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…

Hunter’s Moon on the Commodore 64 is one of those games I forget exists then come across again, remember it’s one of the absolute best at what it does, then can’t leave it alone… Until it happens all over again! Specifically, time we’re actually talking Hunter’s Moon Remastered, an official 2018 remaster, update and general overhaul of the 1987 strategic, multi-directional shoot ‘em up by Thalamus. Quite the pioneer that was in its own right back then too, showcasing one of the earliest uses of procedural generation in a video game, not to mention a real stunner of a loading screen! And once that’s out of the way, you’re playing a space pilot who’s flown too close to a black hole and ended up lost on the other side of the galaxy, and now you need to shoot your way into the sprawling, hive-like space cities that make up each level to get at their mysterious alien Starcells containing the navigational data you need to collect to plot your course home. While I’d generally go retro-pure with stuff like this, you can’t ignore this modern version upping the level count to one hundred and eighty, spread across twenty-one star systems, and also introducing new level types and new game modes, with training for novices and a random one for veterans, as well as a level editor. There’s also some wonderfully ominous new music, a cool new parallax starfield effect, and intro and outro cutscenes that feature some of the most stunning imagery I’ve ever seen in a C64 game! The fundamental gameplay is the same though, which is as brutal as can be! It’s also addictive as hell though, and so intuitive to puzzle and shoot and dodge your way through the myriad of increasingly complex city structures. It’s a beautiful game too, with simple, thoughtfully shaded shapes full of movement and life, set against the most gorgeous, shimmering graphical effects! This one is just outstanding, and don’t you forget it!

Although I bought a very similar compilation on PlayStation Portable at the time, and most of what’s on this one is now available to me in a dozen other places on top, I’m still not sure how it’s taken me so long to get hold on Capcom Arcade Classics Collection on PlayStation 2! First released in 2004, this includes twenty-two of their finest from the arcades spanning 1984 to 1992, and as you’d expect by then, they’re all pretty much perfectly recreated, with multiplayer also available on the likes of Street Fighter II and Mercs, and alternate screen modes for portrait-mode stuff like 1942 or Commando, where it’s shifting things like score displays and lives left to the side of the gameplay area, making better use of the PS2’s default screen space without messing with original ratios. Still not sure I like it though! You can mess around with other video and sound settings too, as well as DIP-switches, and there’s high score saving, and loads of bonus content – histories, artwork, playing tips, and you can listen to original and remixed music from each game. As for the games, on top of what I’ve already mentioned, it’s a really nice mix of all-timers like Ghosts ‘n Goblins, Final Fight and Bionic Commando, and lesser known classics like Pirate Ship Higemaru, SonSon and the fantastic vertical shooter EXED Exes! Several versions of Street Fighter II, 1943 and Ghouls ‘n Ghosts too, and then there’s stuff like Forgotten Worlds and Gun.Smoke and Vulgus, and they’re all worth your time and it was definitely worth the wait for me! 

While it put me in mind of Elden Ring as much as it did Fallout, the setup for Atomfall is effectively Fallout in the Lake District in the early sixties!  It’s an action-survival type thing, released straight to Xbox Game Pass and elsewhere this week, and finds you in a post-apocalyptic quarantine zone, five years after a far more dramatic, fictional take on the real-life Windscale nuclear accident of 1957 in northern England; it’s Cold War sci-fi with a folk-horror vibe. By the way, there’s a serialisation inspired by events leading up to the game just begun in the latest 2000AD Judge Dredd Megazine, which I thought was excellent! Could have done with that kind of head-start for the game itself too because it really drops you in it and doesn’t hold your hand from the outset, although there’s plenty of leeway below the default difficulty, and once you find your level you can start to properly explore this gorgeous, none-more-English, Wicker Man-infused (literally!) picturesque landscape, full of rolling hills and valleys, (unusually!) sunlit woods and once-quaint villages, leading you to not-quite-abandoned mines and nuclear bunkers, cult-controlled ruins and all kinds of weirdness. Along the way you’ll need to scavenge, barter, craft, talk, stealth and fight for survival, as suspicious locals, the military and their pets, secretive government-types and an English take on the cast of Mad Max will gradually lead you to clues about what’s going on, as well as vaguely where to go next, although getting there (or getting totally sidetracked) is on you, and it’s such a good time! The rest is more functional, and noticeably so when you’re not being distracted by those wonderful, enchanting landscapes and some very eccentric characters, but once it gets going, the emergent narrative moves at a decent pace so far, and your curiosity seems to be frequently rewarded too… You just need to give it a chance to reward you first! 

Right, that’s everything I’ve got for you this week, and we’ve gone long anyway, so we’ll call it a day there. In case you missed it last Wednesday though, do have a look at this because we got (deep!) into one of those holy grail retro-gaming moments when you find a new all-time favourite (and an old classic!)… Discovering Ico on PlayStation 2. Then next Wednesday, check back again because as usual at the start of the month, we’re heading back exactly forty years for the very latest in video gaming with Retro Rewind: April 1985 in Computer & Video Games, straight from the pages of the original magazine! Hopefully see you then! 

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