Innholdsfortegnelse for No. 247 i Retro Gamer

TESTAROSSA 1984 ■ Ferrari’s flagship Eighties car is perhaps its most famous model – and the one that Yu Suzuki chose for the starring role in his original Out Run (albeit without seeking a licence). The one in the game is a convertible variant which Ferrari never actually put into production. F40 1987 ■ On release this was Ferrari’s fastest-ever model, with the manufacturer asserting it was the world’s fastest sports car. As the most exciting new car on the block, it was chosen as a replacement for the Testarossa in Turbo OutRun, again without a licence secured. F50 1995 ■ Developed to celebrate Ferrari’s 50th anniversary, the successor to the F40 actually evolved from the Testarossa, making it the perfect vehicle to headline OutRun 2 in 2003. The car…

MOTORS MATTER ■ It might be tempting to buy the cheapest vehicle, but the savings aren’t worth it – it’s slow to get to incidents and can’t carry a lot of equipment. At a minimum, you want to purchase the hearse. TOP TRAPPING ■ It’s best to place your trap as high up the screen as possible when catching ghosts. It’s best to activate the beams when a ghost approaches your ’buster and flies lower on the screen. TAKE THE BAIT ■ Marshmallow Man attacks seriously affect your bank balance – you’ll lose $4,000 if he smashes a building but successfully baiting him earns you $2,000, so make sure you always have some. DRIVE SMARTER ■ As the Roamers get faster, camp out by the Zuul building. You won’t need…

Turbo was a different breed of tortoise. You’d catch him speeding across a series of platforms and bouncing on the heads of enemies one minute, then avoiding spikes, discovering hidden rooms and collecting an abundance of fruit the next. Not bad for a reptile with a reputation for living life in the slow lane and such platforming fun ensured that, when Hi-Tec released Turbo The Tortoise in 1992, the game sped to gamers’ hearts. Turbo ticked familiar boxes. Cute character: check; get from A to B: check; difficult boss: check. But it did it so very well, producing a game inspired by console titles that, from time to time, had neat ideas, such as being able to zoom around on a jetpack, create ad-hoc platforms by chucking rocks or accessing…

■ In 2022, Jarrod Bentley updated Turbo The Tortoise for the ZX Spectrum. The artist, who created most of the graphics for the original game, said the release marked the title’s 30th anniversary but, in early 2023, he made a few more tweaks, creating what has to be the ultimate Speccy version. The idea came after Jarrod helped Retro Gamer’s Martyn Carroll with the Tournament Arkanoid mod. Jarrod then decided to mod Thalamus’ Sanxion as a way of paying respect to Roger Kean and Oli Frey and thought it was a good time to revisit Turbo. “At first, I decided to tweak the backgrounds a bit then gave it a major overhaul,” Jarrod says. “I didn’t touch the sprites because they were Den’s. The way they were compressed in memory…

IN THE BEGINNING ■ Long before bullet hell, there were the very first 2D shooters. 1962’s Spacewar! wasn’t really a shmup. But it started the genre – and arguably the gaming form. EARLY ARCADE ICONS ■ After games spilled out from the lab to the arcade, it was giants like Computer Space, Space Invaders and Asteroids that asserted the shmup’s wild popularity. IN THE SCROLLS ■ By the turn of the Eighties, scrolling became a genre-stalwart via shmups like Caverns Of Mars. 1982’s Xevious, though, really set the template for all that would follow. TOAPLAN’S ERA ■ In 1984, Toaplan began a journey to take what was established by Xevious and its clones, and gradually up speed, bullet count and complexity. INTO THE CAVE ■ Toaplan’s last shmup Batsugun was…

» MANUFACTURER: Watara » YEAR: 1992 » COST: £39.99 (launch), £100+ (today, boxed), £65+ (today, unboxed) With the Game Boy, Nintendo had successfully proven that a technical disadvantage could be overcome by affordability, good marketing and quality software. Watara saw this and decided that it could potentially make some money if it undercut Nintendo with a handheld of its own, and promptly released the Supervision, a device that looked an awful lot like Nintendo’s machine with a bendy neck. Rather than marketing and distributing the machine itself, Watara partnered with various international distributors including Quickshot in the UK and Hartung in Germany. While Watara succeeded in making a cheaper machine than the Game Boy, Supervision games were generally of poor quality – indeed, many were produced by the Taiwanese developer…

