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 much going on outside of gaming this week – I managed to spend way too much money on a pretty rare old cult horror paperback from 1979 though! It’s called The Curse of Loch Ness by Peter Tremayne, where an expedition to hunt down the legendary monster unleashes an ancient, malevolent force tied to a dark family secret and a mysterious 18th-century journal… It’s as trashy as it sounds but all the same, his books always seem to go for a packet when they eventually turn up for sale. I’ve been after it for a very long time regardless, and I do like his stuff, so I’m sure I’ll get my money’s worth out of it! And likewise, hopefully the same for a couple of games I’ve picked up this week too…

The first of those is Area 51 on the original PlayStation, although much like Time Crisis on there a couple of months back (more here), this is a rail shooter that would be far better served by a light-gun controller, but what are you going to do nowadays? And it’s not like I haven’t been happily playing things these all wrong since Operation Wolf with a Kempston joystick on the ZX Spectrum anyway! This was originally an Atari arcade game from 1995 that got ported to PS1 (and Saturn) a year later, dropping you into the titular top‑secret military base that’s been overrun by aliens, zombies and other nasty stuff you need to blast your way through as part of a last‑ditch clean‑up operation. Or something like that! It’s obviously missing the spectacle of the arcade machine but it’s still a master-class in bad b-movie FMV in its own right, with some of the hammiest “acting” you’ve ever seen, and the digitised enemies and special effects are like nothing you’ve seen since! It’s six stages of mid-nineties nonsense at its finest, complete with unnecessary cleavage and a proper straight-to-video soundtrack too, and okay, it would undoubtedly play better with a Konami Justifier, but a regular controller is actually less of a compromise than I expected – the reticle moves smoothly, predictably and fast enough to keep up with what’s not the most frantic of these games in the most part. I’ve always found it loads of fun for all the reasons above though, and I’m glad to now have a copy of my own!  

I’ve been a big Tolkien fan since my early teens, but I’d never really come across this take on The Hobbit for Nintendo GameCube (and elsewhere) until more recently, so after keeping an eye on eBay for ages waiting for a copy to appear at a price I wanted to pay, one finally turned up and I grabbed it. First released in 2003 – which was circa Peter Jackson’s Return of the King – it’s based strictly on the book rather than any films for rights reasons, so from the outset, it’s a bit out of kilter with what you might expect from Middle‑Earth in the early‑2000s, but it’s exactly what you’d expect from an action‑platformer around then! Loads of box‑pushing, switch‑hitting, simplistic combat, collectibles and what barely qualifies as stealth, and while none of it is necessarily broken, it’s all so lightweight that you’re very quickly mostly still playing because of the the source material (as well as realising you’ve just spent more on it than it’s probably worth!) rather than it being especially worthwhile. No surprise either that the camera is just about adequate, the platforming never feels very precise, and the combat is little more than decoration, but the game keeps it coming regardless! Even so, the narration and music do a decent job of carrying the story, and the colourful cartoony take on it does give you something to distract you from the controls, but it’s still very much a very average licensed adaptation doing the bare minimum as usual.

One more thing for you, and something a bit more up to date, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine II, which I think arrived in 2024 and is currently on Xbox Game Pass. It picks up from the relatively recently modernised remaster or remake or whatever more than the very-2011 original I rented and enjoyed on PlayStation 3 at the time, with the same renewed ambition and heft, but now it’s on a bigger scale… Although that said, as much as the camera likes to sweep back and keep showing you impossible odds, with seemingly endless waves of enemies swarming battlements or pouring through gaps, in reality the actual third-person, sci-fi fantasy hack and slash-ish encounters that follow are far more manageable, which I suppose makes sense or otherwise there wouldn’t be much of a game left to play! One thing I’m less forgiving about is the mapping of the melee combat to a shoulder button – it wants to be rhythmic but that’s the wrong place to do it, giving every strike this slight resistance that adds half a beat to each press. Regardless though, just like the big guns you’ve also got loads of, the campaign is still a blast, and the escalation of the first game’s story is total nerd-service, which goes for the visuals too – especially the cutscenes that blend in and out of the ridiculous amount of action going on. Some of the special effects are a bit lightweight (possibly as a result of everything else on-screen) but the meaty battle sounds and perfectly dramatic soundtrack pick up any slack. Very enjoyable, didn’t outstay its welcome, and is exactly the reason I’m glad that Microsoft provided me with the incentive to get back into Game Pass again! 

I’ve also been back to Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly Remake on Xbox Series X to see if I can mop up stuff I missed first time around (more here), and it’s still such a rich and atmospheric J-horror concept, although it does seem far more self-contained second time around. I did grab a couple of other games nice and cheap this week too but I’ve barely touched them yet, so we’ll save them for next Sunday instead and say that’s about it from me. In case you missed it last Wednesday though, it was time for our regular journey back exactly 40 years for the very latest in video gaming with Retro Rewind: July 1986 in Computer & Video Games, straight from the pages of the original magazine! Do check that out, do have a good week ahead, and I’ll hopefully see you next time!

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