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’ve had the Gaelco Arcade 2 collection for Evercade on the go a lot this week, and in particular World Rally 2, the on-rails, isometric-ish rally racing sequel from 1995 that – like its fantastic predecessor – so effortlessly blends skill and simplicity. While it really ramps up the visuals and the track complexity this time, the against-the-clock race format is the same, with sixty seconds to clear each stage in four multi-stage rallies, taking you across Portugal, Kenya, France and the United Kingdom, and while they increase in difficulty in that order, you can take them on as you like. You’ve got three cars to choose from, which seems to be aesthetic only, then it’s left, right and a button to accelerate as you react to on-screen directions. Simple as could be but so much fun, like you’re throwing a car around a Scalextric track! It does take a while to get the hang of though, but that’s as much about getting familiar with each track as handling the car itself, and knowing where to ease off and how much to push the steering, which is easier said than done as the clock ticks down! The presentation is outstanding, full of sampled sounds, speech and some rocking music, and there’s a load of digitised static and animated cutscenes too, but the race itself is the real star of the show. It’s a stunner! The speed and the smoothness as everything is spun around in all directions is incredible, with cool lighting and special effects, while the cars and the courses are so full of pixel-rich detail and texture that they manage to look almost photo-realistic at times. In a very PS1 kind of way! I love this game! 

Back in October 2021, I did a deep-dive on Rogue Trooper for the ZX Spectrum, and along the way got into loads of other (mostly average at best!) 2000AD video game adaptations, including 2003’s Judge Dredd: Dredd vs. Death on PlayStation 2, which I’d never played before but hinted I would do, and maybe even cover in its own right sometime. In the background, I then added it to my big to-do list, and I bought a copy, and more than three years later I finally got around to playing it too… And having now done so, unfortunately it’s very unlikely I’ll continue to the extent I’m giving it any more attention than it’s getting here! Janky visuals and clunky controls and a first-person shooter starkly of its time I’m fine with, but just a few hours in, it’s so bland and lifeless and boring, and now I’ve seen my dear old friend Judge Death in all his PS2 glory, I reckon I’m done! I never had great expectations but it’s a shame all the same because I do genuinely love the subject matter, which has you playing Judge, jury and executioner (just don’t go too wild) as it gradually becomes apparent that the supernatural menace of the Dark Judges – Fire, Fear Mortis and Death – has once again been unleashed upon the dystopian future of Mega-City One, and its handful of bizarrely realised, constantly repeating, er, I mean eight-hundred million occupants, all gagging for your justice! It really is such a lifeless place, with no atmosphere and too many opportunities to lose track of where you’re supposed to be, which is another annoyance, as you try to work out where your latest copycat mission wants to take you next. The Duke Nukem-infused voice acting is funny though, and it does all sound alright, but that’s all I’ve got, and it’s really not enough.

Klax was pretty much the Atari 2600’s last hoorah when it arrived on there (in PAL regions at least) in 1992, which is wild in all sorts of ways when you think about how long it had been around by then, its topsy-turvy state(s) of existence in the interim, the competition that had come and gone and come again several times over, and the fact that someone was still porting arcade games to it! Pretty amazing it could still pull-off an excellent take on a modern arcade game too, although Atari’s original arcade game wasn’t exactly pushing 1990’s technical boundaries – more like trying to cash-in on the success of Tetris… It even emerged out of AmigaBASIC! Anyway, it’s also a (kind of) falling block-matching puzzler, with coloured tiles coming at you down a conveyor belt, which you have to catch when they reach the end and flip them into matching rows or columns to make them disappear before they pile too high. Once you’ve hit the target number you’ll move to the next level, which will be faster, have more colours and more challenging targets as you progress – score so many points, clear so many tiles, create so many diagonals… To achieve some of these, and also get the biggest scores, you can also stack a limited number of tiles on your paddle to save for later and create more complex patterns, but this is risky because new tiles keep coming, and whatever your level, sooner or later it just becomes a joyfully frantic rush to survive for as long as you can! The Atari 2600 has some great arcade conversions and I reckon they saved one of the best for last with this. From the second you shove the cartridge in (which I was lucky enough to get in a sealed box), the presentation is obviously simplified but is totally authentic throughout, and the same goes for the gameplay itself, from the various difficulty-based start conditions to the inclusion of secret warps that send you way ahead into its total of one-hundred waves. It’s even got continues, which you don’t see much on here! Movement is precise and responsive, the tiles are vibrant and easy to distinguish in the emerging chaos, and it’s generally impossible to put down. There really could have been no better ending for this wonderful old machine, and no better fit for my new Atari 2600+ console either! 

Klax finishing us off today might not have been a surprise if you already saw last Wednesday’s new feature here, but in case you missed it, we’re now into March, so it’s time for the Retro Arcadia Gaming Pickups Winter 2024-25 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, and there’s tons this time so do have a look! Then next Wednesday, more March madness as we head back exactly 40 years for the very latest in video gaming… It’s Retro Rewind: March 1985 in Computer & Video Games, straight from the pages of the original magazine! Hopefully see you then! 

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