» PC ENGINE » 1992 » INTER STATE/KANEKO I could never claim to be Retro Gamer’s resident shoot-’em-up fanatic when I’ve got Darran as a colleague, but I do have a real fondness for the genre, which was cultivated as I savoured the Dreamcast’s later import releases. Unfortunately, my friends didn’t share that passion. They were certainly curious as to what a late Dreamcast release might look like, but ended up being repelled by the difficulty of games like Ikaruga and Border Down. I think it’s a long-term problem for the genre, with even superficially inviting games like Fantasy Zone often proving to be too much for many players to handle. If you’ve ever struggled with the genre in that way, I’d suggest Star Parodier as a game that is…

GATHER INGREDIENTS ■ Your absolute first priority is to get spell ingredients for Heal and Water, then return to your tower and at least brew Heal and have it ready to use! Blade Warrior can be a challenging game so stocking up on vital ingredients will make your quest a whole lot easier. ARCHWAY REPRIEVE ■ On the Amiga, most ground-based monsters move at the same speed as you, which means they can be very hard to shake. Keep ahead of the monsters and reach an open stone archway to escape down a different path, giving you much needed temporary respite. RINSE AND REPEAT ■ Find a tree or statue that gives up sweat or tears (spell ingredients), strike them with your sword, take the ingredient and find the nearest…

DANDY BOB ■ Clockwork Knight’s opening boss is a freakish blue toddler dressed in a top hat and tails, but he’s not as challenging as he appears. Concentrate on avoiding Bob’s hat when it’s on the move, otherwise you can decimate his hit points without worrying about him retaliating. DOUBLE JETTER ■ Take care of the foot soldiers Double Jetter parachutes in before landing, then attack his upper body until he takes off. Repeat this a few times and he’s toast, but get your shots in quickly or else he fires boomerang missiles for you to contend with during your battles. CRAZY TV ■ The last boss in Clockwork Knight alternates between attacking with his arms and with his circuit board. For the former, stand in front of his screen,…

■ MOON PATROL I reverse-engineered the gameplay from the arcade original, wrote a multiplane scrolling game engine, drew all the art and designed the sound effects. ■ CALIFORNIA GAMES The germ of the idea came from my wife, Candi, and in an epiphany, I sketched it all out in my head. Epyx instantly green-lighted it and gave me a big team, eager to work on it. ■ DIABLO II I recruited and hired most of the developers, wrote most of the NPC quest dialogue, created the ‘!’ NPC marker and managed localisation and voice casting.…

» PLAYSTATION 2 » 2003 » UBISOFT MONTREAL A friend of mine recently uploaded an episode of G4’s show X-Play that she had appeared on in 2004, with the warning that it was not worth watching – a warning that I would soon regret ignoring. My breaking point came six minutes in when my friend was shouted down as she tried to propose that The Legend Of Zelda: The Wind Waker might have been worthwhile, after most of the guests and hosts had asserted that Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time was the only good game of 2003. Yes, the same year that Wario Ware Inc, F-Zero GX, Beyond Good & Evil and Max Payne 2 came out. Still, they weren’t wrong about Sands Of Time being good. It…

» System: Evercade » Buy it for: £17.99 » Buy it from: Online, retail The Amiga becomes the latest home computer to join the Evercade family and the decision to focus on the games of Team17 is a sound one. Omissions like Worms and Superfrog are weird but there’s no denying that the mix of games on offer is a good showcase of the developer. Body Blows and Full Contact haven’t aged too well, and we still can’t warm to Project X, but the likes of Qwak, ATR: All Terrain Racing and the three Alien Breed games are great fun and easily worth the price of entry – there’s even two okay sports games thrown in. Even games like Body Blows become more enjoyable when played on the VS and…

<INTRO> SEVERAL GAMES THIS MONTH ARE AVAILABLE AS A PHYSICAL RELEASE, WHICH TAKES TIME AND EFFORT. BRUXÓLICO COMES WITH A BOOK AND AUDIO FILES, AND OUR FEATURE TALKS TO PCNONO GAMES WHOSE SPECTRUM TAPES RAPIDLY SELL OUT. LOOKING FORWARD, NES FANS WILL WANT THE STORIED SWORD ON CARTRIDGE, AND MATT BENNION’S CRYPT OF DRACULA COULD ALSO GET A PHYSICAL RELEASE. SO PLAYERS WANTING MORE SHOULD SUPPORT THESE EFFORTS AND BUY THEM – PHYSICALLY OR DIGITALLY. </INTRO> <BODY> “We could say that we have been related to videogames all our lives,” Antonio Róman tells us, going on to say he started typing BASIC code from magazines into his Spectrum at the age of six with his thirteen-year-old brother. “In 2015 we started making games for PC and Android. We always wanted…

