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…

After caning Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance a couple of weeks ago, I’ve started heading back towards what’s left of the series proper with Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes on PlayStation 4! Well, by “series proper” I mean a blink and you’ll miss it appetiser for the main course, The Phantom Pain, but as such, and for a couple of quid in CEX, no complaints whatsoever. But what’s this 6% completion thing all about??? Well, along the way through your first play-through, you’ll have probably stumbled upon a collectible or two, and when the credits have rolled, you’ll be told you’ve unlocked hard mode and some side-ops… And keep playing, and you’ll keep unlocking! I read somewhere we’re talking forty-plus hours to even start approaching 100%, and while it will probably have run out of steam for me long before that, it’s all short and sweet enough to want to go back and see it again, and try and work out what’s going on in the cutscenes, then maybe again, skipping the cutscenes and exploring a bit, or just trying to do better. And actually, as soon as I did finish first time, do better was exactly what I wanted to do straight away! As well as a prologue of sorts to the next game, it’s also a sequel to MGS Peace Walker (more here), with you rescuing a couple of familiar faces from a grotesque Guantanamo Bay-type situation, a few months on from it in 1975. It’s a very tightly-packed and tense setup, but with a surprising amount of freedom to approach it how you want, although despite all the tools at your disposal (and in your ear), as well as rebuilt stealth mechanics and streamlined controls, nothing’s being handed to you on a plate! Well, except for absolute blockbuster presentation, insane attention to detail and the best possible advert for what’s to come…

Despite having almost two acres of the real thing to take care of, I can’t resist 1983’s Hover Bovver on the Commodore 64 whenever I fire up Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story on Switch! It has you “borrowing” your neighbour’s lawnmower to cut eighteen different lawns, or about three of them max in my case! If only you’d asked him first, and then avoided the gardener’s flowerbeds… You can call on your occasionally faithful dog to slow their angry pursuit, but only while there’s something left in its loyalty meter, so you want to save that for emergencies. The dog soon gets annoyed by the sound of the mower too, and lets you know about it, leaving you painfully exposed to the chasing mob for a few seconds when it does! Holding a direction down will make you go faster for the briefest escape but that will also cause the motor to heat up, so you need to keep an eye on that as well, and with loads of different garden layouts, which include carefully positioned hedges no one can cut through, there’s a lot of strategy to work out on every level! I did also jump to the Atari 8-bit version on the same compilation as it’s there but this just moves slightly better, and there’s no better system than the C64 to enjoy the earthy colours of the simple textured graphics here, or endlessly play its Country Gardens folk tune… Never gets any easier but never gets old either!

By my reckoning, Doom: The Dark Ages (which I’m playing on Xbox Game Pass) makes that eight mainline Dooms now, the first of which I bought on launch day on the original PlayStation, the third of which is my all-time favourite first-person shooter, and the last two of which caused me terrible motion sickness… This is a staggeringly cinematic prequel to the latter, namely 2016’s Doom and 2020’s Doom Eternal, laying down a surprisingly decent origin story for our legendary Doom Slayer, although it will be no surprise that it still involves slaughtering the entire population of techno-Hell with all kinds of wild, demon-slaying super-weapons, as well as a brand new shield, which you never knew you needed but is far more fun than simply defensive, and does mix up the traditional stick-and-move Doom gameplay a lot. Some big mech-fights and even dragons to fly too! The overall scale of what’s going on is outrageous, with insane numbers of both familiar and new enemies coming at you all at once and from all directions, leaving you equal parts exhilarated and exhausted, as your senses are pummelled by relentless, blockbuster, heavy metal violence. It’s so fast-paced, and plays so fast and loose, but with real impact to everything, heightened by the Devil’s own apocalyptic soundtrack and audio design, while the visuals – both in-game and during cutscenes – are just a gothic sci-fi fantasy feast, literally oozing atmosphere and dripping medi-evil in every respect. Best of all though, no unwanted nausea whatsoever this time – just what’s meant to be there!

And that sounds like a good place to call it a day for this week! In case you missed it last Wednesday though, we were rediscovering World Games on Commodore 64, which I always thought was a bit of a black sheep in a fantastic series but it seems like I might be in a minority, so do check that out. Then next Wednesday, it’s time for another countdown, and this time we’re going to be spanning over four decades, and counting down my Top Ten Favourite Pinball Video Games! Hopefully see you then!

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