Last Retro Game You Finished And Your Thoughts

I'm gonna start introducing myself as a renegade cyborg and fabulous babe.

"Cyborgs ain't ladies"

J K Rowling

I know it's far from the worst thing about that advert, but:

Martha Splatterhead
Berzerker Bullova and Blitz

Splatterhead vs. Bullova

Strewth.

Looks, sounds and smells like Data East Arcade 1.





Of course BurgerTime is on here. I’ve read that it was a really big deal back when it came out, but I’m not about to get nostalgic for a game that I wasn’t alive for. These days, I get a notion to try it again a couple of times a year, just for a quick fifteen minute blast. While it’s not a game I feel I need to get good at or a game I want to sink a lot of time into, I enjoy it well enough whenever I play it.  

Gate of Doom and Wizard Fire are part of the same series, they’re otherwise known as Dark Seal and Dark Seal 2. I finished them both, but I really don’t have a lot to say about them. The RPG mechanics don’t really grab my attention, and the fantasy motif doesn’t really capture my imagination either. They’re clearly well-crafted games, but they’re nothing I got excited about.  

I can’t make my mind up about Lock ‘n’ Chase. It’s not the Pac-Man rip-off that it first looks like, instead playing like a clever game of cat and mouse inside a well-secured bank. Slammable doors and electrified barriers add a bit of strategy and thought to it. And it’s fairly addictive, it’s got that going for it too. Yet it’s from 1981, a very simple time in gaming and so it’s a very simple game. It’s hard to feel too arsed about it either way to be honest. You’d probably need to have some nostalgia for it.  

You’ll maybe better recognise Chain Reaction as Magical Drop, the stacking puzzle game that mixes aspects of Tetris, Puyo Puyo and Bust-A-Move together. I think there’s better sequels than this original one, they obviously refined it with Magical Drop II and III. At its core though, it’s still an very fine game.

You can see for yourself on G-Mode’s Revival Project website that they’re willing to license all the old Data East games that they now own. There’s even a list with examples. From all that, why Blaze Entertainment would choose to license a vertical shooter that’s as boring as Darwin 4078, I just can’t explain. The name comes from an evolutionary mechanic that powers up your spaceship, which in its defence is a fairly smart idea. It’s just executed in an exceptionally dull way, and contained within a painfully difficult game. A baffling inclusion and an all-round shite-a-thon.  

Do you remember Gearshifters, the car-orientated horizontally-scrolling shmup that came out for current and last-gen systems late last year? BreakThru is Gearshifter’s great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather. Not playing like something you’d expect from 1984, BreakThru is fast-paced, quite exciting and surprisingly dynamic. I enjoyed this, I’ll definitely play through it again in the future.  

I’ve always thought that Bad Dudes Vs. Dragon Ninja (aka the “are you a bad enough dude to save the President?” game) was really overrated, and not deserving of the cult classic status that it seems to have. It’s repetitive, it’s unimaginative and it’s unskilful. At least it’s short though.  

I’m not sure if and how they’re connected, but Sly Spy feels like a sequel to Bad Dudes Vs. Dragon Ninja. As shameless a James Bond rip-off as it is, the gameplay is nicely varied and the controls are reliably solid. Less 007 more 006 ¾, but it’s an all right playthrough.  

Lastly is Tumblepop, an entertaining single-screen platformer that has you touring around the world to suck up enemies with your vacuum. It’s not an especially deep game, but it’s perfect for pick-up-and-play. It’s my favourite thing on here, very good quality.  

I think Data East Arcade 1 is a decent compilation with a few highlights, but it plainly could have been better. Darwin 4078 is a characterless bore, and Chain Reaction has better sequels. I could have done without Bad Dudes, Gate of Doom and maybe even Lock ‘n’ Chase here as well. I just hope that there’s a second Data East Arcade cartridge on the horizon, with Dunk Dream ‘95, Boogie Wings, Bloody Wolf, Spinmaster, Joe & Mac and more of the legit belters that Data East produced. Data East were class, and this collection doesn’t meet it’s potential. 6/10.

From Barcelona, here's a big load of games I'd never heard of before in the form of Gaelco Arcade 1.





Alligator Hunt was a proper treat for me. It’s a really satisfying and addictive crosshair shooter that plays a bit like Wild Guns on the SNES. It’s one of the best games that I’ve discovered on Evercade, for sure.  