<iNFO FROM: AMERICA WEBSITE: BIT.LY/STORIEDSWORD-NES FORMAT: NES PREVIOUS GAME: SUPER HOMEBREW WAR (NES) WORKING ON: THE STORIED SWORD (NES) /> WHAT INSPIRED YOUR NEW GAME? <Nathan: The goal was to capture the fast-paced frustrating challenge of Ninja Gaiden but with elements of Sunsoft’s Batman mixed in (like using wall-jump physics and specific enemy mechanics)./> <Jordan: I’ve been bingeing classic swashbuckling and high-fantasy films looking for inspiration for the artwork. Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood, The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad, Jason And The Argonauts and Jack The Giant Killer have been playing on repeat. The result is a fun mish-mash of influences./> WHAT ARE THE UNIQUE FEATURES? <Nathan: Jordan had an idea early on to make our enemies more interesting: instead of them all being faceless clones, we have different heads that…

RETRO HUNTERS Dear Retro Gamer, We love travelling around the UK to find independent retro shops and, like Henry Petrie in issue 246’s Mailbag section, we also would love to see a feature about independent retro shops across the UK. We’ve visited Retro World in Derby and would like to put forward another two stores that are local to us in Essex for a future article hopefully. Both stores are amazing and have a wide range of stock. They are both run by genuinely nice guys. One is The Retro Hunter, 1172 London Road, Leigh On Sea, Essex; run by Ally. The other is Miso Retro Games, Unit 54 at The Village at Barleylands, Barleylands Road; run by Luke. We can’t praise the stores and them enough, so it is…

» XBOX 360 » 2008 » DICE We first covered Mirror’s Edge as a Future Classic all the way back in issue 109 and I’m delighted to say it still holds up today. I’d always been fascinated by DICE’s game when it was first announced, because there simply wasn’t anything like it at the time of its release. Although it utilised a first-person viewpoint like so many of DICE’s other games, the aim of Mirror’s Edge was to avoid combat rather than actively seek it out. It turns out that avoidance is surprisingly easy because your avatar Faith Connors is a Runner, effectively a skilled parkour courier who is surprisingly adept at delivering sensitive information. She soon finds herself in trouble when her sister is framed for murder and Faith…

What are Golden Axe’s influences? “My father loved action movies, and I used to watch them with him. During the development of Golden Axe, I rented a video of Conan [The Barbarian] and watched it until the tape was worn… Of course, I was also inspired by The Lord Of The Rings. I bought many illustration works based on Middle-earth, and used them as reference materials. If I could, I would vote Gandalf for president!” Why are there three playable characters but only support for two players? “We did consider that plan, but we gave up due to the hardware specs. The maximum number of characters, including the enemies that we could display and operate at once, was six. But by the time we created the next title, Revenge Of…

OCTOBER 2006 – With the holidays and two new consoles fast approaching, a glut of quality software threatens to keep players glued to their hardware. Nick Thorpe braves another strange journey to bring you yesterday’s hottest stories Tech giant Google announced its intention to buy YouTube on 10 October, in a deal worth $1.65 billion. According to Comscore the video-sharing platform had experienced explosive growth, going from 2.8 million unique users per month to 72 million in the space of a year. Both companies also announced deals with Universal Music Group, Sony BMG and Warner Music to host videos. Farepak collapsed into administration on 13 October, meaning that 116,400 customers would not receive the Christmas hampers they had been paying for throughout the year. Companies including Tesco, BSkyB, Sainsbury’s and…

START PALM BEACH ■ As in the original Out Run, your journey begins on a sun-kissed coast under brilliant blue skies. This course provides a gentle introduction to the game as you wind through the resort, with the only challenge being the tricky chicane before the split. SECOND COLUMN - A DEEP LAKE ■ This fast, generally flat course spans the lake on a series of four-lane bridges. None of the corners are taxing which means you can take them flat out without drifting, although precise positioning is required to navigate the final left-hander. SECOND COLUMN- B ALPINE ■ We’re up in the Alps so you can expect stunning views as you race up and over the range. Two curved tunnels carve a route into the side of the mountain…

