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. First though, I need to report that I resubscribed to Xbox Game Pass! I had no idea the new boss had called for a backtrack on last year’s outrageous price increases the other day until I was having a look at that new MMO thing Albion on the store, and was intrigued by what you got for being a Game Pass member versus the regular free to play, and I noticed the price of Ultimate was showing as a lot less than the last time I looked. And while it’s still a couple of quid more expensive than than the last time I actually paid for it, it’s no more than my ground coffee subscription went up by as well this week, so I’m fine with the new £16.99 a month, especially when I was on the store in the first place to buy the two new games I’m going to cover in a sec, which are both included in the sub. And I was thinking about getting a month or two anyway for the new Forza in a few weeks, so I reckon we’re back into getting value again for the time being at least! And that sounds like a good place to get into what I’ve been playing…

As much as I literally played it to death when it came out back in 2022, I have absolutely no idea what I’d have wanted a sequel to Vampire Survivors to look like… I do know it wasn’t Vampire Crawlers though, but I’m pleased to report it’s doing just fine so far all the same! Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors! (to give it its full title) takes the destructive and wildly compulsive snowball-effect thrills of the original and bizarrely turns them into this turbo-charged, turn-based, tactical deck-building dungeon-crawler with a super-old-school, overtly bargain bin vibe! It’s all first-person perspective now, with you shuffling around these vaguely familiar and totally lurid heavy-on-the-pixels locations filled with the even more lurid and gloriously 2.5D undead, as well as treasures, unlocks, upgrades and all sorts, and no need to worry about all that nerdy card nonsense either, because once the built-for-fun system clicks, there’s a rhythm here that isn’t quite equal to Vampire Survivors but you’re going to struggle to put an end to regardless when you realise bedtime was an hour ago! You explore, encounter, play your cards, unleash some world-ending combos, reap the rewards, equip your upgrades, then do it again until you die trying, when you can reap some more persistent rewards and do it again, er, again. Marvellous! It’s almost unfair to compare this to the original, when it was such an out of nowhere cultural phenomenon that was never going to be repeated, but that hasn’t gone anywhere if you want more of the same, and this sits very weirdly but almost perfectly alongside it! 

Grandiose Square Enix RPGs aren’t typically my thing, but sooner or later I find myself in the  mood again, which is how I’ve ended-up buying a copy of Valkyrie Profile 2 Silmeria on PlayStation 2, all the way from its later years in 2007 (in Europe at least). That it was this one in particular was originally for very superficial reasons too – I was simply watching a “best graphics on PS2” video a while back and there it was. And honestly, that ongoing visual wonder is the main reason I’m still persevering with it – I can take or leave both the overly-involved gameplay and the typically melodramatic fantasy narrative, but it really is one of the most stunning things I’ve ever seen on there! It’s all lavish, medieval-style pre-rendering with these gorgeously detailed character models and the most exquisite lighting and particle effects for the time. No on-screen clutter is nice too, as is a wild baroque-prog soundtrack, albeit countered by exactly the twee voice-acting you’re probably already imagining! I’d have just preferred something a bit more Final Fantasy in design, rather than side-scrolling dungeon-crawling with obtuse navigation and puzzle-platforming elements, and this fiddly semi-real-time combat system built on complex party management and tactical positioning, and action points, break gauges, extension gauges, attack chaining, combo routing and other sub-systems that just make my eyes glaze over and I’ll never get the most out of. I can just about get enough out of them to keep the spectacle coming though, even if I’m not sure how far into its apparent fifty hours or so that’s ever going to get me. But as long as it’s enough to get my money’s worth then that’s fine!

I’m even more rarely in the mood when it comes to 3D platformers, so I’d likely never have given this a chance had it not been for the subject matter, but I think I was on level three of Super Meat Boy 3D when I realised how much of a good time I was having, not in spite of it being a genre I’m not that keen on, but because it was proper new Meat Boy regardless! And for context, three levels is well under a minute in! Anyway, I’ve been a fan since the 2010 original’s brutally precise but instantly retryable 2D original, and I liked its similarly challenging auto-running follow-up from 2020 too, and apart from being 3D, this is familiar territory again, as the cube of meat called Super Meat Boy once more heads off to rescue Bandage Girl from the evil Dr. Fetus. It’s all rotating sawblades, fiendish traps and menacing bosses again too, and they not only look great here, but the fixed yet dynamic camera absolutely nails perception of depth and your place in each breakneck level, so negotiating all these hazards is as seamlessly intuitive and effortlessly rhythmic as when it was all in two dimensions. Gets ridiculously hard though, but never unfairly or cheaply so, and once you get going, you wouldn’t want it any other way. Which also goes for the outwardly cute but utterly sinister presentation, with those persistent blood trails especially an ongoing and increasingly in your face reminder that you just need to get good! Maybe not my favourite game type, but I’ll always take more Meat Boy when it’s this much fun!

Not sure what it is about playing games I’m not really into this week but in my defence, I did finally bin-off Resident Evil 5 (more here) – I guess I was about two-thirds of the way through but it went from having the odd moment to the point of not being fun at all… If only it had let my stupid computer controlled co-op partner stay dead instead of constantly coming back and wasting all the ammo and generally being a moron again, I’d have probably persevered! Right, that’s going to do us for this week. Do tune back in next Sunday though, when I’ll hopefully be reviewing the new Atari 2600-filled Activision Collection 2 on Evercade, with a look at every single one of the fifteen games included. See you then! 

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