I like Biomechanical Toy a lot as well. This is an enjoyable run ‘n gun platformer, sort of playing and feeling like a cross between Metal Slug and the first Rayman. It’s nowhere near as polished as either of those, but it’s maybe just as surreal and creative.  

Glass is an alien shooter where you strip back layers of glass to reveal pictures underneath. The story goes that Blaze Entertainment had to censor lots of this for it’s re-release because it wasn’t only layers of glass that you stripped back: it was anime boys and girls too. Just naw. Anyhoo, Glass has got nice spritework and the controls are spot-on, it’s reasonably proficient in those senses. It’s probably the weakest game in this collection though; as action-packed as Glass is, the gameplay just isn’t very engrossing.  

Pretty much all of the marketing for this cartridge was focused on World Rally. I’d never heard of it before this collection was announced, but it’s supposedly quite a famous game in other parts of the world. I’m guessing that it was an inexpensive arcade cabinet for amusements and retailers to buy, I imagine that it was the type of thing that you could find just about anywhere across continental Europe and in the Americas. All the same, it’s a very good and highly accomplished time-attack rally racer that controls well and puts up a good arcade challenge.  

Snowboard Championship is essentially a snow-capped version of World Rally. It has a similar isometric perspective, though it’s got a much more confusing play style where all your control is inverted. I finished it eventually, but I never truly got used to the way it played. It looks hilariously awful for a game from 1997 as well. No wonder it was left in the arcade up until now. For its appearance alone it would have been buried at the bottom of the bargain bin if any publisher had attempted to slap it on a disc for a PlayStation release, and it would have been sure to get a 6% ‘shatformer’-style horsing for PlayStation Max magazine.  

Always one to lap up a retro platformer that I’ve never played, Thunder Hoop was the first thing I tried on my Evercade Vs when I got it last year. I’d describe it as difficult but fair. It’s unusual and distinctive too, evoking some faint memories of Europlatformers that you’ve maybe tried on an Amiga (or played later when they were sloppily ported to the Mega Drive and SNES). It’s not a long-lost classic and I think the emulation is a bit ropey, but getting past that Thunder Loop is pretty all right.  

This is a great cartridge, with three scrappy yet likeable games and another three that are legitimately very good. I would like to see Evercade compile more compilations like this, with unfamiliar games that are worth introducing to new audiences. It’s great news that they’re bringing out a second Gaelco collection soon, because this is one of the best Evercade collections so far. 8/10.

The Cappuccino Kid wrote:

Thunder Hoop

Maybe you wanna lay off the Greggs then.

You might have already done it but the Gremlin Collection, review for that?

Most of that Gremlin Collection is rubbish. There's two badly done console ports of ancient sim management games, a racer and a football game from the first generation of 3D gaming, an absolutely horseshite Game Boy puzzler about reflecting lasers and Zool, which manages to be the best thing on here despite being a pretty low-tier Mega Drive platformer. Have a 3/10 if you like.

oof

Form a queue for some Atari Arcade 1 chat.





Asteroids Deluxe was designed as a more challenging version of the original 1979 classic. I’d say that this has aged better than most of the games on here, it remains an engaging multi-directional shoot ‘em up when so many of its 21st century imitators simply aren’t.

Centipede and Millipede are two more arcade icons that still hold a decent amount of entertainment value. You defend your mushroom garden from insects and monsters in a shooting game that quickly gets fast and manic. Millipede adds a bit more variety, but I like them both.

I’ve never really got along with Missile Command, the counter-missile game where you defend your bases from waves of attacks. For me, it’s a totally blah game that I’ve struggled to type even two sentences about.

Liberator is yet another early ‘80s space shooter where you save the galaxy from invasion. In a turnaround of Missile Command, it’s you that attacks the planets to destroy bases and stop the enemy starships from taking off. It’s a pretty-looking game when it’s put next to the likes of Pong and Super Breakout, but I wasn’t buzzing to play more of it after I tried it for the first time. There’s a good chance that it wasn’t the first time here anyway - I’ve probably forgotten all about playing it on an older Atari compilation if I’m honest.

Pong is an action role-playing game developed by FromSoftware and directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki, and made in collaboration with fantasy novelist George R.R. Martin, who provided material for the game’s setting.

Journeying to the moon like Wallace and Gromit in A Grand Day Out, Lunar Lander is an outrageously annoying game to play. It might be unfair to judge a forty-three year old arcade game for its controls and physics, but they make Lunar Lander a load of old bollocks these days.

