Back again for my 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. We finally got home from our Pacific Northwest adventure on Monday night, then from Tuesday had a plasterer in to put right all kinds of mess that comes with living in a 400-year old house, although given the amount of dust we’re now surrounded by, I think he might have left even more mess than was there to begin with! Anyway, that did include getting my home office walls completely replastered, which meant all my consoles in there had to be moved elsewhere temporarily, and they’re only just back, so a bit of a handheld theme again this week…

We’ll start with a quick look at the new BurgerTime Super Micro Keychain Gamer from the makers of Evercade, an approximately 6 x 7 x 2cm handheld featuring what I think are the NES ports of Data East’s BurgerTime, Karate Champ and Side Pocket. As such, it’s more of a £20 stocking-filler than anything you’ll be hanging off your belt and taking very far with you for serious sessions on the go, both in terms of awkwardly small form-factor and what aren’t exactly definitive versions of any of them! It’s well put together though, with a vibrant-enough 2” screen and clear-enough sound, which you can turn up and down on the side, while there’s a decent d-pad, two action buttons plus Start and Select nicely positioned below the screen on the front. Not sure about battery life yet but it takes three AAAs in the back, which honestly I think should have been something rechargeable via USB at this price. That might have allowed for firmware updates too because I reckon the sound on Karate Champ isn’t emulating right and could do with one to eliminate the in-game hum, although you’ll probably be too concerned about the dodgy collision detection to notice! It’s not a terrible way to play a game I have huge nostalgia for though, and the extra modes on this port of Side Pocket work well here on top of it being a fun conversion, and I’ve always liked this version of BurgerTime too, even if the inherently finicky controls are pushing their luck on a tiny screen! I’ll get my money’s worth out of all of them though, even if it will probably have been consigned to a drawer long before any stockings actually need filling!

Apparently, almost three hundred of the budget-priced, budget-sized PlayStation Minis were released for the PSP and (more often than not) PS3 between 2009 and 2012. I bought some decent ones too, but it turns out that Actual Crimes: Jack the Ripper wasn’t one of them! Given it’s taken me fifteen years to fire it up though, we’ll call the £2-3 I probably spent on it water under the bridge and accept it for what it is, which is a reasonably factual contemporary reinvestigation into the now-legendary unsolved murders in question… In the shape of a crappy hidden object game! The narrative progresses all over Victorian London, from seedy East End pubs to Buckingham Palace, no less, with each location providing new clues that apparently the police had previously missed, as well as opportunities for occasional simple puzzles. But although police incompetence is familiar to any amateur Ripperologist, you can’t blame them for anything missed here because some of the hidden objects are ridiculous – it’s not so much that they’re “hidden” but in plain sight and virtually invisible! I often found myself simply moving the cursor in straight lines, back and forth and up and down the screen, frantically pressing X in case it happened upon something, and I’m not even talking about an obscure final object – it was sometimes most of them I was supposed to be looking for in any given place! There is a hint icon on a mercifully self-aware timer as well, and I can honestly say that I never once felt stupid after it had pointed out the position of whatever it was I was struggling to see! The visuals you can see are too Hollywood, the sound too repetitive, and I’ve spent way too long talking about this to get into them any further! The same as I spent way too long playing the stupid thing but at least after all this time I now know what was behind that stupid icon on my PSP!

Finishing off with a slightly bigger Evercade handheld than we began with, for some time, I’ve been avoiding my EXP because one of the left shoulder buttons was knackered, which was odd considering I don’t remember ever playing much on there that used it… Which I know does make not using it just as odd! Regardless, I fancied a go on Street Fighter II, and the EXP came with Hyper Fighting, together with bunch of other Capcom titles, so I remapped the controls to avoid the broken button, fired it up and got even more annoyed about it! To solve my predicament once and for all, I then started looking at the new models, but there’s none of the Capcom stuff I want on them anymore, so I looked at getting it repaired, and then I found a DIY fix, and all of a sudden I was surrounded by tiny screws and all the buttons that had fallen out when I opened it up the wrong way around! Putting it back together took way longer than fixing it though – was just a little rubber contact pad that had worked its way off the rest off the main button mould. Then, as if by magic, the lovely Chun Li was back in action again, default controls and all! Not that they’re exactly optimal, with heavy attacks relegated to those shoulder buttons, but you soon get used to them, together with how much faster it plays relative to the game’s previous iteration, Champion Edition. Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting was the third of them, released in 1992, and as well as the speed boost, it added new specials, new looks and various character balancing tweaks. Speaking of which, the four bosses, Balrog, Vega, Sagat and M. Bison were now playable too, on top of the eight original characters. And how playable they all are, with the faster pace not just adding more energy and intensity, but also adding a new fluidity to the character animation, while the backgrounds are as vibrant and varied as ever (not that you’d know it from my rubbish pic here – sorry). Same for the wild synth soundtrack, and those sound effects never had more impact! Not sure my fingers are still up to the accompanying boost in precision that’s also needed here though, but it won’t stop them trying!

Mega Man X was one of the other Capcom games that came on the Evercade EXP, and I’ve been playing that on there too, but I’m only a level and a bit in so I think I’ll come back to that next week and will call it a day here for now. In case you missed it last Wednesday though, it was the first one of the month, so time for another journey back exactly 40 years for the very latest in video gaming in Retro Rewind: November 1985 in Computer & Video Games, straight from pages of the original magazine! Apart from that, I’ll just wish you a good week ahead, and hopefully see you here again next Sunday.

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