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. Not much to report outside of gaming so I will quickly mention that I cancelled my Xbox Game Pass subscription following the recent 53%-price rise. Which is a shame because I’ve been really pleased with the service this year especially, but I’m only onboard for new games and access to stuff I’ve never played before, and I’m never going to get almost £300’s worth out of either of those next year, so the money can go on the games I actually want instead. Which nicely brings us to what I’ve been playing…

Scott Adams’ text adventure, Pirate Cove (aka Pirate Adventure), on the Commodore VIC-20 was the very first game I ever finished! One of the very few games I ever had on cartridge too, but although I really enjoyed what was probably months of messing around with its perfectly functional but ultimately limited two-word parser, you only really played a text adventure once, and there was so much more out there, especially when you had zero money to buy any of it, so it would be a long time before I played another! No excuse for only getting to one of his other games I remember eyeing up on there, Voodoo Castle, well over forty years later though! And not even the VIC-20 version either, but a new-fangled Atari 8-bit (with 32K memory expansion) update from 1982, with graphics and everything! All still done with two words at a time though, as you find yourself face-to-face with an unconscious Count Cristo in his creepy castle, who’s not the vampire you might be expecting, but some poor victim of Voodoo magic! You have to explore the castle, work out how to revive him, and gather all the bits and pieces you need to do so before performing a very particular ritual (which took me so long to get right that I almost didn’t!) to break the curse and escape the castle. Proper Hammer Horror place it is too, timelessly brought to life by Adams’ trademark to-the-point but highly atmospheric and surprisingly immersive writing, and I’d say “embellished” by some primitive but often quite delightful images depicting the scene. It’s pretty puzzle-heavy but none are too off-the-wall – just explore everywhere and try everything (however unlikely) as usual, and the castle is thoughtfully laid out enough that it’s got scale but everything’s compactly joined together at the same time. I still love the occasional text adventure and as expected over the course of many, many years, this is still a really good one!

I was convinced I had a copy of WipEout Fusion on PlayStation 2 when it came up in a recent Cane & Rinse podcast on the series, but my game shelves apparently told me otherwise, so I ended up buying it instead… And having now played a load of it, I’m still convinced I already had a copy! Regardless, it first came out in 2002 and was the series’ only original outing on PS2, although a port my old PlayStation Portable favourite Pulse did make it there in 2009, which would explain why I didn’t own that one because I’d long since moved onto the PS3 by then, and that already had its own game as well. Back with Fusion, it’s set in 2160 and has you competing in the corporate racing world of the F9000 anti-gravity racing league, comprising ten tournaments of three to seven races with sixteen competitors in each. There are also single races, super-weapon challenges, crazy-speed survival and more regular time trial modes, plus various multiplayer modes, and in total you’ve got forty-five tracks, thirty-two ships and twenty-six weapons to play with, including the incredible Seismic Field, which sends a black hole down the track in front of you! I’m not sure there’s much other (more figuratively) groundbreaking stuff here though – it’s a pretty accessible take on Wipeout (or WipEout) that’s certainly easier to control than some of its PS1 predecessors, it’s got the big techno soundtrack that isn’t my cup of tea at all, it looks great (if a little muddy at times), and it moves at a crazy pace. Other racer AI is pretty mean-spirited but not really to the point of frustration, although you shouldn’t expect to be even finishing, let alone winning any races for a while, but learning the tracks is fun and they’re all very fit for purpose – which is mostly total chaos – and I’m glad I definitely now own a copy!

As well as replacing games I thought I already had, I’ve also been replacing games I used to have but sold at the time… As mentioned when I covered Lollipop Chainsaw here a couple of weeks ago, during the PlayStation 3 era, I had to sell games when I was done with them to pay for the next ones, but, having been quietly replacing them again as and when the mood takes me over the past year or two, it turns out I was mostly still well in profit. Lollipop Chainsaw aside! Anyway, that put me in mind of another Suda51-related game on PS3 I’d also got rid of not long after it originally came out back in 2011, Shadows of the Damned, which I honestly was far less impressed with than I’d hoped to have been at the time, but fancied giving another go all the same, especially as it wasn’t quite as expensive to buy again as I’d anticipated. It’s a supernatural third-person action-shooter-type thing that has you playing a Mexican demon hunter (accompanied by his friendly demonic sidekick) slaughtering his way through the City of the Damned to rescue his a bit mad girlfriend from the clutches of the Lord of the Demons. It’s all very stylish too, in a hellish, super-crude, relentless dick jokes and gratuitous sex and violence kind of way, which obviously is still the main attraction for me, as it was the first time around, and apart from some stiff animation (to match some stiff controls), it still looks (and sounds) really good. Loads of variety too, and loads of bosses and upgrades and levels called things like The Big Boner, but it is all still masking a bit of an average and sometimes frustrating game! I had fun with it though, and at least it’s now my own bit of an average and sometimes frustrating game again!

I did finish Silent Hill f as well… Then jumped right back into a new game! I covered that in reasonable depth last week, so won’t get into it again, but I absolutely loved the thing, leaving me with some big choices to make about my game of the year when I get into that here in a couple of months! In the meantime, I think we can call a close to proceedings for today. In case you missed it last Wednesday though, it was the start of the month, so as always, we headed back exactly 40 years for the very latest in video gaming with Retro Rewind: October 1985 in Computer & Video Games, straight from the pages of the original magazine. Do have a look at that, and do have a good week ahead, and I’ll see you same time, same place next Sunday! 

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