Crystal Castles is a kind-of 3D maze game where you control a gem-collecting teddy bear. I think there’s problems with the way that your character unpredictably moves, and that’s probably because it’s supposed to be controlled with a trackball and not a D-Pad. Enemies dropping out of nowhere and chasing you faster than you can outrun them is another of Crystal Castles issues too. That said, I think it’s still fairly good by the standards of 1983, being just about bearable with the Evercade’s save feature.

I read in Atari Arcade 1’s instruction booklet that 1976’s Night Driver is the world’s first 3D racing game, as well as the first one that let you have a first-person carseat view. Your car’s headlights illuminate a winding road, and your only goal is to stay on it for as long as you can without crashing. Over and done in about five minutes, racing games sure came a long way in the decade after Night Driver.

Super Breakout is a historically important block-breaking game that’s been mimicked thousands of times, but this version is mince. The paddle that you batter the trapped balls with is too small, and it’s too twitchy to control with the Evercade’s D-Pad. A bad fit for this hardware, it’s a ruined version of the game that undoubtedly should have been left off of here.

Canyon Bomber and Skydiver share many similarities, with near-identical control schemes and the same scoring mechanics. You don’t have to be too imaginative to think what their differences are, these are two games that are well-explained by their titles. They’re quite good in this context.

Wrapping up this collection is Warlords, which is essentially Pong crossed with Breakout. It’s an especially frantic multiplayer game that I first tried on the Atari Anthology on PlayStation 2. I’ve got good memories of playing it with pals, occasionally shunning even the likes of Burnout 3 Takedown and WWE Here Comes The Pain. Since those days I’ve said that Warlords is my favourite Atari coin-op game from this era, and my mind hasn’t changed.

There’s my thoughts on the thirteen games from Atari Arcade 1. The game selection is okay if a bit small compared to what everybody’s accustomed to from Atari compilations. I admire the purity of it in a way. Yet most of what’s here has been re-imagined, modernised and ultimately better refined a countless number of times over the last four decades. 4/10.

Ah - that's a shame really in this case. Because a lot of Atari's work was pioneering, it always seems mean to be negative, but it really was so early in the early days that they are really prototypes. I don't think I want to play any of those games, and I'll usually play any old shit!

Atari published PlayStation updates of Pong, Centipede, Breakout and the rest - I thought they were pretty smart, I'd much prefer playing them nowadays. There's the Recharged series that's recently come out on modern digital shops as well, I'll sooner get round to those than boot up this Evercade cartridge again.

Yeah, those mostly seem like museum pieces rather than entertainment.

I will say, I've had a fascination with Missile Command and its bleak depiction of the inevitable futility of any action in the face of nuclear war ever since seeing it in T2. But that doesn't mean it's fun to play, especially without a track ball.

I finished Hotel Dusk: Room 215 a while ago. It’s a fascinating game to have played for the first time in 2022. The storytelling captivated me and the characters immersed me too. I have to think that these two aspects of the game probably stand up as well today as they did when Hotel Dusk was new on the shelf fifteen years ago. But on the other hand, so much of the game’s cleverness and ingenuity has been lost to time. It uses the DS brilliantly…but in 2022, does that matter at all? It’s innovation that’s not innovative anymore. Quite the opposite, there’s many games that worked out how to do all of Hotel Dusk’s gimmickry in a more sophisticated and overall better way. Still, even on low-resolution technology such at the DS that film noir-esque stylisation and lighting still looks cool though.

Don’t get me wrong, I still think this is a really interesting game. I enjoyed it, and I’d recommend it (if everybody else on the planet hadn’t already played it, natch). But of course this would have been a much more impressive game back in 2007. Granted, there’s no chance I’d have had the perseverance to stick with Hotel Dusk for the 15-ish hours that I did now. My tastes in gaming weren’t mature or cultured enough back then to be dealing with a crime drama text adventure. Even nowadays though, my patience with it was wearing thin long before the story concluded. 15-ish hours is too long by half.

As much as I can appreciate it’s timeless style, I feel like I’ve missed out on something that was quite special, something that’s unfortunately not all that special anymore. I’m fifteen years too late with Hotel Dusk, aren’t I? I’m still looking forward to playing Cape West in the near future though. 7/10.

