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. Not a huge amount going on away from gaming apart from a miserable week at work I won’t get into, and sorting out US health insurance renewals and remote medical tests for our son probably isn’t something you want to hear about either! And I’m not into international football at all so I can’t even get into the World Cup. What a bore I am, and long may it continue! My wife did do a marathon yesterday if I can pick up a bit of that glow though! Anyway, with nothing else that’s particularly interesting to tell you, let’s see if I can do better with what I’ve been playing…

Occasionally, there’s more to finally going physical with a game after years of emulation than just feeling better about yourself, and in the case of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Game Boy Adventure: A Bogus Journey (on the original Game Boy), the simple transition to a “real” screen makes a very small (literally!) but surprisingly significant difference! It’s a single-screen puzzle-platformer from 1991 in the US and the following year here in Europe, with the most tenuous of links to Bill & Ted – in fact, if it wasn’t for a couple of “Excellent!” cartoony intro screens with them on, you’d have no idea! There’s a vague plot about recovering time fragments from ten different periods, loosely signified by the level backgrounds and occasional helping hands from the likes of Billy the Kid and Napoleon. Each one then has five stages, made up of an increasingly complex maze of platforms, ladders, ropes, gates, hazards and enemies to negotiate a route around to collect all the fragments, then get to the exit before the clock runs down. What starts out fast-paced and pretty free and easy soon becomes the opposite, ending up properly fiendish, especially with that time limit! The frantic music adds to the pressure too, while visually it’s all tiny, contextually unrecognisable and generally nothing special, but here’s that thing about the real thing – there’s a bit of hardware motion blur going on, which is weirdly kinetic and adds this kind of mischievous energy to the game that’s missing from the sharp edges of emulation. It’s as barely there as the license but I was surprised at how much it elevated the gameplay for me, which wasn’t exactly lacking in energy in the first place! Anyway, however you play, it’s not bogus in the slightest, and is definitely worth adding to your cartridge collection if you have one! 

I know I’ve covered a couple recently already, but another birthday present I received back in May was the Devil May Cry HD Collection on PlayStation 4 from 2018, which is regularly on Amazon now at a real bargain price! What you’re getting is the original stylish, expressive, combo-driven supernatural hacking and slashing PlayStation 2 trilogy, which was then previously collected in cleaned-up form on PS3 in 2012, and is given another resolution boost with sharper textures and smoother performance here. Otherwise though, it’s pretty much untouched from what I can tell – some trophies, some bonus art and audio, but no reworked systems or modern quality‑of‑life tweaks; just the games as they were… For better and worse! 2001’s Devil May Cry (pictured at the top of the page and below) was originally a Resident Evil sequel before spinning-off into its own thing, but you can still see where it came from in the fixed‑cameras, decadent gothic corridors and slightly awkward movement, although once the combat kicks in, it becomes obvious why they switched to its naturally-fitting genre – it’s still a joy! The plot is simple but engaging enough too, with hero Dante storming a demon‑infested fortified island to confront the evil forces that killed his family. And once you get your head back into its exploratory rhythm, it still plays great for the whole of its ten or so hours, slightly rough around a few edges by modern standards or not, and the same goes for the presentation, constantly reminding you how good this thing looked on the PS2! Will always be a classic! 

Less so Devil May Cry 2 though… The story pretty much passed me by, with Dante and newcomer Lucia fighting demons in a bland modern city, while the combat – meant be the series’ backbone – is suddenly weirdly weightless, repetitive and lacking any kind of creativity. Then there’s the glitches, the jank, the dreadful signposting, the even more dreadful checkpointing… Easily the weakest game of the three in this collection, and no amount of HD polish could have disguised that was also the case when it first came out in 2003! All that said, I wouldn’t not have it here, and I was happy enough going back to it again for the first hour or so – until Mission 5 to be precise, when it gets really rubbish! Devil May Cry 3: Dante’s Awakening from two years later is thankfully the complete opposite! It’s not just the huge correction that saved the series either, but it arguably defined how this kind of thing would play for the next decade or more too. It’s a prequel involving Dante’s rivalry with his brother Vergil, but this one is really all about the massively enhanced combat system that introduces styles, cancels, weapon switching and a ton of mechanical depth that still feels incredible today. Looks and sounds stunning, runs beautifully, and unless you’re like me and the first game will always be the one you love the most whatever followed, this is probably worth the price of entry alone for most people. And overall, despite doing the bare minimum to preserve three inconsistent but undoubtedly important pieces of early‑2000s combat-action-adventure history, for what it costs today it’s a no-brainer, especially if you can get someone else to buy it for you!

I am still playing Silent Hill: Homecoming on PS3 (more here) but I really don’t know why – it stinks in general, but there were entire sections where I’d shut all the curtains, closed the doors, and turned up both the in-game brightness and the TV’s, and literally couldn’t see a thing. None more black! Got to be right near the end now though… Been on a bit of a King of Fighters ‘97 tip on one of the NEOGEO carts for Evercade too, which is also a good time to let you know I’m hoping the new one turns up in time for me to give you a full review here next Sunday! In the meantime, in case you missed it on Wednesday, we’re well into June, which can only mean it’s time for the Retro Arcadia Game of the Year 2026 Halfway Hotlist! I know I’ve said it before but I always enjoy this one, not least because it usually gives me a chance to showcase a few games that wouldn’t make the final countdown in December otherwise, as well as have a quick look at what’s still to come for the rest of the year that might creep in instead. Anyway, do have a look, do have a good week ahead, and I’ll hopefully see you next time!

As always, I’ll never expect anything for what I do here but if you’d like to buy me a Ko-fi and help towards increasingly expensive hosting and storage costs then it will always be really appreciated! And be sure to follow me on Instagram, X (formerly Twitter) or Threads for my latest retro-gaming nonsense, and also on Bluesky, which is under my regular name but most of it ends up there too if you prefer!