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’m not going to bother you with house sale stuff this week, although when I tell you I’ve got about halfway through Frank Herbert’s Children of Dune novel, you might decide that would’ve been preferable! It took me decades of trying before the first book finally clicked, which I always knew it would in the end, then I breezed through the second one at the end of last year, asked for the next for Christmas, and I’m finally getting around to it… In my defence, I do read a lot, and my gaming backlog has nothing on the book one! Anyway, so far, Children of Dune takes us in a weirder and, I think, a more atmospheric direction, with the next generation wrestling with the weight of their messianic father’s legacy. It’s slower and more tense, and at this stage I’m really not sure where the second half of the original series is going to take me, which is a good place for it to be. And a good place to move on to video games!

Just as I hoped for, this is the most stupidly addictive stupid game you could ever hope to come across! Raccoin is a roguelike coin-pusher, exactly like you used to play at the seaside when you were a kid, but without the tantalising prospect of any monetary reward, which, of course, was temporary at best, and inevitably got shoved straight back in until you’d lost it all again, and everything you started with, and your parents refused to give you any more. Could always hang around and see if a rogue 2p fell out by itself though… None of that expectation here either, which reinforces its pointlessness, but that’s all fine because it’s fantastic regardless! You’re given a handful of coins to start with, which you drop onto the back of the pile on the top platform as it moves back and forth, in the hope it will force the coins at the front onto the next level down, in the continued hope it does it again, and you eventually end up with a load of coins falling out of the bottom into your greedy little mitts. Except here they’re weirdly transformed into tickets, which I didn’t like, but you can then spend them on more coins for more goes, as well as special coins and prizes, and there are loads of them, and they all trigger unique skills and bonuses and coin towers and coin showers, and all sorts of stuff. Then there’s obstacles and combos and different characters and machines, and you can shake the machines, and before you know it, there’s so much spectacle and chaos everywhere! You might just hit your targets for that round amidst all the chaos too, and then you can hit the shop again to fund even more chaos, and off you go to the next one! The presentation is deliberately “indie” and works great, but you’ll barely notice any of that because for something (seemingly) so mindless, you won’t be able to get that ridiculous gameplay loop out of your head once it’s in there, and you won’t want to either!

Quick shoutout to Catty Bird (which is nothing to do with what you’re thinking), a new Atari 2600 homebrew by jab – also known as Alberto – over on the Atari Age Forums. It’s as simple as it gets, but is well put together and addictive in short bursts too, with you trying to pop as many balloons as you can by letting them go at precisely the right time for the birds flying back and forth overhead to burst them. Why doesn’t matter, but you’ve got a maximum of six misses to rack-up your biggest score before it’s game over, although there’s a lovely summary screen with a big friendly bird on it waiting for you when that happens! You can change your position on the bottom of the screen to help account for the wind, which will be displayed with an arrow for direction as well as its strength at the bottom for each new balloon you need to let go, and bursting ten of them will give you a bonus life and move the game to the next level where the formation of birds in the sky will become more challenging to intercept. It’s pleasant enough to look at without doing a great deal, and the same goes for what few sounds there are, but it does what it needs to perfectly well, and the very basic controls work fine, and it just gets what the system was always good at – a quick dose of fun! Check it out for yourself here: https://forums.atariage.com/topic/389057-catty-bird/

It’s been a long time since I played Resident Evil 5 – long enough that I didn’t really remember it being as bad as people say today, although it was probably telling that it’s one of the very few entries in one of my favourite game series I’d still never finished before, and certainly the only mainline one. Anyway, for once people are right… It’s bad! Perhaps some of that is on me though, like playing solo when it’s (totally unnecessarily!) built for co-op, but if you insist on giving me a computer controlled co-op partner in the absence of having anyone stupid enough to play this rubbish with me, don’t make her a total liability, wasting my ammo and medicine, and generally getting in my way, and definitely don’t send me back to the last checkpoint when the idiot dies, which is even worse when you know it would be a far better experience that way! Co-op in a Resident Evil, whatever next… Well, combat and getting your character to do pretty much anything at all ain’t much fun either! It’s all stiff, unresponsive, you have to stop to do anything, aiming is dreadful, and after the masterclass in inventory management that was its predecessor (which also still controls fine to this day), that’s somehow clunky and intrusive as hell again. Everything on-screen moves as rigidly as it plays too, and it’s got that very-PS3 sterile sheen to it, but I’m not going to put any of its problems down to showing its age because once again, Resident Evil 4 just doesn’t. Sounds alright though, and it can all add up to being occasionally atmospheric and frantic and vaguely Resident Evil at times, but just not enough of them. And yeah, I’m going to go back to 6 next too, so we’ll see how that holds up (or not!) here very soon!

Right, that’s all I’ve got for you this week, although after all that Dune chat at the start, followed by Resident Evil 5, of all the things I could have played this week, I don’t imagine you’re too sorry to hear that! Do check back next Wednesday though, when business is hopefully going to pick up again when we get into something I’ve been wanting to cover in-depth for ages, not least because it’s my favourite game on the system… Yes, we’re finally going to be discovering Solaris, a galaxy-spanning space epic that simply should not be possible on an Atari 2600! Hopefully see you then!

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