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. I’m afraid you’ll have to wait a bit longer for my thoughts on Robocop: Rogue City though, after I said I’d just grabbed it from Xbox Game Pass here last week… I have now played it but I was way too busy enjoying it to even think about covering it here yet! Busy week though, so it was only last night when I finally got to it, and I really wasn’t expecting to be quite as taken by it as I was, despite being a huge fan of the man-droid and his work! We’ll try again next time but I have got a load of other good stuff (and more besides!) for you regardless, so let’s get on with it…

I’ve been playing the NBA Street basketball games for as long as emulation has allowed, but unlike a lot of more “American-interest” sports games from the early 2000s, the second (and my favourite) in the series, NBA Street Vol. 2, actually got a PAL release on both PlayStation 2 and GameCube back in 2003, and I’ve finally got a copy for the latter! The trouble was, despite getting a European release, I don’t suppose it sold a lot in the UK anyway (hence most of these not coming out here), so I’ve been on the lookout for it at a decent price on either platform for literally years, but as is often the case, a bit of patience will eventually bring a bit of luck too! It’s 3-on-3 street basketball with a fast-paced, arcade-like feel and loads of immediate fun to be had, but with plenty of depth to the controls as well, and all-new tricks and gamebreakers, and twenty-nine licensed teams from the 2002-2003 season to play with, plus legends like Larry Bird… Three versions of Michael Jordan too, so you could unlock yourself a team of only Jordans, as well as a ton of other rewards, from players to courts to jerseys, by playing through the various game modes, which include one or two player quick games and seasons, a big set of tutorials, and the main Be A Legend mode, taking you from zero to the best there is. The cartoon-realism and vibrant grittiness of the visuals – as well as the exaggerated realism of how everything moves – is glorious, and while the star-studded hip-hip soundtrack is just right but just isn’t for me, the environmental sound effects like police sirens or the taunts from the spectators really make the game! And once you’ve got a few moves down, you’ll quickly stop getting battered every game and become totally immersed in the brilliantly balanced back and forth. At some point I’ll put together a countdown of my top ten favourite basketball games, and here’s a spoiler – this will be right at the business end! 

Since getting Delphine Software Collection 1 for Evercade a couple of months back, I’ve now completed Another World on there at least twice (I lost track with a deep-dive on the way meaning I’m playing everywhere), and had fun messing around with Flashback again, but not touched the two games on there I’d never actually played before! This week I finally got to Future Wars – Time Travellers though, a “Cinematique” point-and-click adventure for the Amiga (the version here) and elsewhere from 1989, taking our window cleaner hero on an adventure through time, although getting far is going to take some serious effort and patience on your part, pioneering fancy interface or not! Examine every pixel on every screen, take everything, try everything on everything… Fine, it’s what the genre demanded of you back then, but where the likes of Monkey Island did this elegantly and somehow wanted you to succeed, the execution here often stinks, doing its best to ruin your chances instead, throwing up way too many brick walls loosely disguised as puzzles. For example, with no prompting whatsoever, you’re expected to search the foot of a specific tree in a wooded area to reveal a previously totally invisible rope. Use the rope on a specific branch on that tree (but only if you’re standing exactly where it wants you to be) and you’ll pull yourself up so you can have a sleep, which triggers a bloke turning up for a naked swim in the lake behind you, whose clothes you can then nick (if you’re in exactly the right place and notice every item) to progress a puzzle later on. None of this for the last time either.

Over-obtuseness aside, it’s so finicky too, and that’s before you consider you’re using a controller as standard here and not a mouse, although it’s clunky regardless of that – basic movement around the screen is a real slog either way, and the same goes for the action menu – knowing to “operate” rather than “examine” a single piece of rubble, when you’re called an idiot for doing so anywhere else on a screen full of rubble, is ridiculous! Then there’s another bit where the ceiling is coming down on you and you need to examine a keypad first to then be able to operate it and type in a code you might have found earlier, but to enter the code, it’s open menu, choose operate, move cursor back to a tiny number (using a d-pad remember), press button, open menu, choose operate, type next number and so on. You’ve got a few seconds to do the lot and it’s almost impossible even if you do somehow manage to land the cursor on the right number at speed, which is totally unnecessary and totally kills the vibe. Also not for the last time either! And that’s a real shame because it’s got such a nice vibe, with the time travel thing taking you to some unexpected and great-looking pixel-art places, sometimes with some great music too, and the narrative is compelling enough and doesn’t take itself seriously at all. Just wish everything else about it was the same! Still beat the stupid thing though, but at best it’s just a step in the right direction towards the wonderful things that followed. 

I went way too long on a game I really didn’t like just then (which also applies to the amount of time I spent playing it!), so I’m going to finish with something quick and a bit mindless, which kind of also reflects why I jumped to it next in the first place… Although you’d never know it was mindless in the slightest from one of the most stunning arcade intro sequences ever, with this huge helicopter gunship emerging in full attack mode from this spectacular, future-Oz-like cityscape! Beyond that though, Silent Dragon is a pretty generic side-scrolling beat ‘em up from Taito in 1990. It was developed by East Technology, the, er, Double Dragon 3 folk, but don’t let that put you off too much, and the same for the generic rescue your kidnapped girlfriend plot, or the four generic martial artists to choose from, because while it’s certainly no Final Fight, it’s competent enough, with accessible and reasonably fluid combat, and there’s a quirkiness about it that’s been bringing me back every once in a while for years! I really like the soundtrack by Taito’s legendary house-band Zuntata too, and the oddball situations you find yourself in, but that’s about all I’ve got to recommend it – hardly a guilty pleasure but those things aside, it really is generic, and there was probably never a better advert for a fantastic (albeit barely relevant) attract mode on an arcade machine as a result! 

Right, that’s me done for this week, but in case you missed it last Wednesday, do check out my deep-dive into WWF Superstars on Nintendo Game Boy, which by coincidence also turned out to be a nice tribute to Hulk Hogan, who passed away the following day, assuming you’re of the mind that he deserves one… It is sad that there’s only one of those guys on the title screen above left though. Anyway, my next big feature is coming a week on Wednesday, when we’re going to be taking our monthly trip back exactly 40 years for the very latest in video gaming in Retro Rewind: August 1985 in Computer & Video Games, straight from the pages of the original magazine. And in the meantime, I’ll see you back here next Sunday for more of the same, but hopefully with less rubbish point-and-click adventures, although it might be worth hitting the other one on that Delphine collection while I’m still slightly numbed to the pain… All will be revealed, I’m sure, but until then, have a good week! 

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