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…

It’s a fair bit of a bit of both this week too, starting with Tetris Forever, which I’m playing on PC, and is the latest luxurious compilation-meets-celebration from the masters of their craft, Digital Eclipse. Coinciding with the fortieth anniversary of what I’d consider to be the perfect game, on the surface this looks like all the downright-genius and outright-iconic falling-block puzzling you could ever wish for, with no less than fifteen classic and more obscure Tetris titles included, including a brand new game (pictured here) called Tetris Time Warp, where up to four players “warp” between different eras of Tetris in real-time to experience a variety of classic graphical styles and gameplay mechanics with some modern finesse on top. You’ve also got over an hour of all-new documentary features exploring the creative partnership between Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov and The Tetris Company founder Henk Rogers, and it really is quite the tale! As we’ve come to expect from this Gold Master series, it’s all presented beautifully too, with slick interactive timelines and all kinds of other media to explore. What more could you want? Well, remember I mentioned “perfect” just now? Obviously, I was referring to the Game Boy version, but like the juiciest Tetris games on any other Nintendo platform too – and yes, that also includes the last word in competitive Tetris on the NES – it ain’t here! And unfortunately, all the cult favourites like Tetris Battle Gaiden or Super Bombliss in the world don’t quite make up for that for me! The accurate recreation of the first version of Tetris on the Electronika 60 computer from 1984 is really cool though, and so is everything else here, including all sorts of other Nintendo goodies; it’s just that what isn’t here really stinks! By the way, I’ll try and get into more detail on a few of these over the new few weeks here. 

I was gutted when I realised The Case of the Golden Idol had been around for a while on PC when it appeared on Xbox Game Pass a few months back, so wouldn’t qualify for my upcoming  game of the year countdown. This brand new sequel makes that all better though, especially when it’s also launched free of charge on iOS via Netflix, which really is the ideal way to play too! That said, it’s super-slick, newly enhanced interface is going to feel great wherever you are, letting you focus on unravelling the twenty increasingly complex but mind-bogglingly logical moment-in-time crime scenes, before using it to rebuild the emerging narrative, word-by-word, into solutions and optional (but irresistible!) side-puzzles. New but familiar also goes for that narrative, with the titular Golden Idol now up to no good two hundred years after the first game in the 1970s, which really suits its distinctively deformed, minimally illustrated, almost childlike art style. And as much fun as it was before, there’s more to it now than “simply” deducing the interconnected circumstances around yet another dead body, with more varied scenarios and locations, and the same goes for some very inventive new puzzle mechanics. I know I’m being vague but this game and  the engrossing over-arching storyline you’ll gradually piece together deserves just that. And so do you, Mr Holmes! 

Now for something I’ve been desperate to get my hands on since the second it was announced, and it is, of course, The Spectrum! I can’t resist these things at the best of times but a full-size, modern take on the machine I loved was the fastest I’ve ever preordered anything ever… Fully working authentic rubber keyboard too, and I’m already flicking through all my old BASIC books and magazine type-ins to give that a proper workout! Likewise The Hobbit, for that authentic text adventure experience you don’t normally get with a Mini, and that’s one of forty-eight games built-in, together with classics like Manic Miner, Match Day II, Head Over Heels, Target Renegade and Exolon (and I could keep going on and on with those!), as well as old essentials like Horace Goes Skiing and Firelord, some modern homebrews like Alien Girl, and a remastered version of Saboteur. By the way, it might look like a 48K Spectrum but it’s got full support for 128K and its AY sound chip, as well as ULAplus extended colour palettes too. Game selection and the user interface will be familiar if you’ve ever tried a C64 Mini, A500 Mini and so on from the same folk, with save states, display options and plenty of other under the hood settings if you need them. Of course, you can also add your own old favourites via a USB stick, and I have, and dear old favourites like Feud and Renegade,  Gauntlet and Shao-Lin‘s Road haven’t felt this fresh in forty years!

What else? There’s a nice new special edition of Crash magazine in the box, and you can easily hijack the family’s main TV via the 720p HDMI output, and there’s also support for your USB controller of choice too, although you won’t find one of those in the box. A bold decision but I reckon another authentic one – no one had a joystick on the original Spectrum, and a lot more than The Hobbit here was built with keyboard control first in mind, but it’s easy to just plug one in; everything included has had extensive button mapping treatment too, and you can mess around with your own games if necessary. With a thousand ways to play every Spectrum game ever already, and my old Spectrum+2 plugged in mere inches away from me as I type, I definitely don’t need it, but this thing really is irresistible, and what a fantastic way of rediscovering a beloved old machine… Assuming you don’t brick it with a bad firmware update! No idea what happened but after giving it a workout, I decided to install it, and seconds later it was knackered! Sounds like I was an unlucky one-off, and I’ve never had such problems with updating these machines before, but I got a quick refund from Amazon and an immediate replacement from elsewhere, which I got very lucky with, so not the end of the world, annoying as it was.

Again, like those Tetris games from earlier, I’ll try and get into a few bits and pieces running on The Spectrum in more detail over the next few weeks here too but I think we’re probably done for this week! In case you missed it last Wednesday though, somehow we’ve almost made it to the most wonderful time of the year, meaning it’s time for a wonderful annual feature… It’s Wonderful Sights in Gaming Part 4! Then next Wednesday, do check back again for the Retro Arcadia Gaming Pickups Autumn 2024 Recap, a seasonal feature covering all the retro games and related stuff I shouldn’t have been spending money on over the last three months! There’s a disturbing amount of it too… It won’t be including my pre-release review of Taito Milestones 3 on Nintendo Switch though because there’s an embargo on talking about a bunch of forty-year old arcade games, would you believe, but we should be okay by Friday so I’ll try and plug it in as a bonus then! Hopefully see you for both of those! 

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