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…

Mafia: Definitive Edition has been installed on my Xbox since whenever it first appeared on Game Pass, but I really need to be in the mood for an open-world game, and in a bit of a post-Doom lull, a prompt from a friend set the mood perfectly! Then a weird thing happened… I absolutely caned it for two full evenings, from the time I finished work to the time I went to bed, unable to resist just doing the next bit for hours on end, but then the next game we’re going to cover came along, which I’d been looking forward to for ages, so I jumped to that, caned it even harder, and through no fault of its own, have had no desire to go back to this one since! That’s me and my weird relationship with open-world games though, but I genuinely had a great time with every second I did spend in its authentic and relatively newly super-atmospheric 1930s gangster’s paradise! It’s a 2020 remake of the original Xbox and PS2 Mafia from 2002, set in a fictional US-city that seems to be part New York and part Chicago, with you completing missions and getting up to all sorts of no good as a cab driver turned Mafioso, finding his way through the ranks of a local crime family over the course of the decade. The whole thing has been totally rebuilt, from mostly great-looking visuals and all-new voice-acting to additional modes, difficulty levels and some lovely driving mechanics, which also feel good on the newly-introduced motorbikes. Shame about the janky hand-to-hand combat though, and some of the animations also betray their roots, but that city and its surrounds can be truly jaw-dropping, the music on the car radio is exactly what you want to hear, and the narrative is way more engaging and varied than I expected, and I’ve no idea why I haven’t been back since!

As said though, I can tell you exactly what distracted me from it in the first place! Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine – Master Crafter Edition is another remake that arrived on Xbox Game Pass this week, and while there’s even more jank still hanging around in this one, for the most part you wouldn’t want it any other way! It originally appeared in the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 era, back in 2011, and was as big and dumb and fun a third-person shooter any sci-fi fantasy nerd could ever hope for at the time. Not much has changed on that front here either, in what the producer has called a “thoughtful restoration” and involves a resolution boost, enhanced character models and textures, remastered audio with loads of new voice lines, modern controls and a spruced-up interface. Meaning if you haven’t played it for fourteen years like me, it’s probably exactly what you think you remember it being like in the first place! It’s still such a blast regardless, totally mindless with non-stop weapons like bolters and chainswords being served up as fast as the non-stop action, and no messing around with nonsense like cover systems either, as you play a Space Marine sent to get rid of a millions-strong Ork horde that’s invaded an Imperial forge world. New graphics engine or not, it’s still not the prettiest or most varied world you’ll ever geek-out in, but the narrative does go places, and it’s well-paced, mostly well-checkpointed, and doesn’t outstay its welcome. In the grim darkness of the far future, there might be only war, but it’s a really good war!

I’ve been a big fan of the Food Fight arcade game by Atari in 1983 forever, and more recently the fantastic Atari 8-bit conversion too, but the other place it got one was on the Atari 7800 in 1987, which I’ve been playing this week for the very first time! The idea is to get your little guy, Charley Chuck, from one side of the screen to the ice cream cone on the other before it melts. Unfortunately, you’ve got four angry chefs and piles of all kinds of food in the way, which they’ll throw at you with increasing ferocity as you progress through each level. Get hit and it’s a life lost, but you can grab the food and throw it back too, temporarily banishing them to their mysterious manholes, but don’t get too distracted by the glorious chaos and the surprisingly cat and mouse nature of the food fight, because that ice cream is going to be gone in about thirty seconds! The faster you get there, the more bonus points you’ll earn, but however long it takes, that extending mouth animation will never get old! It’s an incredibly simple concept matched by simple but character-filled presentation, and overall this port couldn’t be better. I was especially impressed to see the action replays from the arcade original carried over, which occasionally appear between levels when you’ve had a particularly close call! Not sure this game ever got the recognition it deserved on any platform but this is certainly a good place to give it some! 

I did have a lovely old time with the new Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 – Foundry Demo on Xbox Game Pass too but I reckon we’ll save that for the full game when it arrives and call it a day for now. In case you missed it last Wednesday though, we gave the Nintendo Switch 2 a Retro Arcadia welcome with my Top Ten Favourite Mario Games, all the way back to his days as a carpenter named Jumpman! Then be sure to check back next Wednesday for something I’ve been looking toward to getting into since I did the same with Vol. 1 (here), as we discover some arcade shoot ‘em up classics (and more besides!) in Psikyo Shooting Library Vol. 2 on PlayStation 4! Hopefully see you then! 

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