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. Although I’m not big on birthdays or anniversaries, I’ve now done 250 of these things, which is getting on for five years’ worth, and that got me thinking – I reckon it’s as good a time as any to change things up again. Over that period, I’ve tweaked the format more than once, adding bits, taking bits away, moving from more‑and‑shorter to less‑and‑longer (and occasionally back again), and throwing in the odd curveball like book reviews or a countdown of my favourite Kraftwerk albums! The thing is, I’ve been struggling to keep up lately, and I often find myself playing things for this feature rather than for enjoyment – which, around this time last year when I was looking at the frequency of my deep-dives, I said was going to be my priority. Oh yeah, I’ve also turned my attention back to that secret cryptozoology book I’ve been threatening for even longer than this has been going – before someone else nicks my idea – so for the time being at least, we’re going to leave it at #250. The rest carries on as normal though. And I’ll just move the reviews of new releases I’d usually cover here into standalone Spotlight Review slots instead, while the older stuff I continue to pick up will go into my seasonal pickup review features (more on those below), so no big deal. Just means I can finally play Resident Evil 4 back-to-back for a whole month if I want to again, and you won’t have to hear about it! Hope that makes sense, and with that, for the last time in this current guise, let’s jump to the games I’ve been playing.

I’ll start with a game I’ve been meaning to give a go here for ages… Actually, I’ve been meaning to play Kennedy Approach since I first saw its wonderfully mid‑eighties adverts in Computer & Video Games magazine, with their stark air‑traffic‑control tension and hints of cold‑war‑era drama! For whatever reason though, I’ve only just got around to it now, and it’s been a real surprise because while it looks like the kind of stuffy simulation you’d expect to find buried in the text-only nerd-verts you also got back then instead, it’s actually this gripping, minimalist panic inducer that nothing else could have pulled off better than the Commodore 64 in 1985! You’re sat in front of a radar screen, managing incoming and outgoing flights across various US airports, issuing altitude changes and runway assignments, and the whole thing plays out with this almost hypnotic rhythm where you’re calmly lining up approaches one minute and then suddenly juggling half a dozen blips that all want to land at once, and it becomes this frantic mess of vectors, clearances and near‑misses that’s far more exciting than it has any right to be! So much atmosphere from so little too – sparse visuals and primitively perfect spoken instructions, and likewise, the way the tension ramps up purely through timing rather than any spectacle. And even though it’s obviously very limited by modern standards (assuming such things still exist), I love how it strips the whole concept down to its essentials and still manages to get your blood pumping. The ads got me in the end then… Good game! 

As instinctive as it is to describe Radar Lock on the Atari 2600 as some kind of proto-arcade dogfighter, it actually came out two years after Sega’s Afterburner! As is the case with a lot of these very late releases on there though, this one from 1989 is a bit of a miracle regardless, which is no surprise when you consider it’s by Doug Neubauer, the genius behind the astounding Star Raiders (astoundingly released on Atari 8-bit machines a whole decade before this), and its spiritual successor and best game on the 2600 (in my humble opinion), Solaris! Plenty of both of their DNA here too, pushing the system to the limit, which my new (old) boxed copy now allows me to experience in all its original glory! From the second you launch into the sky, from your from-behind but cockpit-style 3D view with instruments below it’s surprisingly intense, as you juggle throttle, weapon selection (on a separate joystick), target tracking and fuel management in a far more ambitious way than in most shooters on here, and then you’re weaving through waves of different enemies over five different mission types, lining up said radar locks or peeling away to desperately hook-up with your refuelling plane before you run out. Obviously, we’re still talking Atari 2600, so everything is flickery and a bit abstracted (including the sound effects), but it’s detailed and colourful, the sense of speed is fantastic, the controls are responsive once you get into their groove, and the whole thing just has this fantastic confidence about it. Very impressive technical showpiece indeed, but it’s also a lot more besides!

That extra joystick I needed to play Radar Lock just now was in the same box as some Atari ST stuff, and one thing led to another, and suddenly it was all set up on my desk again, and I’ve  been having a gloriously stylish, gloriously unfair old time with Overlander ever since! It’s a post‑apocalyptic combat‑racer from Elite in 1988 that I’m sure was the first thing I bought for the ST after the copy of Star Wars I got with it, and I’d still rather play over RoadBlasters or Chase H.Q. And that iconic loading screen (pictured above), oozing Miami Vice meets Mad Max, and the pounding Peter Gunn‑tinged title tune, and those unforgettable desert‑sunset gradients (pictured at the top of the page) that sold me on the game long before I’d ever played it… It’s still as brutal as ever though, with exploding motorbikes materialising out of nowhere, gun emplacements hidden in dips, random trees jutting into the road, and collision detection that’s either your best friend or your worst enemy depending on the current frame! But once you’re hammering along those fast, smooth, undulating freeways, juggling fuel, cargo choices and whatever weapons you managed to afford, it becomes this frantic rush that feels more arcade-like than most actual arcade conversions on the system, especially with that QuickShot II on the case! It might never have been perfect but it’s still got more than enough going for it that it never needed to be.

We’ll go out on a high with a quick mention that after all these years, I got to the World Championship game in Neo Geo Baseball Stars 2 (on Evercade) and finally won it! I know I’ve said it a dozen times before, but SNK’s gloriously exaggerated, fast‑paced arcade take on the sport really is the perfect antidote for anyone who thinks baseball is slow or overly obsessed with stats! Its vibrant cartoon visuals, wild animations, booming sound and frantic gameplay make it one of the most energetic and accessible baseball games ever made, far removed from any kind of stuffy old simulation (or even worse, modern TV-sim). Even for those of us in the UK who have barely ever touched a baseball game, it’s hard not to be won over by how much sheer fun this one throws at you.

That’s me done for this week, and this feature as it currently exists, but as said at the start, not so much the end of an era as the beginning of yet another chapter, with the first of those new Spotlight Reviews right around the corner; I think I’m going to go same time and place as these for those too, so keep an eye out on Sundays. And as I also said, everything else continues as normal, so do check back again on Wednesday, which is well into August by my reckoning, making it time for my regular but newly renamed Summer ’26 Retro Haul Review Drop, covering all the retro games and related stuff I shouldn’t have been spending money on over the past three months! Finally, I know my social media links always appear at the end of everything I do, but they’re the best place to keep up to date, so do look me up wherever you are too. Thanks for sticking with me, and see you next time! 

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