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…

Since watching Vancouver Canucks play Pittsburgh Pirates while visiting family in Canada recently, I’ve fancied a new ice hockey game, and ended up with NHL Hitz 2003 on Nintendo GameCube, mainly because I’ve always thought it looked decent, but also partly because I haven’t given that much love of late! It’s from 2002, and gives you a fully-licensed but fully-exaggerated, high octane and big impact 3-on-3 take on the sport, meaning each game moves at a lightning-pace, with rocket-fuelled goals and hard-hitting brawls that are hard-hitting enough to send your opponents straight through the safety glass and into the crowd! That’s not to say there’s not some wild depth to the gameplay too, with all sorts of sim-like advanced controls on top of regular with- and without-puck action, as well as your turbo and “on-fire” buttons. There’s also loads of stats being tracked everywhere if you want them, and coaching and management and trading, and more game modes and mini-games and training stuff than I’ll ever get to… Season mode with my New York Rangers is doing me fine for now though, and despite the depth and occasional intentional stupidity, it’s playing a very accessible and generally realistic game of hockey too, with a great flow and that early TV-style presentation that’s kind of cartoon-lifelike (give or take a few polygons) and just moves beautifully… Especially when it’s Rob Zombie’s turn on the soundtrack! Not sure it’s quite my favourite hockey game yet but with the huge but still-untapped Franchise mode to tackle, there’s definitely potential for it to be. 

Colin McRae Dirt 2 on PSP was supposed to be Colin McRae Rally 2005 on there, but that’s not appeared at the right price yet, and this was a couple of quid, so I decided to take a punt while I’m waiting! And for that much, I’ve certainly had my money’s worth already, although I’m sure there are probably better places to get the most out of it… It originally arrived in 2009, and was the first in the series to be released after McRae’s death a couple of years earlier, and also the last to feature his name in the title. It’s very much at the arcade end of the rally spectrum, with the main (and pretty much only) mode, World Tour, taking place all over the globe across forty mostly off-road races against three other drivers (rather than more traditional stage-based rally events against the clock), and you’ll unlock these as you win races through four ranks. Two problems though – firstly, the controls are really sloppy, and I don’t just mean that intentional rally game sloppy, but more never really in control at all; secondly, your competitors are total morons, although that does sometimes work in your favour too! The different venues vary from really good-looking, like the Mexican desert ones, to could-be-anywhere generic – like most of the others in fact – and the different surfaces and conditions they throw at you can never really compete with the inherently dodgy controls. It’s well-presented though, and the sound is alright, and once you get a few races under your belt, it’s not not fun, but just not as fun as I know the game I really wanted is going to be when I finally track it down!

I’m going to quickly mention Shady Part Of Me, recently arrived on Xbox Game Pass, which I enjoyed up to a point but just ran out of steam with, probably about halfway through… It’s a melancholy, narrative puzzler that has you dealing with your character’s anxieties in a very stylish (very indie) 3D world, with the assistance of her shadow, which exists in a 2D platforming world behind her, and you need to open up a pathway to get both through each nightmare-fuelled section and open up the next. This involves switching between them and manipulating (and avoiding) light – the source of your anxiety – and dark, which dictates your shadow’s movement. The puzzles this translates to are more frequent than particularly challenging, and combined with the “another one of those games” presentation, what started out engaging eventually got stale, and having then decided to find out how far I was from the end, I just couldn’t face that much more of the same again. 

Now something I’ve been meaning to do for months to finish off with… I’ve been back to last year’s Tetris Forever compilation, which still doesn’t include the definitive Game Boy version, but among more Tetris than you can shake a stick at otherwise, it does include Spectrum Holobyte’s MS-DOS version from 1988! This is an interesting one because it’s not only the first version of the game introduced in the USA, but also follows the scoring system from Alexey Pazhitnov’s original version (also included on here), where you’re awarded points for how fast you drop your little Tetromino shapes into place, rather than for clearing lines. All the same, the more lines you clear, the faster it gets, and if you’ve picked anything above the default level of difficulty (from a total of nine), that happens pretty quickly! As well as this, you can also set the line height you want to start at, so it can chuck a load of random pieces into play from the outset (which explains the screenshot above rather than my rubbish gameplay)! Presentation is typically ancient Tetris, but the limited colour palette here makes for some very evocative backgrounds, which vary across difficulty levels, so it’s always worth stretching yourself, and altogether makes this one of the standouts in the collection.

I am still plodding through Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker on PS3, and quite a lot of hours in now, it’s finally properly grabbed me. I’ve also just started tinkering with Dune on the Amiga, and that’s shaping up very nicely too, but covering it is never going to be quick, so I think that will do us for this week! In case you missed it last Wednesday though, it’s not to late to join me for some post-apocalyptic combat-racing as we rediscover Overlander on Atari ST, with its iconic sights, mad difficulty and weird advertising! Then do check back again next Wednesday, when we’ll be hopping over to the other side of the 16-bit pond and counting down my Top Ten Favourite Commodore Amiga Fighting Games… Incredible what you can do with a joystick and one button! See you then!

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