I played Hotel Dusk and was impressed back in the day, but I only actually completed both games in the past few years. I think they're still special, but it's mostly the aesthetics and the writing that you mentioned. Actually, in Cape West, whenever some gameplay popped up it actually felt kind of out-of-place. If these were made in the Indie space today, I think they wouldn't feel the need to shoehorn in DS puzzles here and there. Would they be better games for it? Probably, but they'd also lose a certain nostalgic charm.

I've forgotten the gameplay bits, and I think that's probably okay. That wasn't what any of us were, or are, really there for when it comes to Hotel Dusk. Glad you enjoyed it overall Cappa.

When it first came out I was a little more up for that stuff as Another Code had some really clever puzzles but I quickly accepted Hotel Dusk ain't about that.

Buskalilly wrote:

I played Hotel Dusk and was impressed back in the day, but I only actually completed both games in the past few years. I think they're still special, but it's mostly the aesthetics and the writing that you mentioned. Actually, in Cape West, whenever some gameplay popped up it actually felt kind of out-of-place. If these were made in the Indie space today, I think they wouldn't feel the need to shoehorn in DS puzzles here and there. Would they be better games for it? Probably, but they'd also lose a certain nostalgic charm.

I've not played Hotel Dusk (we exist), but I like the point about the gameplay getting in the way in Cape West. I just adored inhabiting that world because it was remarkably atmospheric and homely, something I'd not experienced since ol Shenners on t'Dreamcast. The 80s "Take On Me" aesthetic shoehorned into an American apartment block, funneled through the mind of a Japanese team is such a unique thing. Love it.

I've got Cape West kicking about somewhere and I've always meant to get around to it, potentially even playing it on the back of a long overdue Hotel Dusk replay. I've heard it's a good Christmas game, so maybe I'll give it a bash this winter if there's nothing else out to distract me.

Narrator's voice: 'There was something else to distract him.'

October means I’m back on the Halloween games. I’m talking about the proper scary stuff here, there’s no time for Silent Hill and Fatal Frame.



I’ve gone back twenty years with my playthrough of Disney’s Magical Mirror Starring Mickey House. Going back much further than that, this whole 2002 GameCube game is loosely based on a 1936 short called Thru The Mirror:



In a dream, Mickey Mouse accidentally sleepwalks through his magical mirror and into an alternate fantasy world, only to be trapped on the other side and in a mysterious mansion where everything’s come alive. To awaken from his nightmare and so he can return home, Mickey has to collect shards of the shattered magical mirror that have been broken by an evil-doing ghost. Mickey repairs the mirror by outsmarting the mansion’s ghosts and it’s antimorphic objects, taking back the pieces of smashed-up glass. This is accomplished via minigames and ‘pranks’, and everything you come across is usually interacted with via straightforward and uncomplicated point-and-click controls.

This was quite an attractive-looking game in the magazine screenshots, and it received plenty of attention seeing as it was a collaborative project between Disney as the licensee, Capcom as the developer and Nintendo as the publisher. Shigeru Miyamoto also has a producer’s credit for it too, and you know his name doesn’t get trotted out for every game. Understandably, I think that everybody expected good things from Disney’s Magical Mirror.

But lads: it’s rubbish. It’s an incredibly sluggish, unresponsive and uninvolving game with boring, long-winded cutscenes and set-pieces that take forever to play out. I spent less than three hours finishing the whole thing, but it felt like so much longer. You’d honestly be just as well fast-forwarding through a playthrough on YouTube – it would draw you in just as much as actually sitting with a GameCube in front of your TV would.

Granted, graphically the game has loads of colour and clarity, and it’s still presentable now. Yet that’s not at all the case in its gameplay. Even for a children’s game it’s really unimaginative stuff, and gives you virtually no direction as to what you’re supposed to do from moment to moment. Kids wouldn’t accept this these days. Neither would 33 year old grown men, but that’s beside the point…

Horrifying for all the wrong reasons, this must be one of the worst games that Disney, Capcom or Nintendo have ever put their name to. 3/10.

Yikes. I briefly turned to the Wikipedia page to see whether everywhere was as damning as Cappa. With a ranking of 50% on Metacritic, and the lack of direction slammed in the article itself, you'd have to say: almost. What a blunder.

Now to wait for the review for Hide & Sneak

I believe it was one of NGC's lowest ranked games, I played a little bit of this back in the day along with the also widely panned Universal Studios and they're both stinkers.