Exclusive Subscriber Cover Every Issue! Great Reasons to subscribe… • Stunning exclusive subscriber-only covers• You’ll never miss an issue!• It’s delivered direct to your door• Brilliant value – save money on the cover price PRINT £27.99 every 6 months Get 13 Issues of Retro Gamer over 12 Months in Print, straight to your door and save 20% PRINT + DIGITAL £35.49 every 6 months 13 issues of Retro Gamer over 12 months in print and digital, saving 47% DIGITAL £19.50 every 6 months 13 issues of Retro Gamer over 12 Months in digital, and save 25% *(gifts not included with digital subscriptions) TERMS & CONDITIONS Offer open to new UK subscribers only. Pricing is guaranteed for the first 12 months and we will notify you in advance of any price changes. Please…

ZX SPECTRUM ■ As you’d expect, the Speccy version is the least colourful of the three versions but detailed backgrounds, smooth parallax scrolling and clearly drawn sprites more than make up for that. The game progresses at a perfect pace – neither too fast nor too slow – allowing players to tackle enemies, navigate platforms, puzzles and battle bosses without feeling frustrated or overwhelmed. The big let down is a lack of music, an issue suffered by the CPC version too. AMSTRAD CPC ■ The CPC version is, by far, the most colourful of the three and that really helps to distinguish the six time zones which make up the game. There’s a real cartoon-like feel to both Turbo and the enemy characters and, while they can all appear a…

COOL SPOT ■ This was actually the third game starring the 7-Up mascot, but the strength of the David Perry platform game template ensured that it was the most memorable. Interestingly, it dropped the soft drink branding in Europe to protect Fido Dido’s status as the local mascot – and his games got cancelled. MCDONALD’S TREASURE LAND ADVENTURE ■ Unlike the other games based on burger chains shown here, this one had Treasure on development duties. Developed alongside Gunstar Heroes and released in 1993, it’s not up there with the studio’s best but as far as licensed Mega Drive platformers go, it’s one of the better choices available. PEPSIMAN ■ After a cameo in the Saturn version of Fighting Vipers, the freakishly faceless Japanese Pepsi mascot bagged his own PlayStation…

■ In what was probably the closest thing to Twitch that existed at the time, anyone up early enough on a Saturday morning in 1991 could watch live as call-in viewers attempted to top the Magic Pockets high-score board. This was a regular segment of the children’s show Motormouth, which used a preview level of the game hastily put together by Sean Griffiths especially for the programme. The Bitmap Kid was renamed Mighty Mo for the show, and as the presenter Andy Crane explained to audiences, “Mighty Mo lives in the Motormouth dungeon and with your help on the phone, Mighty Mo makes his way through the Motormouth dungeon, zapping the bad guys and eating the sweets to accumulate points.” Callers could make their moves by shouting “jump”, “zap” or…

Jason Kingsley’s first encounter with computers was at school in Leicestershire in the Seventies. “It was a huge industrial-looking computer, programmed using punched tape and it sat in a corner classroom,” says Jason. “You could take programs on rolled-up tape in your blazer pocket, and the little punched holes were much sought after as kids could scatter them around the school!” The Kingsley family’s first home computer was built by Jason’s younger brother Chris. “Chris built an Edukit, which had something like 256 bytes of memory. He soldered it all together and got it working, but we didn’t really do much with it.” Their first ready-made home computer was a Commodore PET, followed later by an Atari 800, which was their first dedicated gaming machine. Jason played a number of…

■ Soon after Blade Warrior had been signed, Image Works approached Simon Bisley to produce the fantastic box artwork, and his wonderful painting featured on the packaging and advertising for the game. Simon went on to become a hugely successful and prolific artist, including entering the comic world of 2000 AD where he produced iconic art for ABC Warriors, Slaine and Judge Dredd. Ironically, Jason Kingsley’s Rebellion became 2000 AD’s publisher in 2000, and the 2000 AD links don’t stop there either. Mirrorsoft was based in an office building in South London called Irwin House, at 118 Southwark Street. The building is long since demolished, but before Mirrorsoft moved in, the very same building had been home to 2000 AD’s editorial team in the mid-Eighties when it was part of…

The growing pains of the games industry as it transitioned from a 2D medium to a 3D one are well documented. Sega’s Saturn was at the heart of this story, and designer Kats Sato’s early 2D/3D Saturn title Clockwork Knight reflected these times. Arguably, everything changed when Sega received word of the impressive 3D tech powering Sony’s forthcoming PlayStation. 3D Saturn games then suddenly became Sega’s top priority, as the designer of Clockwork Knight remembers. “We had heard a rumour that the PlayStation could display a lot of polygons, but we couldn’t believe it, because technically that was quite difficult to do,” Sato observes. “Our hardware architect hadn’t designed the Saturn like that, because Sega had a history of making games with big sprites and background images. However, the Saturn…

