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…

Before we get into something, er, new, having now been through pretty much all the Metal Gears, Metal Gear Solids and various spin-offs over the course of the past twelve months, I decided it was a good time to jump to Death Stranding – which I got on PlayStation 4 for my birthday last month – especially with the sequel in the wild now too (albeit not anywhere I can currently play it). Anyway, it might be a relatively new series, but Kojima-san doesn’t make writing about his games any easier, with this one set in an alternate, modern day-ish post-apocalyptic America, but no simple nuclear backstory here… From my ten or so hours playing so far, here’s what I reckon – the apocalypse was brought about by an event called the Death Stranding, where the world of the living met the world of the dead, spitting out these nasty supernatural beings called Beached Things, who like to hang out in a new type of rain, Timefall, which emerged with them and also causes normal things to age… Just make sure anything that ages a bit too much or otherwise ends up a corpse because then you’ll have forty-eight hours to get them to an incinerator before they become a mini atomic bomb! Then there’s various levels of psychic abilities called DOOMs that some people got as a result of the Death Stranding, and babies in portable wombs still psychically connected to their dead mothers, and a communication network that uses them to function, which is what’s going to reconnect the country, and that’s down to you, a delivery driver and a bit more besides, including the ability to return from death! It’s as bonkers as you’d expect, playing out as a third-person, open-world action-adventure meets walking simulator, with lots of weird controls that I’m sure I’m going to really miss when I return to “regular” games, and possibly help to disguise not a whole lot to the gameplay, as does an all-star Hollywood cast, brilliantly delivering the typically cutscene-heavy narrative. It is a very PS4-looking game, with a bit too much attention to detail in places that hasn’t aged well, but I can’t really fault its cinematic stylings aside from that, and the soundtrack is superb and directed to great effect. I’ve no idea how long it goes on for, or if anything (including its slow-pace) changes up particularly, but I imagine not, and for the time being I’m fine with that, grizzled old Kojima veteran that I’ve now happily become!

The brand new and strangely (but vaguely logically) titled Windjammers, Karnov & Friends collection for Evercade next, which came out a few days ago, and features five old Data East arcade games, obviously led by Windjammers, which at first glance might have been even more logical on one of the upcoming Neo Geo collections for the system, except SNK (who the Evercade folk, Blaze, have teamed up with for those) don’t own it, so it’s here instead. Anyway, I’ll come back to that and what else is part of an intriguing mix here shortly, but as usual with these, it’s all on a cartridge in a real box with an sizeable manual containing histories and trivia, as well as the all-important instructions,  plus some lovely stickers. Once you fire it up, you’re also getting typically slick, sortable on-screen menus, game info screens, quick saves and loads, and various DIP-switch settings if it’s all a bit too hardcore for you! Let’s have a quick look at the five games included now, starting with the undisputed headline act, Windjammers, which is one of those games I might own all over the place already but you can never have too many ways to play! I’m a huge fan of this one from 1994, playing like tennis with a frisbee, or a souped-up, powered-up version of Pong. It plays best multiplayer too but solo is still full of variety, depth and strategy, and when you get properly in tune (and used to playing it on an Evercade d-pad), it’s an absolute joy and everything about it still oozes quality. Our co-headliner (but not really) is Karnov, an arcade-platformer from 1987 that I had a soft spot for on the ZX Spectrum but has always been old-school brutal wherever you play! Gets weird quick too, as your fire-breathing strongman delicately  lumbers through nine levels of very nicely presented but not massively sophisticated treasure hunting, although its inventory system was pretty unusual for this kind of thing at the time. Definitely tough but it controls well and rewards perseverance. 

Next up is Atomic Runner Chelnov, which is one of those rare cases when the home port (namely Sega Mega Drive or Genesis) was better than the arcade original in almost every respect, although either way, I’ve never really clicked with this one when I’ve played it previously. It’s an early example of the auto-runner genre, all the way from 1988, with you on the auto-run from an evil corporation with a nefarious interest in your apparent ability to survive a nuclear meltdown! It’s multidirectional run and gun, where the screen never stops scrolling from right to left, and it’s alright but looks and sounds a bit crap, and doesn’t control particularly elegantly. Cannon relative of Karnov though, and almost as many cameos in other games, so maybe it’s just me, and maybe I need to give it a bit more of a chance after all. We’re spinning around to a vertically scrolling shoot ‘em up now, with Vapor Trail: Hyper Offence Formation from 1989. Fantastic soundtrack but otherwise a competently good time with a forgettable story and generic mechanics that I’m sure I’ll gladly fire up whenever the cartridge is in one of my Evercade consoles but is unlikely to be the reason I got it out in the first place. Likewise its 1991 sequel of sorts, and our last game here, Rohga: Armor Force, which spins us back to a horizontal plane but is now as much run and gun as it is shoot ‘em up, as you take a mech this time to face up against the returning rogue military meanies you thought you’d got rid of in the last game. Once again, it sounds amazing, and this time looks the part a bit more too, and certainly mixes up the gameplay to good effect, but it’s really not my cup of tea, and I think it’s a bit awkward too. Overall then, I’m a sucker for Windjammers, and I’m glad to finally get my hands on a legitimate copy of the original Karnov (possibly for the first time?), so I’m sure I’ll get my twenty quid’s worth out of that pair at least sooner or later, but I doubt I would out of their titular friends, and as such, it’s hard to recommend as a package. 

Right, that’s loads of stuff so we’ll call it a day there for this week, but in case you missed it last Wednesday, do check out one of my favourite annual features, The Retro Arcadia Game of the Year Halfway Hotlist, with everything I hoped for and a lot more besides from 2025 so far! Then next Wednesday, another month will have rolled around, so as always, we’ll be heading back exactly 40 years for the very latest in video gaming with Retro Rewind: July 1985 in Computer & Video Games, straight from the pages of the original magazine! This one was a very memorable issue for me too, so hopefully see you then to explain why! 

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