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. Actually, it’s only a couple of games this time, the first of which might appear topical, especially given I’ve had the Winter Olympics on TV in the background all day every day, but I actually returned to because it was mistakingly name-checked in a podcast I was listening to last weekend – I think they meant Alpine Racer! Maybe I’ll try and get that running for next time regardless, but for now, let’s jump to what I was inspired to play instead, which I have far more reliable ways of accessing…

It took me a very long time to fully appreciate Taito’s Alpine Ski arcade game, and as usual, going back to it on Nintendo Switch this week (via the 2022 Taito Milestones collection) quickly had me tearing my hair out all over again! The first few attempts at this vertically scrolling dodge ‘em up were pretty much instant crash followed by crash after frustrating crash, with each one running down the timer you’re racing against to nothing before you’ve gone anywhere at all thanks to the overly-severe, very black and white collision detection, combined with initially awkward controls. Just give those controls a chance though, because with just a bit of practice you’ll work out how to cut into the snow to control your speed as you turn, and before long you’ll be flying through the opening downhill stage, dodging the pesky amateurs and picking up the risky score bonuses along the way, and then onto the slalom course, and even occasionally the ski jump without too many problems, and suddenly there’s something fun and addictive here that wasn’t there before! Bright and breezy as the presentation is, even by 1981 standards there’s not much to look at here, and definitely not much to listen to, so this one stands on gameplay alone, and once you find it, it’s not bad at all!

Long before I started noticing the surprising amount of new stuff in Silent Hill f’s New Game + modes, I was also quite taken aback by quite how good-looking my Game of the Year from last year really is! Even its take on the series’ Otherworld is just beautiful, like some warped Valentine’s Day nightmare, to stay topical, and those essential fog effects have never looked better anywhere! Anyway, although I was planning to jump straight into Batman: Arkham Knight this week, after finishing (and a lot more!) Arkham City last week (which I covered here the week before), I noticed the Silent Hill box next to my Xbox Series X and thought I fancied a bit of that instead, so I’ve spent pretty much every evening this week in the remote and totally messed-up mountain town of Ebisugaoka in 1960s Japan instead! Although not set in the titular Silent Hill though, it’s Silent Hill all the way, with its Japanese folklore-inspired puzzles, not massively elegant melee(-only) combat, and wildly grotesque monsters! Gets typically nasty as well, as you play a seemingly unremarkable local teenager, Shimizu Hinako, navigating the equally grotesque remnants of her past and pre-written future, facing impossible decisions, and generally trying to survive a constantly tense and unsettling but immersive and ultimately enjoyable narrative, complete with trademark multiple endings! 

Those new endings are just one element of NG+ too, which I had no idea was also going to play out like a kind of director’s cut, expanding on the original story with new or extended dialogue and cutscenes, and I want to quickly mention a nice touch with those, whereby if you try to skip them – as you might be tempted to on a second run – it warns you you’ll miss something you haven’t seen before, while the ones you have already seen get no such treatment and you’re good to carry on to the action! You’ve also got new difficulty levels, new puzzles, new side-quests, and new items and documents to find, all further extending both narrative and lore, as well as combining to some of those “true” or more wacky endings! The rest plays as well as ever (although I did knock the combat difficulty right down this time), weaving in clever new survival-horror elements with Japanese psychological horror to fantastic effect. And while the anxiety is naturally dialled down second time around, it remains wonderfully atmospheric too, in no small part thanks to its incredible sound design and literal hell of a score! We might be well into 2026 by now but it’s still my Game of the Year!

Right, that’s literally all I’ve played this week… Well, I did also attempt to play Raiders of the Lost Ark on Atari 2600, which I bought on eBay the other day, but not unlike another well-known movie tie-in on there, it turns out I’m going to have to spend a bit more time with the typically extensive instruction manual (which was fortunately also included) before I have a clue what’s going on in the thing! I’ll try and let you know when we’re hopefully here again next Sunday though, but speaking of stuff I’ve been buying, do check back next Wednesday too, when it’s going to be time for the Retro Arcadia Gaming Pickups Winter 2025/26 Recap, covering all the retro games and related stuff I shouldn’t have been spending money on over the past three months. See you then! 

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