BAKU BAKU ANIMAL ■ A clever twist on Tetris, Baku Baku Animal has you arranging falling animal blocks next to blocks of their favourite food, which they eat and then disappear. A second player or the CPU does likewise, and whoever keeps their side of the screen clear longest wins the round. SONIC R ■ Although a racing game, Sonic R is just as much about exploration and collection as it is about first place finishes on twisted tracks. Hidden areas and multiple paths through courses allow you to shave seconds off lap times, and they give you places to look for pick-ups. MANX TT SUPERBIKE ■ It’s testament to how closely Manx TT SuperBike channels the sport it’s based on that it plays so differently from other racers. There’s…

Sony went back to basics after unveiling an ill-received prototype controller at E3 2005, reverting to the familiar DualShock body for its standard PlayStation 3 pad. A new Home button sat in the centre of the device, the L2 and R2 buttons were converted into analogue triggers and the controller had motion-sensing capabilities from which it derived its name. It was the first wireless controller to be included as standard with a PlayStation system, using Bluetooth technology for connection, and featured a rechargeable battery that could be charged with a Mini-USB cable. For all its new features, Sony controversially omitted rumble from the Sixaxis, claiming that “vibration itself interferes with the information detected by the sensor”. Industry figures noted that Sony had recently lost a $90 million patent infringement lawsuit…

It’s funny to think that for all of the success the Zelda series has had, very few of its games have been direct sequels. The story often starts afresh with a new Link and a new Zelda, and even in games like Majora’s Mask where it doesn’t, there’s a major change of setting. But The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom very directly builds on Breath Of The Wild, starting the story with Link fully powered and exploring beneath Hyrule Castle with Zelda – an expedition that naturally goes awry, leaving Link weakened and devoid of equipment. Those who didn’t like the open-world Zelda formula in Breath Of The Wild won’t like it here – it takes that game’s map as a basis for its own, and features many of…

» System: PS4 (version tested), Switch, PC » Buy it for: £12.99 » Buy it from: Online, retail Nuclear Blaze casts you as a firefighter exploring an abandoned nuclear facility, trying to keep fires under control while also investigating just what happened there. The game has been a real pleasant surprise – it controls nicely, the action is very well paced and the way that fires spread leads to situations of real urgency. There’s a nice style to the pixel art, which isn’t obviously trying to imitate any specific era, and the soundtrack fits the atmosphere extremely well. The only small knock against it is that it’s not tremendously long, as it can be beaten in an evening, but it’s very good fun while it lasts. >> Score 80%…

ADVENTURES CONTINUE <Inspired by Adventures Of Lolo (NES), this block-pushing puzzler entered ZXDev 2021 and features a brilliant rendition of Daft Punk’s Around The World./> ZOOMING SECRETARY <A clever demake of the Russian Mega Drive homebrew title also for ZXDev 2021. Rush around the office answering phones and dodging dodgy managers…/> TINY CRATE <With the first few levels acting as a tutorial, this action puzzler sees you throwing crates to climb around and escape the building site./> PAINTBALL 2048 <Two players must capture the flag and fight off invading forces in this Robotron:2084-style game. A solo player must survive against hordes of enemies./> TRASHMAN CRISIS TIME <Drawing on the Malcolm Evans classic Trashman, Andrés the rubbish collector must earn extra money to survive during the economic crisis./>…

BRUXÓLICO <INFO FORMAT: ZX SPECTRUM CREDITS: AMAWEKS PRICE: $10 DIGITAL DOWNLOAD (INCLUDES PDF BOOK & AUDIO FILES), FREE DEMO AVAILABLE WEB: BIT.LY/BRUXOLICO-ZX/ > <BODY> After the brilliant TCQ (85%, RG238), this new game from Amaweks comes with a 40-page book and accompanying audio files (in English and Portuguese) to give the full narrative. Bruxólico’s inspiration comes from Portuguese folklore and the work of Franklin Cascaes, a Brazilian anthropologist who studied the culture of the Azores. From the depths of a bottomless well, the Ghost-Ox emerges. You control this supernatural creature, which is armed with a powerful kick and you must seek out hearts to replenish your vitality. Consuming papaya seeds gives you the ability to spit projectiles for a brief time, while collecting the Ghost-Ox Doll awards you with an extra…

