other seven planets in your system they’ve already conquered, meaning you need to plant explosives around the core of each one and blow them out of existence! You can’t just wander straight in though – you need to get yourself as fully armed and upgraded as possible, and in possession of a primed Planet Buster bomb first, and you do all of that in the shops you’ll come across, meaning you need to grab the money dropped by the aliens you shoot. This happens in the aforementioned first phase, where you jetpack left and right across the surface, and it’s enjoyably chaotic, mindless fun as you grind away for the vast amount of cash you need if you’re making a serious attempt at the game. From there, it’s platforming down and down against the clock, dealing with more aliens until you reach the bottom where a very impressive (and often very bizarre) large-scale boss fight is waiting for you. The rest is more simple to look at but I think it’s a great-looking game, with effective use of colour and limited parallax effects, expressive animation and loads of variety in the enemies and the different planets you find them on, both above and below the surface. Sound effects are effectively ominous too, backed by some jauntier music that comes and goes. The grind might make this a bit of an acquired taste if you want to get the most out of it but I’ve really got the taste and I think it’s better now than ever before!  

Here’s a quickie from 1980 by the name of Space Cyclone, which I’ve been playing on Nintendo Switch but began life as another re-use of the Space Invaders arcade board. Hence its inclusion on the Space Invaders Extreme Collection. Two years was a lifetime back then though, as the golden age of the arcade game got into its stride, meaning uptake for its cabinets was low; in fact, its legendary status now among collectors is mostly down to its subsequent rarity because of that! It’s a familiar single-screen shooter format, with your rocket ship moving left and right at the bottom, firing back at the invading, meteor-riding insect-cyborgs! You can’t hang around though because they’ll soon start dropping down off the meteors, and if you let them land they’ll start building their own rocket equipped with a cyclone cannon, which will launch into space and do you no good at all if you let them complete it! This all gives it a bit more of a Galaxian or Phoenix kind of feel than Space Invaders, but I reckon it’s a real hidden gem in its own right, with its primitive synthesised speech shouting stuff like “we’re coming” and “gotcha” throughout the battle, and the shimmering star-field and multicoloured cartoon explosions when you get hit by the lighting-bolt laser from one of the big UFOs! You even get a lesson in star constellations as a reward for completing waves too!

We’re going to head back for some more Atari to close because I’ve liked the look of Adventure on the Atari 2600 forever but never had any clue what’s going on! Seeing it staring back at me again from the Atari 50 compilation’s games carousel while I’ve been messing around with the new DLC this week finally prompted me to open the in-built manual and find out though, and I had no idea quite how hooked I was going to get when I did! Originally released way back in 1980, its scope is staggering for the time, with you trying to find an enchanted chalice stolen by an evil magician and return it to the Golden Castle. Along the way, you’ll need to find the keys to open the gates to this and two other castles holding other items you’ll need to progress your quest, from swords to deal with the magician’s three dragons to bridges to navigate some hard to reach places. Then there are big mazes and blind mazes to negotiate, secret rooms to find and a stupid bat that regularly steals whatever single item you’re trying to carry somewhere and takes it somewhere else, and is far more likely to ruin things than any dragon! Three skill levels too, where the first is straightforward and there to ease you in to the second, which I guess regular and way more expansive and challenging, then the third drops all the items randomly every time, and is where you’ll play forever! It’s real genius is how quickly it grabs you and lets your imagination take over though, leaving you totally immersed in this first-of-a-kind action-adventure, totally oblivious to the fact that you are playing as a square, and everything else is made up of a handful more squares, all accompanied by some harsh beeps and blips, rather than the brilliantly varied and atmospheric fantasy kingdom you’ve convinced yourself you’re spending an entire weekend obsessing over! Has to be seen to not be believed, and it’s an absolute masterpiece I’m so glad I’ve finally found! 

I think that’s more than enough adventures for this week, so we’ll leave it there, but in case you missed it last Wednesday, do check out my review of the brand new IREM Collection Vol. 2 on Nintendo Switch, with some real exclusive, pioneering and generally spectacular stuff… GunForce II really is something else and worth the asking price alone… Figuratively speaking at least – you can read the review for the full story! Then next Wednesday, can you believe we’re already getting into the first of our annual pre-Christmas features? It’s a favourite of mine every year too, as we look at another big bunch of the cool sights that have stuck with me over the past four or five decades of gaming in Wonderful Sights in Gaming – Part Four! Hopefully see you then!

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