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’m going to start by quickly running through another batch of original cartridges I’ve picked up for the Atari 2600+ console I was lucky enough to receive for Christmas last year. A sentence or two on each is the plan, although there’s a couple of my absolute favourites on the system here, so we’ll see how that goes! We’ll start with one of those too, Seaquest, which has probably been pipped by Solaris and Adventure in recent years as my number one on there but I don’t think anything else typifies what it was best at quite as much – undiluted arcade fun in the comfort of your own home! This is a single-screen, underwater take on Defender from 1983, with you rescuing divers in your submarine and shooting enemy craft and killer fish while keeping an eye on your depleting oxygen supply. It’s slick, atmospheric and deceptively immersive, with a very addictive sense of progression, and is just great, mindless fun! Frostbite from the same year wouldn’t be far behind in my favourites list either, blending elements of Q*bert and Frogger (although I think it was developed before Q*bert) as you leap between ice-flows, changing the colour of each block you land on, which gives you another one to build your igloo with, which gradually emerges in the background. Once it’s done you start again, more frantic this time and with more chances to fall in the freezing water and more aggression from the wildlife, including a terrifying polar bear that turns up later! Despite better-known similarities, this is definitely its own thing and I reckon is even more compulsive!

I love an ice hockey game but if you want to play on the 2600 then Ice Hockey is about all that’s on offer, although that’s fine because it’s also the only one you really need! It’s a simplified, two-on-two take on the sport, and while it seems primitive now, it was pretty groundbreaking in 1981, with the ability to switch between players and thirty-two different angles to hit the puck from, and is a really fun time on top, especially with two players. I’ve said it before but the 2600 really did have some fantastic arcade ports, and you really couldn’t expect any more of one than 1983’s Jungle Hunt. In fact, all it’s really missing is a bit of the flair of the original in the final stages, which see you first leaping between vines, swimming a crocodile-infested river, leaping over falling boulders then avoiding the local cannibals before rescuing your girlfriend from their big cooking pot! It’s so full of variety and character, and really nails the setting. A very nice showcase for the system! Two games for my set of paddle controllers next, starting with another arcade port that needs little introduction, Super Breakout from 1982. Like with its predecessor, there’s a bit more compromise to this one, as simple as bouncing a ball onto some bricks (or coloured lines) to make them disappear may be, not least that the ball is a square!

However, the paddle control makes all the difference compared to later joystick, keyboard or controller variations on the game, and it plays great, especially when you start exploring all the different game modes, with Progressive being my favourite, where the walls start scrolling down towards you! Our last game is Circus Atari, which dates all the way back to 1980 and is based on an even more ancient arcade game called Circus, and honestly I only really picked it up to give the paddles a workout, although once again, I was keen to see how they much they’d improve on what I’d previously experienced with a controller on various Atari compilations, which I’ve never thought was doing it justice. It turns out they bump up the fun a lot but it’s still very difficult, as you alternate between two clowns on a moving seesaw, bouncing the other up to pop ballons at the top of the screen. And yes, by “balloons” I mean coloured squares this time! As usual here, it’s all about the gameplay though, and with that added precision I suspected might have been missing before, you soon find yourself in a zone you’re struggling to leave, which really comes into its own with two players controlling the clowns! I don’t think I paid more than a fiver for any of these, so not much money very well spent on a bunch of games which, if they’d been all I’d ever had in the early eighties, would have been more than enough!

A sentence or two or not (but mostly the latter!), I did go long there, so just a quick look at Viking Raiders on the ZX Spectrum to finish off with, which I mentioned I’d always liked the look of but had never played to this day when it came up in this week’s new Retro Rewind feature… And now I have! It was a £2.50 budget game from Firebird Software all the way back in 1984, before budget games really existed, but would continue to appear with a cool-looking screenshot on their multi-game advert in the games magazines for years to come! We’re talking surprisingly deep turn-based strategy, considering it seems to written in BASIC, and thoughtfully presented too. You can even play with up to four players, but one plus three computer opponents is mostly fine too, a few movement- and gold-based limitations exclusive to you aside! You all begin with a castle on a on a randomly (very slowly!) generated map, and you need to use your gold to buy soldiers, boats and catapults, then set off on a chess-like game of cat and mouse across the various terrain types (which can change as the onset of winter freezes any water) until you’re positioned to attack an enemy castle, take over what’s left of their resources, and move to the next until you’re the only one left. Just don’t stretch yourself too thin or you’ll be on the receiving end too! The random nature of things means if you’re lucky you’re in for an utterly engrossing time, and one you can keep going back to way beyond your £2.50’s worth, but, combined with that built-in unfairness, can also very quickly get frustrating. But it’s easy to generate a new map and try again, and it’s all pretty intuitive as the “action” unfolds. Quite the bargain, and while I can’t quite believe it’s taken me so long to get to, especially considering how much I liked the look of it over forty years ago, I’m glad I finally have! 

Right, that’s us for this week, but in case you missed it last Wednesday, do make sure you check out what I was just going on about with Viking Raiders just now, 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! Then next Wednesday, it’s the second in a new series of features, and this time we’re going to be revisiting The Perils of Willy on Commodore VIC-20… More than a cut-down Manic Miner? You bet it is! By the way, the first of those features revisited some ancient coverage of Kung-Fu Master so you can have a look at that right now too and see what’s in store! Hopefully see you again soon.

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