Dear Retro Gamer, This isn’t my first letter, but it is my most sincere. Like many I’m sure, I re-read past issues on a daily basis and I came across Darran’s very honest, but humble approach on how gaming can help with mental health in issue 237. I could appreciate everything said and identified just as much. Something though, that I still curse to this day for many reasons, was my addiction to alcohol. Though I’m coming up to three years sober, from strength, focus, support and by applying the tools of SMART (Self Management And Recovery Training), I’m reminded often when reading past issues of your magazine of the many titles I sold to pay for my sickness. Games I will never be able to afford again. Saturn gems…

R-TYPE COMPLETE CD » The brilliant PC Engine conversion of R-Type had one flaw, at least in Japan – it was split across two HuCards. This CD-ROM version didn’t just unify the two halves of the game, but added a rather spiffy CD soundtrack and some brand-new ending scenes, complete with voice acting. Let’s take a look at one of them now, shall we? » You’ve managed to defeat the Bydo menace, and now it’s time to escape the rapidly disintegrating base. Pushing the R-9A Arrowhead to its absolute limit, it’s going incredibly fast – but maybe not fast enough. » Your compatriots can only watch from afar as the Bydo’s dark star begins to explode, as the effects of your battle with the final boss take their toll on…

Sony and Nintendo might have been preparing to unleash shiny new hardware, but the Xbox 360 was retaining player attention with games like Capcom’s Dead Rising, which offered a journalistic mystery to uncover and a mall full of zombies to slaughter. In a 9/10 review, games™ called it “one of the most ambitious, shocking and hilarious games to have ever been created”, while Official Xbox 360 Magazine gave the same score, saying that, “If George Romero ever decided to make a game of Dawn Of The Dead, this would be it.” Edge felt it was, “Thematically eccentric, mechanically shambolic and technically stunning,” giving it 8/10, and it also scored 4/5 in 360 and 9/10 in X-360. Also on the Xbox 360, open-world racer Test Drive Unlimited scored 7/10 in games™, 8/10…

» ATARI 2600 » 1984 » COLECO When I look at the wealth of home versions of arcade classics available today, many of which are practically indistinguishable from the originals, I can’t help but feel that we’ve been spoiled just a little. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not wishing away the work of companies like Hamster, M2 and Digital Eclipse – I just get a little sad when contemporary home conversions of games are dismissed by players. Case in point, I recently read a fairly scathing comment about Front Line for the Atari 2600, which dismissed it as a missed opportunity relative to the quality of the arcade original. Coleco’s conversion definitely lacks some major elements of Taito’s coin-op – you can’t throw grenades, for example. The level designs are…

What’s your opinion on Hiroshi Kawaguchi’s original compositions for Out Run? Hiro’s music is outstanding and iconic. I remember the first time I heard it as a kid. I was on a summer course in North Devon and found myself in the local arcade one afternoon. This was the first time I had ever seen Out Run. The music was the first thing I noticed about the game – the quality of the sound board was so much better than anything I’d heard at the time. And the music itself, wow! Hiro completely nailed the music. It was perfect in every way. What brief were you given for the ‘Euro Remixes’? I wasn’t really given a specific brief, other than to put my own take on the original tracks. So…

START SUNNY BEACH ■ Very similar to its counterpart Palm Beach, both in setting and how it eases you into the game. You don’t need to drift, but the wide coastal route with its sweeping turns provides ample opportunity to test out some sideways action. SECOND COLUMN - A BAY AREA ■ The stage begins with you crossing the Golden Gate Bridge – the perfect place to slipstream – then swings into a tricky uphill S-bend. Then it’s a fast dash down the city’s steep hills before a wide left-right turn leads to the checkpoint. SECOND COLUMN - B NATIONAL PARK ■ We’re in Yosemite for a breezy drive through a tree-lined valley. The first left-hander can be taken at full speed with careful positioning, but the two S-bends towards…

» COMMODORE 64 » 1993 » APEX COMPUTER PRODUCTIONS It’s a well-known fact that if you can hold on until the end of a console or computer’s death throes you’re likely to see some seriously impressive stuff from it. It makes sense after all because loyal developers to those machines will understand just what makes them tick and will be able to coax all sorts of magic out of them – just look at today’s homebrew scene if you needed further proof. Mayhem In Monsterland arrived on the C64 in 1993, an astonishing 11 years after the acclaimed machine made its debut. I wasn’t there for the cute dino’s arrival as I’d long moved onto consoles (the Saturn and PlayStation were just around the corner) but thanks to playing it…

