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. That said, I don’t have a huge amount for you this time – I’ve been on my travels since Tuesday, landing in a very hot Nashville, Tennessee, USA, then heading across Kentucky to where our (college-athlete) son’s now moved in, done his medicals and already started pre-season training with his new team. Very impressive set up from what I’ve seen, nice city, and once we’d spent a fortune on stuff he needs and I’d more or less finished driving him around, I had good few days for some bourbon and bluegrass tourism, and (in the absence of the wife this time) a bit of nerd-shopping too! I did get into a bit of gaming (and related stuff) before I left home though, so here’s a quick rundown…

I decided The [Atari] 400 Mini needed a bit of love after spotting it looking forlorn in the cupboard the other day, and there’s no greater love of mine on there than Star Raiders! It will always be outrageously ahead of its time – the immersion of its cockpit views, the tension of juggling shields, scanners, energy, hyperwarps and damage control, the way the galaxy moves in real time around you as Zylon forces converge on your star-bases, and its totally absorbing mix of strategy, simulation and dogfighting. It’s all so primitive on the surface too – white dots on black, shrill beeps, a few abstract shapes – but it creates such a sense of being there that’s still more convincing than games with a thousand times the horsepower, and once you’re wrestling the stick to line up a shot while alarms blare and your energy drips away, you realise you’re playing something that had absolutely no right to exist in 1979! The action swings between cat and mouse skirmishes and desperate chases across a sector; the galaxy map becomes this emergent risk and priority puzzle; and every successful dock, every last‑second starbase save, and every narrow escape into hyperspace just feel epic. And it really is, all the way from an era when most of us were still amazed by Pong clones!

Regular readers of my Retro Rewind features will know that the pretty extensive collection of Computer & Video Games magazine we look at every month spans from not long after it started in the early eighties to around the middle of 1992, then from there, I’ve got bits and pieces but coverage is pretty spotty to say the least. I do pick up the odd copy as and when they come along and the price is right though, and that was the case with the May 1993 issue recently, so I thought it would make a nice change to throw a quick look at that in here too… And what a time to be alive! In the news, the Mega-CD launches in the UK, although the regular Mega Drive still has this month’s best reviewed game, Flashback, scoring 94% and being described as “graphically almost perfect” with “the best animation ever seen in a computer game.” Nice version of Fatal Fury on there too. The classic Star Wars dog-fighter X-Wing is the headline act on PC, where Terminator 2029 also does alright for itself – bit of an obscurity nowadays but a bit like a reskinned Dungeon Master. The Terminator on SNES is a more traditional action-platformer but scores a lot lower for being just too hard; some similarly average-scoring big names elsewhere on that this month too, with the likes of Wing Commander and Batman Returns, while its Lethal Weapon tie-in just stinks! 

If you’re after something new on the Amiga, the choice is probably between Lemmings 2 and Desert Strike, but nice to see one-on-one fighter Body Blows scoring high too. Back on the Mega-CD, not off to a great start, with what’s now a bit of a cult classic piece of interactive manga (or “car version of Dragon’s Lair”), Road Avenger, scoring 64%, and all-time classic (whatever they say!) interactive b-movie Night Trap hardly doing justice to the controversy surrounding it in the wider world either! In the arcades, we’ve got brilliantly bonkers beat ‘em up Cadillacs and Dinosaurs scoring a lot higher, then there’s a Super Mario Kart guide, a SNES Super FX chip developer interview, and I was amazed to find the full Go! handheld magazine still attached in the middle of the Flashback poster on the middle pages (because I removed them from my own copies and they’re mostly long-since gone as a result). Really not a lot to get excited about in there though – the Game Boy take on classic Defender-a-like, Dropzone, scores 93%, Air Zonk on PC Engine GT (like anyone owned one of them!) scored 91%, then it’s diminishing returns from there, with stuff like Super Smash TV on the Game Gear, European Football on the Lynx, and some more very average tie-ins back on the Game Boy, such as Tom & Jerry and The Flintstones: King Rock Treasure Island. All the same, I love seeing all this stuff, and this hobby provides few greater pleasures for me than further expanding my C&VG collection out of one end or the other!

I did also play (and finish) Halo: Campaign Evolved on Xbox Series X. It’s the new remake or remaster or reimagining or whatever of the original Xbox launch title, Halo: Combat Evolved, from 2001, and it’s all very nice if that’s your thing, but as a predominantly PlayStation owner since long before then, I came to the series late and it’s never made much of an impression. I like the vibe in this though, the modern cutscenes look great (at least until they started not showing at all without a reboot), and the rest looks and sounds and moves and mostly controls fine, but there’s just not a lot to it, and I don’t find it terribly tactile either. And who thought those awful vehicle controls were still a good idea? Well, like the rest of the game, apparently most other people from what I’ve seen (and yes, I do know there’s settings you can change now) so what do I know? It’s alright for a few virtually mindless hours care of Game Pass, and I was playing solo on normal difficulty, if that does indeed make for a lesser experience. That’s really all I’ve got this week, but in case you missed it last Wednesday, we went on our regular journey back exactly 40 years for the very latest in video gaming with Retro Rewind: August 1986 in Computer & Video Games, straight from the pages of the original magazine, so do check that out. And all being well, I’ll be back home for the 250th of these things next Sunday, so hopefully see you then!

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