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. Outside of gaming, I could share a few more pre-house sale decorating exploits, but you want that as much as I do! I did finally see Tron: Ares though, and while it’s very much sci-fi style over substance, it’s also a decent bit of neon-drenched nostalgia combined with a fantastic Nine Inch Nails soundtrack too, and I enjoyed it a lot! I’ve been picking up a bunch of trashy old horror novels on eBay of late too, and this week’s haul included a couple I’ve been after at a less outrageous price than usual for ages, namely the novelisation of the eighties remake of the fifties creature-feature The Blob, and The Morgow Rises, a seemingly rare Cornish sea monster yarn from 1982, so I’m very pleased with those as well! And speaking of sea monsters, I’ve also been working on a cryptid-related book of my own, but maybe I’ll save that for next time and get into some games instead…

Having just finished Evil West (covered here last week), my recent business with the PS4 being back under the living room TV again has concluded for the time being, the Xbox Series X has been reinstated, and I’ve been back to the 2005 Xbox 360 launch title, Condemned: Criminal Origins on there. I actually picked it up a few months back, as I’ve got the sequel on PS3 but had never played this, and not unlike Evil West, it’s the classic, unpretentious, not massively complicated or taxing seven out of ten I was hoping for! It’s a dark and grimy, vaguely supernatural, first-person action-detective game, with you playing an FBI agent working on a grisly serial killer case that not only turns out to be more than meets the eye, but you get framed for it along the way too! As well as battering zombified junkies with planks of wood covered in nails, among a dozen other types of blunt or otherwise objects you can pick up at every turn, there’s a bit of the survival-horror going on too, with plenty of desperate-for-ammo situations, and there’s some light environmental puzzling to enable continued progress, and a more crude, virtually on-rails take on Batman’s fancy detective tools from the Arkham games… Which I’ve suddenly got the urge to play again! It all works fine for what it is here though, and I had such a good time just being taken for ride through a bunch of atmospheric and suitably creepy locations, enjoying the terrifying sound design and general Silence of the Lambs vibe for a few hours. Did not disappoint in the slightest! 

After what was possibly years of being very patient on eBay, I just picked up a copy of Street Fighter Alpha 3 MAX on PlayStation Portable, and although I’m hardly the greatest connoisseur of the franchise, and it also doesn’t have a huge amount of competition in my collection, if there’s a better fighting game on this or any other handheld then I’d love to be introduced! Actually, there is the Darkstalkers game on PSP… Anyway, this thing is a miracle, with no less than thirty-seven (and possibly a few more) characters, including the platform-exclusive Ingrid and returning Maki from Final Fight, and a wild number of game modes, with regular arcade and training, a bunch of tag-team and multi-character battles, survival modes, a crazy one-hundred single-round battle mode, boss battles, more team battles, and the globetrotting World Tour, a kind of RPG-lite career mode with custom fighters! There was all kinds of network play for up to eight players at once available at the time of release back in 2006 as well, but good luck getting any of that working nowadays, let alone finding anyone to play with! Despite missing a couple of buttons, the gameplay itself feels great on the PSP, featuring the various combo-nuanced “-ism” fighting styles introduced in the 1998 arcade original, and the overall translation to handheld feels just perfect to an admitted-philistine like me at least! As does the presentation, which my rubbish photography doesn’t do justice to whatsoever, but is so vibrant on this wonderful little screen, and moves so beautifully, and with so much flair and non-stop flourish. There’s a ton of personality in the sound design too, suitably corny as it can be, and although the synth-techno-rock soundtrack isn’t exactly a series peak for me, it’s got plenty of energy and does what it needs to just fine. And I’m just hugely impressed with this! 

Although I count the original Gauntlet as one of my top ten favourite games of all time, I’d never played any version of Atari’s 1998 arcade follow-up, Gauntlet Legends, until I came upon a copy of the PS1 port from a couple of years later just a short while ago. In fact, apart from knowing it existed, I was pretty much oblivious to it, including how this is apparently by far the least of the conversions when compared to its Nintendo 64 and Sega Dreamcast counterparts. Ignorance is bliss though, and I’ve found it to be a perfectly fun, more or less mindless, more or less top-down (in an inevitably 3D way), fantasy hack and slasher with just enough depth to keep it surprisingly hard to put down! I think the main concession here was the reduction from simultaneous four-player to two-player, but even that’s still twice the number I’ve had to worry about for a very long time, and just like the first Gauntlet, it quickly finds its own rhythm playing solo, as you choose from the classic lineup of Warrior, Valkyrie, Wizard or Archer (plus four more to find along the way), then set off across four kingdoms, looking for various magical bits and pieces that will get you into the Underworld to see off an evil wizard and his demonic horde. And it really is quite the horde, soon ganging-up on you in traditional fashion and giving the PlayStation a proper workout, which also goes for some impressively large dragons and other boss monsters you’ll come up against. Okay, it is all a bit jagged to look at nowadays, but they’ve nailed that Dungeons & Dragons atmosphere while keeping things colourful and varied, and it’s all helped along by a proper epic orchestral soundtrack and some really polished “fantasy” sound effects. All the intensity you want from a Gauntlet game too, but as alluded to earlier, there’s more to it than just masses of nasties to take down, with different facets to level completion, tons of stuff to find, shops, power-ups, character-levelling, persistent upgrades, secret levels, those secret characters… It’s almost as much RPG as it is arcade game, in a very immediate way, and, lack of time spent around arcades in the late-nineties aside, I think that’s probably why I never paid it any attention first time around but have now found it so well-suited here, and best conversion or not, it seems to be just right for me! 

I do still have Escape From Monkey Island on the go on PlayStation 2, which I covered here a couple of weeks ago, and I’m now well into what looks like the final Act III, but honestly it’s dragging now, and some of the puzzles are beyond ridiculous, and it’s just not the same 3D cartoon-style! Anyway, that’s it from me for this week, but do check back again on Wednesday, when we’ll be discovering Turbo Sub on Atari Lynx, a 3D shooter that might just be the best example of better than the arcade original ever! Oh yeah, I also wanted to quickly mention the regular annual Game of the Year Predictions feature that was originally promised around now too… Primarily, it hasn’t materialised because of an ongoing issue I’ve had embedding video here for a few weeks now, but also, apart from Resident Evil Requiem, there’s just not that much I’m that excited about yet, which I hope will change come December, but for now I’ve decided to leave it. Hope that’s okay, and I hope to see you again next time! 

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