WACKY RACES ■ Starring Dick Dastardly and Muttley, Wacky Races was a side-scrolling driving game/platformer which had you racing across five progressively tougher tracks knocking your rivals and obstacles out of the way while performing some heart-in-mouth leaps. Finish well and you’d go on a collecting spree. YOGI’S GREAT ESCAPE ■ Yogi was smarter than the average bear and he’d know better than to judge a game on its cutesy graphics alone. In this instance, however, he’d have enjoyed a great-looking platformer and had bags of fun escaping Jellystone Park, collecting items and tackling a heap of nasties. SCOOBY-DOO AND SCRAPPY-DOO ■ This magnificent game was arguably the best of the cartoon offerings published by Hi-Tec, standing up well against many full-price platformers. It married top-quality presentation with highly addictive…

AMIGA ■ Unsurprisingly given Amiga games were very much The Bitmap Brothers’ forte, Magic Pockets has the usual high-quality sheen you’d expect from the studio. Loading times are swift and the graphics, music and sound effects are sharp. Not bad at all for a single floppy disk. ATARI ST ■ It’s hard to distinguish between the Atari ST and Amiga versions with the sound turned down. Pump up the volume though and you’ll hear thinner sound effects with an Eighties arcade game vibe on the ST version. The Bitmap Kid’s digitised speech yelps of “yeah” and “oof” are also absent. ACORN ARCHIMEDES ■ The 32-bit Acorn Archimedes packed some powerful hardware to rival the Amiga and Atari ST, and this port made use of those capabilities to run a fast-performing…

■ You might think Magic Pockets would have been a neat fit with early Nineties consoles, with all its vibrant cartoon platforming appeal, but the game was only released for home computers. That would change in 2018 when the French indie publisher PixelHeart, which specialises in limited-edition retro games, developed and distributed a port of Magic Pockets for the Mega Drive, followed by one for the Dreamcast the following year. Company founder Philippe Nguyen explains that his motivation for bringing the game back stemmed from growing up playing the developer’s games on his Atari ST. “I’m a huge fan of The Bitmap Brothers. I had a great time with my friends on Speedball, I loved Cadaver, stressed on Xenon II and raged on Magic Pockets!” Philippe and his team would…

AMIGA ■ Smooth parallax scrolling for the foreground and background, sampled atmospheric sound effects and a bigger choice of colour palette for pathways meant that the Amiga version was always going to be the best overall experience for players. There were subtle differences between the versions, where the two programmers implemented the game in a slightly different way. The Amiga version was potentially slightly easier to play when it came to fighting the wandering monsters in the forest, but the foes took more hits to defeat. PC ■ With one main colour palette for all the regions of the land (even when playing the VGA version), and with nothing more than PC speaker beeps for spot sound effects, the IBM PC version didn’t look or sound as good as the…

THE BACKGROUND Considering it had focussed on original games for over two decades, Spider-Man must have felt like a huge departure for Insomniac Games. Famed for titles like Disruptor, Spyro The Dragon and the wildly popular Ratchet & Clank series, Insomniac was finishing up on its Xbox One exclusive Sunset Overdrive when work on Spider-Man began in earnest. Spawned from the same engine that had given birth to both Ratchet & Clank on PS4 and Sunset Overdrive, the Xbox One exclusive could almost be seen as a dry run for Insomniac’s later game, with Spider-Man effortlessly improving on the 2014 release in almost every way. Insomniac had worked with Sony many times in the past across all of its consoles, but the inclusion of Marvel added a further wrinkle for…

PERFECT PLATFORMING ■ Always look before you leap in Clockwork Knight. Often as not there are enemies or hazards lurking out of sight, so it pays to jump up or across to new areas with your weapon flailing. Keep an eye out for collectables too, as you can accidentally knock these off platforms. OBJECT LESSON ■ Clockwork Knight is crammed full of power-ups and pick-ups, and it’s well worth exploring out of the way areas for them. The most common are keys that restore energy and coins that you can gamble with. These are wagered in tricky shell games, where you can win extra lives. TREASURE HUNT ■ One of the fresh features in Clockwork Knight 2 is its playing card-based treasure hunt. There are four cards per level, and…

