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 I’ve done absolutely nothing of note this week, so I’ll stick with gaming instead, and quickly mention how thrilled I was with that Alien: Isolation 2 announcement at Summer Game Fest this week! It took me a while to get to but I love the original (which you can read about in my deep-dive here), so can’t wait for the bigger scale and more harsh frontier world environments, as well as a more unpredictable xenomorph to keep you terrified when it arrives next year! Two new Cuphead games too, and that Code: Veronica remake, Resident Evil: Veronica, is finally official. That said, I’ve still never finished the original, which I actually bought day one (twenty-six years ago!) on GameCube, so that’s something I now need to fix as soon as possible. Will have to stop playing the other ones over and over first though…

It’s been a year or two since my last time, but Resident Evil 4 Remake remains an absolute joy, and even if it’s never going to be a top three favourite game ever of mine like its 2005 predecessor is, more than enough of that strange and relentless magic survives the transition to modern hardware, and a bit more besides. The 2023 retold (but still wildly meandering) story once again drags you along through rural dread and gothic excess, and the pacing doesn’t let up, although I will concede that most of the tension of the first couple of play-throughs has now been well and truly lost to my infinite ammo rocket launcher! I also always mourn any losses to political correctness but other characters are generally still tolerable too, and the whole thing looks and sounds gorgeous – more bleak, more grand, and that island feels nastier than ever, all helped along by the truly sinister sound design. Gameplay is probably what you remember the original being like rather than the reality, in the best possible way, with twenty years worth of refinement and all sorts of modern conveniences on top of its original genre innovations, and it does it all with so much swagger but total respect too, making this far more than just a remake despite inevitably remaining in the shadow of greatness. 

Next up is Glass on the ZX Spectrum, a game that could sell you on a screenshot alone, or, if you didn’t have your own Spectrum quite yet, get stuck in your memory ever since you first read the review in the July 1985 issue of Computer & Video Games! I revisited that issue in a Retro Rewind feature almost a year ago, so with that anniversary creeping up again, I decided it was time to finally play the thing – as I promised myself I would do back then – especially having even more recently also been reminded how highly regarded it is among some enthusiast friends of mine… Unfortunately though, it turns out to be less so by me! The plot is something about you being in a simulator, preparing to fight your way towards three alien cities then take them down, which involves an impressively fast and very vibrant take on the classic 3D Deathchase and a bunch of admittedly varied but not particularly interesting shoot ‘em up sections. Some of them look absolutely stunning all the same though, with this awe-inspiring sense of scale, superb detail and stylish use of colour that reminded me of Eagle or 2000A.D. comics from around the same period. And the one pictured here, with this vast ship elegantly scrolling right to left that you need to shoot bits off while you’re travelling into this smooth 3D checkerboard effect at the same time is simply black magic! It’s also a bit boring though, and the sound stinks too. Maybe if they’d let me at the actual aliens at some point instead of being stuck in some kind of endless training mission then it might have been more meaningful, but as jaw-dropping as it can be, without the help of any nostalgia this one really isn’t for me, and can safely return to July 1985 again now… Just like I wish I could!

Finally, one of several games I was kindly given for my birthday last month, and it’s  Avalanche for the Atari 2600+ (primarily), a modern port of Atari’s 1978 arcade game, built around John Champeau’s highly respected homebrew version and officially released in a traditional big-boxed, backwards-compatible cartridge format in 2025. Despite the (only-slightly) simplified presentation, it keeps the original’s twist on the Breakout concept intact, with you trying to prevent rows of falling rocks reaching the bottom of the screen (where your scientific research station is apparently situated) by catching them on your stack of shields (what it says!), which decrease in number the more rows you clear. You’ve got a bunch of in‑game variations and four difficulty levels too, but it’s all instantly familiar if you know the arcade game and wonderfully simple if you don’t, although I reckon the paddle controller implementation could do with being smoother and more precise, even if your fingers do learn to compensate. Apart from that, it’s a bit flickery, as you’d expect, and the sounds couldn’t be more, er, authentic, but it eventually hits its stupidly addictive stride, and also fills a weird historical gap in the system’s library pretty nicely, so if you’re a fan of the arcade game like I am, it’s probably the conversion you always wanted. And credit to Atari for the screenshot at the top of the page, which does their game far more justice than a crappy photo of my TV screen would have! Check out the cool box art too!

There is still another ancient Spectrum game from that magazine just now to get into, which I’ll try and do next time, as well as another new 2600 boxed title I’ve got, but apart from still dropping in and out of Forza Horizon 6 (previously covered here), that’s about all I’ve got for you this week. In case you missed it last Wednesday though, do check out the most recent instalment in our aforementioned regular journey back exactly 40 years for the very latest in video gaming with Retro Rewind: June 1986 in Computer & Video Games, straight from the pages of the original magazine! And with that, I’ll wish you a good week ahead, and hopefully see you here again next Sunday! 

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