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. As correctly predicted last week, when I first noticed number two-hundred of these regular features was upon us, I’m afraid there’s no festivities or fuss of any kind to mark the occasion – as I said then, I barely acknowledge my own birthday! I am now beginning a week off work that doesn’t involve painting the outside of a four-hundred year house for once though, and I have been having a lot of fun with the PC-Engine Mini, so we’ll go there instead! It originally came out to play for a quick session on Dragon Spirit, then I got distracted by Fantasy Zone, then I messed around with Space Harrier, Splatterhouse and Victory Run, before finally getting totally (and frequently literally) sucked back in by Galaga ‘88…

Officially the third sequel to the iconic Galaxian, this single-screen (or fixed) shoot ‘em up is something else again, and so is this port – Namco’s 1987 arcade original is great and all but the 1988 PC-Engine version is where I know and love it best! By the way, just to avoid confusion, it was also known as Galaga ‘90 in the US on the TurboGrafx-16, where it arrived a year later again. Whatever and wherever though, Galaga in one form or another has always been my thing, expanding on the Galaxian formula with more complex alien waves and more depth, including the Boss Galagas at the top of the screen who don’t just take more hits but will also suck you up in a tractor beam given the chance, which in turn adds more depth with the opportunity to rescue your captured ship from them using subsequent lives, and then fight on with dual ships… Or they could just end up being another alien to shoot at if you screw it up! This concept is taken further in Galaga ‘88, where the boss aliens can suck up two of you, in turn giving you the opportunity for a triple fighter! It’s now also made up of five worlds of four stages, with branching paths, boss fights and four endings, plus the bonus stages where this game’s excellent music really comes alive. The rest is more of a lick of paint, with new colour and more character to the aliens, some lovely big explosions, and some very cosmic backgrounds, and this conversion just gets the lot right! 

I didn’t really know much about Blackthorne until the Blizzard Arcade Collection in 2021, which I then picked up in a Nintendo Switch sale some time later, and I’ve been dabbling with it every once in a while ever since. Like this week! It’s a cinematic puzzle-platformer, not unlike Flashback in both look and gameplay, and was originally released on the SNES and DOS in 1994, a couple of years after Delphine’s masterpiece, with the Sega 32X version I’ve now come to favour arriving in 1995. Not only does this bring with it the expected graphical overhaul, with bigger rotoscoped sprites and more detailed and more colourful pre-rendered environments, but also with an additional level too, which I’ll come back to in a sec. Worth mentioning that it’s not really all that compared with the SNES on the sound front though, but you’d have to do a side-by-side comparison to realise it doesn’t have anything like the heft to the effects. Anyway, you play as Kyle “Blackthorne” Vlaros, heir to the throne of the distant planet Tuul, which has been enslaved by an evil warlord, who you need to take out to regain the throne, liberate your people, avenge your father and so on. It’s all sci-fi fantasy nonsense, which translates to traversing seventeen levels spread across mines, swampy forests, deserts and a castle, but as just mentioned, this version has fifth area, with four new levels set in snowy mountains, and this area is a real looker, with loads of cold atmosphere behind the, er, blizzard you find yourself in. It’s all very methodical, with you exploring, climbing and jumping back and forth around levels to solve puzzles, open doors and generally progress, with some cool cover and blind-fire mechanics giving combat an extra level of depth, and once it all clicks, it quickly becomes very engaging, also just like Flashback! And while it doesn’t quite reach those lofty heights in terms of spectacle, level design or narrative, it does enough of its own slightly grittier and more action-driven thing to make it worth returning to just as often. 

I’d never even played the 2004 PlayStation 2 original until around a year ago, as I made my way through the entire series and its spin-offs for the very first time, and having now done so, while it didn’t end up being my absolute favourite, it was up there, and I’ve been looking forward to its Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater remake ever since! And never was the word “remake” more appropriate – if you’d played it twenty-one years ago, I imagine it’s exactly how your rose-tinted brain remembers it being, and I’m not just talking the exquisitely current-gen visuals, but literally every aspect of (the absent but ever-present) Kojima’s outrageous ambition, his ropey storytelling, the cinematography, the soundtrack, the mechanics, the perviness, all the nooks and crannies and tricks and quirks, and, of course, the returning David Hayter’s gravelly delivery! You can even revert to original controls if you like but don’t do that because, like the densely atmospheric environments you now inhabit that in reality are on a whole new level, the modern, mobile, 3D third-person shooter controls take the original’s gameplay to a whole new level too, so slick and polished and easy on the fingers! Proper overhaul of those pioneering but ultimately cumbersome inventory, camouflage and healthcare systems too, giving you more time to try and keep up with the game’s bonkers series prequel narrative, set in the Russian jungles of 1964, where you, Naked Snake, are trying to rescue a rocket scientist, destroy a super-weapon and kill your defector former boss. And a bit more besides, played out through hours and hours of unnecessarily self-indulgent but equally slick and polished cutscenes! It might be missing the impact of the original but that’s all – it’s been as reverently modernised as could be, and as such, is a remake done absolutely right. 

Can’t believe I only spent that many words on a Metal Gear Solid Game! Will save me editing it down when Game of the Year time comes in a few months though… I did have a couple of hours on Gears of War: Reloaded too, which came out on Xbox Game Pass this week, and it’s big dumb fun for a while, and is another game that’s had quite the lick of paint to boot! And as I write, the new NEOGEO Arcade 1 collection for Evercade also just turned up, but I’m going to save that for next week as it’s still in its plastic wrapper! Believe it or not, it’s apparently Hollow Knight: Silksong release day next week as well, so if that really happens after all these years, and I’m able to get to it in time (which honestly may not be practical), we’ll cover that then too. In the meantime, in case you missed it last Wednesday, we had the Retro Arcadia Gaming Pickups Summer 2025 Recap, covering all the retro games and related stuff I shouldn’t have been spending money on over the past three months! And there’s more, because next Wednesday, we’ll be heading all the way back exactly 40 years for the very latest in video gaming with Retro Rewind: September 1985 in Computer & Video Games, straight from pages of the original magazine! Hopefully see you then! 

As always, I’ll never expect anything for what I do here but if you’d like to buy me a Ko-fi and help towards increasingly expensive hosting and storage costs then it will always be really appreciated! And be sure to follow me on Instagram, X (formerly Twitter) or Threads for my latest retro-gaming nonsense, and also on Bluesky, which is under my real name but most of it ends up there too if you prefer!