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…

When I was counting down my Top Ten Favourite Commodore 64 Arcade Conversions here a while back, I said I’d eventually get into a few of them that just missed out in these Weekly Spotlights instead, and this week I’ve returned to its 1989 port of Taito’s 1987 follow-up to Bubble Bobble, Rainbow Islands! Bub and Bob are now back in their human forms, and on the trail of the Dark Shadow, which was apparently the evil behind the events of the first game, although I’m pretty sure it was just some drunken wizard the last time I played it! Anyway, this involves travelling upwards through ten individually themed islands against the rising sea level, with each consisting of three stages and a boss, and is mostly about negotiating platforms or creating them with your magic rainbow, which you can also use to turn all manner of meanies into goodies. And it wouldn’t be a follow-up to Bubble Bobble without these goodies then concealing all sorts of additional high-scoring mechanics and abilities, stackable secrets, hidden rooms and persistent power-ups! The C64 conversion isn’t just one of the best on the system but also one of the best you’ll find of Rainbow Islands anywhere, taking full advantage of the machine’s full rainbow of colours (and I don’t just mean shades of brown!), similarly impressive sounds, and everything moves around very nicely. It is missing a couple of the original’s islands but good luck worrying too much about them because behind the cute exterior it soon stops pulling any punches! Brilliant concept done as well as it could be!

Before we get too settled into Spring, I reckon we can squeeze in one more trip to the the slopes with Skiing on the Atari 2600! I’ll be honest, I’ve always liked the box art for this one, and that’s mostly why I’ve just treated myself to an only slightly tatty boxed copy, although I do enjoy a skiing game too, especially these more primitive ones that had no choice but to focus on nailing how it felt to be throwing yourself down a snowy mountain over trying to put you there. That’s not to say it doesn’t look fine though; just of its time. Which was 1980! Sounds like me… Anyway, what we have here is a race to the bottom in the fastest time possible (also sounds like me!), and we’ve got ten variations of two event types to choose from. In slalom racing, you need to go through all the gates, receiving a five second penalty for any you miss, with progressively faster, longer and more difficult slopes in game modes 1-4, while mode 5 generates a new expert course every time. That works the same for downhill racing, where you’re just going as fast as you can and the only penalty is time lost getting back up if you hit something. The two difficulty switches also come into play, and you can set one so trees are positioned more awkwardly on slalom, or it lets you jump on downhill, and the other will allow you to go off-piste (the edge of the screen), which can be fun for finding new and maybe faster routes in downhill. Skiing itself is just left and right, and the more they’re pointing down, the faster you go, so it’s as realistic as it is simple, but as quick as it also is to master, mastering each course in each game variation – especially the harder slalom ones – is going to take some doing, and then there’s almost as much fun to be had saving your best times in a notebook and trying to shave tenths of seconds off them later! Like I said, of its time, but it’s bright and breezy across the board, and a whole lot more than just a pretty box! 

It’s weird because the first one is my favourite Christmas movie, the second a top twenty-five favourite movie of all time, and I must have seen Rambo III a hundred times too, but until just a couple of weeks ago, I’d never even laid eyes on Taito’s 1988 arcade spin-off of the same name! Definitely a case of better late than never though, and further confirmation that discovery is still the very best thing about this retro-gaming habit of ours, even after all this time! I’m not sure a movie license was ever so well adapted from its source material either – the very definition of big dumb fun! It’s a third-person rail shooter (so not like the top-down Atari ST tie-in I do own) that, despite being styled more like Cabal, plays in the main like a fast and loose version of Operation Wolf and its sequel – in fact, imagine Rambo behind that uzi controller and you’re somewhere near! The game’s five stages are very vaguely based on the plot of the movie, such as it is, with our former ‘Nam-era Green Beret rescuing his former commander, Colonel Trautman, from a Russia-related mishap in Afghanistan. A friend can play as him too, fighting alongside you as travel sideways or forwards through military bases, deserts and caves shooting or blowing up everything in sight. And there’s a lot of everything too, with tanks, jeeps, helicopters and a thousand soldiers out to get you, sometimes seemingly all at the same time, and then there’s bigger boss versions and even a motorbike chase towards the mountains! Your crosshair moves with your character, and it feels great, even on a modern controller or arcade stick, allowing you to focus on killing stuff and grabbing pickups, power-ups and the occasional bonus weapon to do it more spectacularly. And that’s about it! There’s lots going on and it all moves well but it’s not a lot to shout about visually for the time, especially Rambo’s weirdly animated legs! Brilliant soundtrack though, and there’s loads of big explosions and a non-stop chorus of machine guns too, and it’s just as much mindless fun as this tiny mind can handle! 

I might also have picked up a bunch more loose original cartridges for my Atari 2600+ console this week but maybe I’ll do a quick summary of each of those next time, like I did for the last lot here last week. Really need to knock that on the head… Right, that’s going to do us for this week, but in case you missed it last Wednesday, we were revisiting The Perils of Willy on Commodore VIC-20… More than a cut-down Manic Miner? You bet it is so do check that out! Then next Wednesday, the MLB season is going to be fast approaching, so I reckon that’s as good a time as any for a sporting countdown I might be uniquely unqualified to share but we’ll give it a go anyway… It’s my Top Ten Favourite Baseball Games! See you then! 

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