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. Away from gaming, after months of getting things vaguely up to scratch, we’ve finally instructed an estate agent to get our house on the market, so this weekend is being spent decluttering, tidying and touching-up before what’s inevitably going to be months of people coming and going while we try to keep it looking like a show home… Well, as much as you can when it’s 400 years old! At least the garden will look a bit less bleak when they come to do photos and fly drones around it and whatever else they do nowadays next week! Anyway, I’ll keep you posted, and I’ll try and remember to share a link once it’s online in case anyone fancies taking it off our hands, but in the meantime, here are some games I’ve been playing…

All the way back in 1980, there was a strategic space combat game for Atari 8-bit home computers called Star Raiders, which didn’t just turn out to be one of the most influential games of all time, but to this day is still  one of the most immersive of its type as well. A couple of years later, it got an Atari 2600 port that was arguably a bit too ambitious, and also came with a custom controller that makes it pretty much impossible to play away from original hardware today. Anyway, in 1986, that all got sorted by its successor, Solaris, which I also reckon was the best game ever to appear on the system! As for Star Raiders though, your best bet on the 2600 is still a totally different game called Starmaster, also from 1982, and for the past couple of weeks, I’ve been back to it everywhere I can get it! By complete coincidence, at the end of last year it appeared on both Activision Collection 1 for Evercade, and I also picked up an original cartridge, but either way, it’s precisely what my beloved Star Raiders should’ve been on there in the first place – built for purpose, intuitive and as immersive as you could hope for from a primitive 3D star-field, a few geometric shapes, a couple of beeps and blips, and the whole galaxy within easy reach! That galaxy is being invaded, so it’s your job to strategically warp around the map, protecting your star-bases from invading aliens by tracking them down and blasting them to smithereens, while also looking out for meteors and the like that want to do serious damage to your energy, which you can replenish from those star-bases, assuming you’ve stopped any immediate threat in time and managed to limp there one way or another! It’s a big-scale, risk-reward game of cat and mouse as you try to anticipate the alien fleet’s next move so you can work out if yours is even feasible! The balance between simple strategy, space-combat and ship management is just right, and everything controls equally simply, and it’s just a joy, especially when you get to the third and fourth of the (four) difficulty levels, where there’s way more aliens who move way faster than you do too! If I had to name a single hidden-gem on the Atari 2600, it’s this, and actually, I don’t think it ranks too far behind Solaris overall either! 

As it usually does whenever I happen across it again, Rally Bike has properly sunk its hooks into me, this time on the Evercade EXP handheld, spun around in Tate mode to get the best out of its vertical orientation! It was developed by shoot ‘em up specialists (and it shows) Toaplan, then originally put out by Taito in 1998, but has been available on Toaplan Collection 2 for Evercade for a couple of years now. As a veteran of far more primitive top-down racers for the best part of a decade before this – which was a lifetime in gaming terms back then – it’s a real favourite of mine too! I just love how this oddball takes the conceptual relic of a top‑down motorbike race and turns it into an exhilarating fight for survival, where your ever-depleting fuel gauge is every bit as dangerous as the traffic. What begins like a nostalgia trip quickly becomes a tense dance of slipstreaming for both speed and immediate track position, desperately hoping for a random fuel canister drop so you don’t have to make a potentially race-killing stop at a gas station, and threading through all kinds of on-road and roadside chaos. And all the time, the game’s relentless shove towards a seemingly impossible race position to qualify for the next stage means you rarely get the chance to admire all the attention to detail as your environment gradually changes through each one. Played vertically on the EXP’s screen (complete with inevitable hand-cramp), the whole thing feels sharper, faster, and even more claustrophobic too, with that unmistakable Toaplan energy – vibrant, busy, slightly unhinged – constantly egging you on to take one more reckless risk than you really should. Once it clicks (which admittedly takes a while every time you come back to it), Rally Bike becomes this brilliant loop of aggression, fuel management and small victories that feel much bigger the further you get, and old-hat or not by the time it was released, it still nails that Golden Age arcade compulsion to have just one more go to this day!

Last up it’s Cairn, which I’ve been sitting on for the few weeks since it released but I reckon three play-throughs of Resident Evil Requiem (more here) is probably enough for the time being, so I’ve finally dusted off my crampons and given it a go… And it’s as mostly-fantastic as I was hoping for! Okay, the main character isn’t my cranky old cup of tea, and I care even less about her inane friends and whatever (mercifully skippable!) equally inane storyline it is that you apparently need to prop-up a superbly executed and gorgeously stylish limb-by-limb mountain-climbing game, but simply focus on being the first person to beat the fictional Mount Kami and it’s still so very rewarding all by itself! It’s so very tactile too, as you methodically puzzle out what’s sometimes only an inch or two at time, one arm or leg at a time, across multiple peaks on the way to the exhausting main event. And that’s after you’ve also puzzled out the best routes, sorted out your provisions (casual Resident Evil style), accounted for the ever-changing weather and day-night cycles, the moods of the local wildlife, sent your Climbot off on his errands, pitched a tent on a vertical cliff-face, and tried to remember to manage your ever-depleting stamina with every step! I went PC on this one – just seemed like a mouse and keyboard kind of game, with every nook and cranny demanding thought and precision, and again, there’s a real tactility to each bit of mountain that just seems to demand being hands-on this way! That extends to both the physically-atmospheric sound design, and the almost cel-shaded, water-coloury realism of the visuals too, that effortlessly swing between majestic vistas and oppressive reminders of the ridiculously precarious situation at your very fingertips! You’ll come across all sorts on the way too, and while I do seem to be in the miserable minority with the narrative and characterisation, that’s also an indication of just how good the climbing is, where I’ve happily lost myself in isolated concentration for hours at a time, and which sounds like a far better way of doing that than the real thing! 

Right, that’s your lot for this time. I have also done the first few chapters of the brand new Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly Remake but was too busy really enjoying it to write about it so far, so hopefully we can get to that next week. Those guys know their J-horror though! In the meantime, do check back on Wednesday, when I be giving you the final “proper” instalment in a long-running, genre-spanning series, and this time it’s my Top Ten 3D Shoot ‘Em Ups! As such (on several fronts!) it also became a bit of a catch-all, and a gateway to a couple of related countdowns still to come later this year, but regardless, I had a great time putting that together, so I hope to see you then!

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