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. First order of business is wishing you a very happy New Year though! As has been the case since long before I ever became a sad old git, I didn’t do anything special on New Year’s Eve – never really been my thing, and in fact, I was painting around the last of our new windows for most of the day, before falling asleep in front of the telly watching Predator 2! Did mean it was no problem to go and pick up our son from the railway station at 5am after he’d been celebrating in London though, and that’s about the same time we said goodbye to him yesterday morning when he returned to Seattle to get back to playing football (soccer), so it’s all very quiet here again, and will be until the summer now… Hopefully! Bit quiet on the gaming front again too, but I did get to a couple of new things I picked up just before Christmas, so let’s get into them now.

As much as I happily play loads of stuff using emulation, if there’s something I play a lot of on a system I own then I’ll try to track down an original copy… And that’s exactly what I just did with The Chessmaster 3-D on the original PlayStation! This came from Mindscape in 1996, ten years into a series that ended-up with dozens of games on almost as many systems, and the best part of two decades before I had any interest in playing chess in any form whatsoever! From what I’ve played of these Chessmasters, they were always a decent game of chess too, but now you can view the board and it’s pretty surroundings from any angle, and there’s a nice bit of realistic sound accompanying the moves, which are very easy to pull off with the controller (and yes, I am fully aware that I’m talking like it’s some kind of fancy skateboarding grind rather than moving a bishop!) thanks to a semi-transparent hand-cursor-thing, no less! There’s a choice of boards and chess pieces, twelve different computer opponents, and plenty of learning to play stuff, but I know, chess is chess, and there’s not much more I can say about it, except this is a really good place to play it. 

I’ve been listening to the Cane and Rinse podcast for the entire fifteen years or so of its existence but until now had never taken them up on their regular opener inviting the listener to pause the current episode (where you’ll get a deep-dive from a panel of expert enthusiasts on a given game) in order to play it first if you haven’t already. Escape From Monkey Island was the one though, and as a fan of pretty much everything else in the series, was a gap in my PlayStation 2 collection I’ve been meaning to fill for ages! It was originally just one of those things I’d long-since moved on from when it first appeared on there in 2001 though – 3D or not, and LucasArts or not, a point-and-click adventure was hardly a showcase for that powerhouse! It’s been pretty well adapted for a controller all the same, with contextual actions easily accessible, and objects easily interacted with, stored and manipulated, even if the tank-like controls absolutely stink at times, with you constantly ending up in places you didn’t want to be!

The interface might be new (albeit evolved from Grim Fandango) but the obtuse and generally nonsensical puzzles the series is famous for are back with a vengeance (and so is the insult-based combat), as you once again take on the role of unlikely pirate Guybrush Threepwood, trying to help his new wife get reinstated as Governor of Mêlée Island, in the face of a conspiracy involving some surprisingly familiar faces in some equally familiar locations. That said, there’s plenty new too, but as vibrant as it can all be, I think I still prefer pixel art over polygons in this swashbuckling take on the Caribbean. The mostly returning voice cast does a very fine job though, and the mostly returning soundtrack is on top form too, carrying a typically imaginative and engaging narrative that probably doesn’t need to exist as part of the wider  Monkey Island cannon, but I’m glad it does because, a few utterly stupid puzzle solutions aside, I had a really good time with it, and I’m glad I finally got there. 

I did also finish Mafia III on PlayStation 4, which actually took up most of the week again (and did become my first game completed in 2026) but I did cover that here last time, so will just say that while the jank never let up over the course of what ended-up at thirty-plus hours for me, neither did the uncompromising storyline, which culminated in a couple of genuinely fantastic set-pieces towards the end, and I loved how it then ended too. Think I’m done with open-world games again for a while now though, so will hopefully have a bit more variety for you next Sunday to reflect that! In the meantime, do check back on Wednesday, when it will be time once again to head back exactly forty years for the very latest in video gaming with Retro Rewind: January 1986 in Computer & Video Games, straight from the pages of the original magazine! See you then!

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