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, the past few days haven’t exactly gone to plan! I’ve had the week off work, taking advantage of a combination of the bank holiday here on Monday and also the birthday leave that my company now gives us on Friday, meaning five days for the price of three. The plan was for four of those days to be spent in the Peak District, but unfortunately, a family emergency just before we were leaving meant we cancelled and didn’t go anywhere in the end. I suppose on the plus side I still wasn’t at work, and I did get to go to a record fair I’d have missed otherwise. Got some nice birthday presents too! Anyway, with nothing else I want to report, let’s have a look at some games, which I unexpectedly also had plenty of time for…

MLB The Show 26 was one of the sacrifices I was prepared to make when I cancelled my Xbox Game Pass subscription last year. As much as I always enjoy it, the ten hour trial you got with EA Play on there was generally enough for me to have my fill until it became fully included a few months later. Suppose I’d have picked it up in sales otherwise, but as I’m back on Game Pass (now it’s a reasonable price again), I don’t need to worry about that for the time being at least! As usual, it comes with all the razzmatazz of a big‑budget sports sim, although having experienced some real graphical showcases recently (such as Resident Evil Requiem – more here), in-game really isn’t all that – competent at best, with textures and lighting that look like they were lifted from several entries ago, and some of the crowd models from several generations ago! That said, the presentation overall leans so heavily on TV authenticity that the jank does at least remind you you’re playing a game rather than watching it live. Modes return largely intact — Road to the Show, Franchise, Diamond Dynasty, the historical story thing  — tweaked but in no way transformed, and the on‑field action is still the familiar blend of effortless pitching, timing‑based hitting and animation‑driven fielding. It’s all incredibly polished, and there are tweaks here too, such as the new challenge rules, but there’s no escaping it’s last year’s game in a new baseball cap otherwise. But that also means it’s fantastic to play, with such great rhythm to everything, from bat hitting ball to the whole nine inning back and forth. Okay, I’ll always prefer an actual video game version of baseball to a broadcast simulator (see my top ten here), but when you get to the baseball itself, it’s so much fun and so hard to not just have one more inning! 

All these years of owning both but never thought to stick Super Mario Land in my Game Boy Advance and see it coloured until this week… I fancied a game but had no AA batteries, so I charged up the GBA SP instead! Looks better all green and monochrome as nature intended in my belated opinion though, but it’s amazing how fast you don’t care either way because this thing will forever be wonderful however it looks! I originally bought it with the (original) console around the time of UK launch in September 1990, and while it does fundamentally have a lot in common with its NES predecessor, Super Mario Bros, it’s definitely its own thing too, as we leave the Mushroom Kingdom behind to rescue Princess Daisy, who’s been whisked off by some alien called Tatanga. While it’s no doubt been scaled-back to play nicely portable, with just twelve relatively bitesize levels set across four worlds (including a wonderfully miniature Ancient Egyptian-themed one), I think the challenge has been upped a notch here compared to Bros, and we also have a couple of vehicle-based, shoot ‘em up-infused levels, with Mario flying a plane and piloting a submarine. No mistaking how any of it plays though, and everything is beautifully realised in tiny detail, but as I said, meticulous shades of green is still how it looks best. The fantastic soundtrack never sounded better though, and whatever the colour, it’s truly Super Mario in your hand!

Imagic’s Riddle of the Sphinx from 1982 is one of those quietly ambitious Atari 2600 epics that going back to today seems slightly out of sync with the system it’s running on. It has you taking the role of the Son of Ra, no less, trekking across a vast, scrolling Ancient Egyptian landscape to lift a curse by gathering sacred items, navigating deserts, temples and some unnecessarily cryptic hazards. And speaking of unnecessary, it’s also one of those 2600 games that needs two joysticks, with the left one moving your character and the right one managing your items as well as your divine powers. Fortunately, my old QuickShot II is still plugged into the Atari ST sat next to the 2600+ console I’m playing this new old cartridge on, but all the same, it’s a strange and awkward proto‑RPG control scheme. It all adds to the game’s intended grand scale though, I suppose. Visually, it’s vintage Imagic, with typically shimmering colour schemes and boldly primitive but character-filled goings-on giving it a surprising sense of place that more than makes up for the far less atmospheric beeps and blips accompanying it! Hardly a thrill ride though, with a deliberately slow pace that does at least allow you to get your head around the not-straightforward-at-all mix of exploration, combat, resource management and item usage. And that’s all rewarding enough once you get into its rhythm, but I can’t help but think it’s another addition to that list of 2600 titles that are just a bit too ambitious for their own good.  

I was recently in CEX, re-buying a couple of PS4 titles I’d previously owned then sold (at a significantly higher price!) when they first came out, and as I was paying, I noticed a copy of Time Crisis for PS1 hanging on the display for unloved systems behind the counter, and for a fiver I reckoned it worth a punt, no light-gun anymore or not! Although it’s my first time owning a copy myself, I did play it loads on a friend’s PlayStation when it came out in 1997, and I was pretty familiar with the pioneering first-person rail-shooting arcade original from a couple of years prior as well. Hell of a port back then too, apparently built from the ground up by a dedicated team at Namco tasked with getting the most out of the console (and a G-Con 45!). Which does mean chunky textures and the enemies are a bit low-poly, but the superb art direction (not to mention straight-to-video narrative!) carries it to his day, with some great use of colours, slapstick animations and sweeping transitions from one set piece to the next. All the heroic energy of the arcade soundtrack too! Playing it now with a regular controller isn’t ideal though – playable but the gun peripheral brought an immediacy you just can’t replicate, so what was subconsciously perfect pacing takes a hit as you try to manage the cursor rather than simply snap to a target – it’s a kind of friction that’s not meant to be there and does interfere with the frantic action. Maybe not as intended then, but I’ve been loving these things all wrong since Operation Wolf on a Kempston joystick on the ZX Spectrum, and it’s still a great game however you play, and definitely worth what I paid for it!

I did also use my unexpected time at home this week to have a decent stab at a few new titles on Xbox Game Pass, including survival-stealth-mystery sci-fi adventure Aphelion, methodical and totally gorgeous cyberpunk-ish puzzle-platformer Replaced, and the fast-paced FPS spectacle of Trepang2… Which it turns out isn’t the sequel to something I’d never heard of I originally thought it was! I am having an absolute blast with that one in particular though, so hopefully I can get into a bit more detail on it next week. In the meantime, in case you missed it last Wednesday, do check out our regular trip back exactly 40 years for the very latest in video gaming with Retro Rewind: May 1986 in Computer & Video Games, straight from the pages of the original magazine! And apart from that, I’ll wish you a good week ahead and hopefully see you here again next time!

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