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. It’s going to be a bit of a quickie though, with Christmas stuff limiting both my gaming time and the time I had to put this together! Really nice time all the same, off work and with not a lot to do, although I did finally get our new shed built, that had been sitting on our driveway for the best part of a month now! Nice restaurant on Christmas Day too, and loads of nice presents, including a very big and very swanky new coffee machine, but barely anything gaming-related for a change, come to think of it… Not that I really needed any more, as evidenced by the couple of games I’ve got for you this week, so let’s have a look at them! 

As regular readers will know, I’ve spent the past few Weekly Spotlights jumping between all the new Evercade cartridges that dropped together at the end of November. Now the dust has settled a bit though, I’m still coming back to Beamrider on Activision Collection 1, and I think it’s the mainly for the novelty of playing it handheld, because it’s hardly new to me! That said, it might not be one of their best-known Atari 2600 titles, but if you want super-smooth 3D motion on there then you won’t get much better, although if you’re one of those sensitive to flashing-types, then you probably won’t get much worse either! Fortunately, no one was that sensitive about all kinds of things when this came out back in 1984, and visual tricks like that every time you shoot an alien, combined with some really meaty sound effects, really elevate the immersion. Plenty of action to keep you on your toes too, as you patrol the Earth’s Restrictor Shield, which seems to have backfired because the pesky aliens are now travelling across its protective beams to attack you! You need to clear a certain number of them from each sector before facing-off against a bigger and more aggressive mothership, taking it down with one of your limited special missiles before it crosses the play area for big bonus points, then moving on to the next one. The gameplay itself might not be terribly original, riffing on the likes of Juno First, but it’s fantastic, with increasingly erratic aliens and new types of danger being introduced as you progress, and things soon get very frantic (not to mention “flashy”), especially when you start messing with the various difficulty settings! And that 3D effect is so impressive for the time, even if does serve to mask some otherwise simplistic (for the time!) visuals. Simplistic never hurt though, and this is living proof of that!

Although it took less than two minutes to unplug my Xbox series X, put it in a cupboard, and replace it under the living room TV with my PlayStation 4, there was something strangely symbolic about doing so… Another nail in the coffin, I guess. That said, it’s only going to be temporary, because I fancied finally getting around to Mafia III, which has been sitting and waiting its turn on my PS4 games shelf for years! Always say I need to be in the mood for a game like this though, and although I knew I would be at some point after I played the demo when it first came out all the way back in 2016, in my defence I think I only got it for Christmas 2020! Anyway, it has you just back from Vietnam in 1968, returning to your organised crime-linked surrogate family in a fictional New Orleans-type American city. They get betrayed and murdered by the local Mafia, and you set up your own gangster empire to avenge them from the inside. The resulting narrative is uncompromising and uncomfortably authentic, and compelling enough to elevate the moment to moment gameplay, which mostly consists of drive here, damage this, meet someone, kill someone and so on, but as repetitive as the missions definitely get a few hours in, every element is always fun – the driving, the sneaking, the shooting and some brutal takedowns always feel good, and the variety of cars, weapons and locations manage to keep things fresh enough too, together with tons of side-missions, car racing and all kinds of nefarious activities, if you fancy prolonging what I think was around twenty-five hours of main story. All of that, spread across a huge, realistic, living city and it’s swampy surrounds, does come at a price though, with lots of minor, albeit mostly forgivable open-world jank, but I do want to mention one thing I found really jarring – you can change outfits, and even facial hair, but get to certain cutscenes and suddenly you’re back in your default outfit with your default look, only to magically transform back again once it’s done. And that it doesn’t happen every time makes it worse, especially when the attention to detail elsewhere is incredible. The soundtrack is a post-Summer of Love dream, from Hendrix and The Rolling Stones to all the Motown big-hitters and Elvis himself, and the voice-acting could be straight out of Goodfellas or something. The rest of the sound design just adds to the authenticity, while character and car models mostly look fine, the city looks lovely (especially when you get outside it), and the weather and lighting effects are superb. All adds up to what’s still an engaging and enjoyable experience almost a decade on that’s probably more than the sum of its parts, and one that kept me wanting to go back at every possible opportunity from start to finish. 

Right, that’s your lot for this week, and for this year too, but as always, I’ll be back with more of the same next Sunday. And hopefully a bit more of it too! In the meantime, in the very likely event you missed it last Wednesday, I did share my regular annual look at every game I’ve seen through over the course of the past twelve months in The Big Retro Arcadia Rundown of Games Completed 2025, just because it already existed so I could, should you still have nothing better to do! And with that, I’ll just wish you a good week ahead, and a very Happy New Year when it gets here as well! 

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!