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 won’t bore you with more details about preparing to put our house on the market, but can you believe it took a mob of people from the estate agent over four hours to do photos, floor plans and other marketing stuff??? Anyway, good to go any day now, so this weekend we’re looking at houses instead of trying to make ours look vaguely presentable! I went to a record fair too, and picked up copies of Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine’s 30 Something, Sugar’s Beaster and Among the Living by Anthrax, all of which I now have on four formats but none of them were vinyl, so I’ve been enjoying them too! And I finally got hold of the Jaws 2 novelisation… Not just games I spend a fortune on! Oh yeah, games, here you go!

Since it first appeared in 2002, as of last week I’ve now sold two and bought three copies of Super Mario Sunshine! The thing is, although I sometimes get the urge, I’m really not into 3D platformers, and this pretty much encapsulates all the reasons why! There’s the dreadful camera controls that struggle to keep up with the action. There’s the pixel-perfect movement demands on sloppy associated controls. There’s the dodgy physics and unpredictable jump mechanics… And it’s all at once and all the time, and then you’re also wrestling with the stupid water-powered jet-pack that sprays everywhere except where you need it to, and then the water’s run out and you have to start again… And those stupid impossible boss fights, and lily pad rides, and pachinko machine levels… Okay, I know Mario Galaxy fixed all this stuff but despite everything, it still didn’t grab me like this one did when it first came out, and apparently sometimes still does to this day! It’s just so tropical and sunny and happy and gorgeous, taking that pioneering sense of adventure from Mario 64 to a whole new level across big and varied and oh so colourful environments that just beg to be explored for every last blue coin they hide! And when it works, it feels great, driven along by a surprisingly engaging story about clearing your name after being accused of polluting this idyllic island, and is filled with the best-looking renditions of all your favourite characters (and some new ones) that we’d ever seen until now. They’re voiced for the first time too, backed by a fantastic summery soundtrack, wacky effects and really atmospheric ambient sounds. No escaping there’s bits that really stink but I reckon once you tame it, that big water spray thing on your back can get rid of most of them too, which might be why I seem to have come upon it yet again!

As a fan of both the swipe-driven casual kingdom management of the original Reigns on  iOS, and the epic majesty of The Witcher 3 on PlayStation 4, I couldn’t resist their coming together in the new Reigns: The Witcher, however unlikely it sounds! Not sure why I’m playing on PC this time, other than I came across it on GoG and in my excitement didn’t think to look elsewhere, because the format is way more suited to a touchscreen, but it works fine with a mouse, while the presentation is simple, stylishly minimal and straight to the point, keeping you focussed on the super-accessible, fast-paced and effortlessly addictive gameplay, strung together by equally fast-paced and dryly familiar writing. The Witcher’s lore is a strangely good fit to the Reigns structure as well, with monster-hunting bounties, political intrigues, personal tragedies and a lot of moral ambiguities all micro-condensed very nicely into this quick-fire, card-flipping format (plus a bit of rhythmic tile-based combat), where you need to stay alive and keep the four forces of power in balance, all by swiping the left or right choice on the current card on the screen. Makes you wonder why you spent hundreds of hours getting there previously… Obviously, entirely different, but if you fancy a really fun, bite-size reunion with Geralt, then I can’t think of a better way, which includes that other stupid card game he likes playing!

Sitting painfully just outside my top ten games of all time, Elevator Action by Taito in 1983 is one of the very (and I mean very!) few arcade games I can say I played to death at the time, and I’ve barely stopped since! For the past couple of weeks, that’s been happening on my Taito Egret II Mini, with its lovely tactile joystick possibly making it my favourite of about a dozen ways I’ve got to play it scattered around most rooms in the house – I absolutely adore the thing! You’re a spy, dropped onto the top of a big tower block, and you have to make your way down its thirty floors using a maze of elevators (and a few escalators), collecting secret documents and taking out enemy agents on the way, before making your escape in a car in the basement and starting all over again in a new building. I love the way it mixes patience with fast reactions, and simple gameplay with increasing strategy that comes with a degree of mastery of manipulating the elevators in particular. Great Spy vs Spy cartoon aesthetic too, full of bold colours and slapstick character, and one of early gaming’s great ear-worms playing in the background too. And that kind of thing will never get old to me, as you can tell! Speaking of which, maybe next week I can dig out my Paddle & Trackball Expansion Set for this little arcade cabinet and get one of the Arkanoids on there going – I’ve had the urge since I got back into Off The Wall on the Atari 2600 here the other week! 

Right, that’s your lot for this week! Do check back again next Wednesday though, when we’ll have just about made our way into April, meaning it’s time for us to once again head back exactly 40 years for the very latest in video gaming with Retro Rewind: April 1986 in Computer & Video Games, straight from the pages of the original magazine! It was quite the month too because although there’d been a couple of unbelievably low-key mentions of both the Commodore Amiga and the Atari ST in previous issues, here we finally got some proper fanfare for the incoming 16-bit generation of home computers – possibly the best-looking game ever seen to that point too, with a nice clue about its identity in the picture above, but you’ll have to wait for the rest. Hopefully seen you then!

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