» NINTENDO 64 » 1998 » KONAMI COMPUTER ENTERTAINMENT OSAKA I generally have no interest in football and normally give any football game a wide berth. Sure, I’ve got a fairly recent edition of FIFA, but that’s generally so I have some common ground with the partners of Melanie’s friends when they pop over. The only football games I’ve ever been remotely interested in were Sensible World Of Soccer, the early editions of Ultimate Team (before EA turned it into a hideously cynical money grab) a few Winning Eleven games and Konami’s superb International Superstar Soccer ’98, or ISS ’98 as it’s affectionately known. Konami’s game felt like a revelation to me when I discovered it on Nintendo’s console. I’d obviously played various 3D football games before, normally when I…

What cherished games would you take to the island? A great idea for a game can hit you at any time. And for Matt Householder, it almost literally did. “It was a Saturday morning in the summer of 1986 and my wife, Candi, and I were walking to a coffee shop for breakfast,” recalls Matt, “when this kid on a skateboard rolls past us down the hill, making this horrible racket with the old hard wheels. My wife said, ‘You should do a game with skateboarding in it’ and I’m like, ‘Woah! You’re right! And we should have roller-skating and hacky sack and surfing… I think I designed the whole of California Games in the next 30 seconds.” Matt had always been open to inspiration from unexpected sources. After completing…

» System: Evercade » Buy it for: £17.99 » Buy it from: Online, retail Clearly designed with the EXP in mind, Toaplan Collection 2 has four of its seven games designed to work with that system’s Tate mode. It’s a great selection as well, with Twin Cobra, Fire Shark and Twin Hawk being brilliantly challenging shmups, while Rally Bike will have flown under the radar of many gamers. Hellfire is the sole horizontal blaster on offer, but it’s a superb one, while Wardner and Demon’s World are decent run-and-guns. Like Team17 Collection 1 the emulation is of a very high quality and there’s plenty of games to enjoy with a second player on the VS. It does suffer next to the Team17 cartridge due to a lack of variety, but…

<Amiga: The deadline for AmiGameJam Sword & Sorcery has been put back to 1 August. More info at bit.ly/amigamejam/> <Atari 2600: No programming knowledge is needed for Haroldo-OKs VCS Game Maker, which uses Batari Basic and Javascript to create a working ROM. Discover it at bit.ly/vcs-gamemaker/> <C64: AGPX and Phobos created the platformer News Stand. Give it a try by visiting bit.ly/newsstand-c64/> <Game Boy Color: Incube8 Games opened orders for Dango Dash as a physical cartridge; the platform game sees you take on a clan of ninjas. Visit bit.ly/dangodash now./> <Master System: Louis The Sega Nerd released the driving game Monaco Master, with a Game Gear version also available. Name your price and buy it from bit.ly/monacomaster/> <MSX2: Côté Gamers opened physical preorders for SAK: Stab And Kill, the excellent…

<BODY> “It started as a simple port of the ZX Spectrum game Tomb Of Dracula, which I played a lot as a kid,” explains Matt about his new game. “The engine takes inspiration from Shining In The Darkness and Doom; puzzle mechanics take inspiration from RPGs and Chip’s Challenge, while Castlevania and Resident Evil are an inspiration too.” Matt tells us Crypt Of Dracula is created with Visual Studio Code together with Stephane Dallongeville’s Sega Genesis Development Kit (SGDK). Currently, the dungeons are randomly generated, but Matt is thinking of switching to pre-generated levels. “I’d love to get a physical release sorted,” Matt tells us. “I’m self-funding most of the work myself now and these things take time, unfortunately.” The development team includes Daniel ‘108 Stars’ Horváth (Pier Solar) drawing…

We’ve spoken to many collectors in the past who have used spreadsheets as a way to track their collections, but Benjamin Wimmer has taken things one step further. “I wanted something visual that would allow me to compare covers and editions more easily,” he tells us. “With that in mind, I started by photographing and then scanning my boxes. As the number of photo albums grew, the idea of presenting them on a website emerged.” That collection can be found at bigboxcollection.com and it’s filled with incredible scans of Benjamin’s impressive big box collection, as well as the games he has picked up for Wii and Switch (the latter of which is all digital). As you might expect, keeping on top of such a project can be quite time consuming.…

How did Samba De Amigo come about? “Samba De Amigo was conceived in 1999. At that time Japan was experiencing the same kind of music game boom that [took] over Europe and America [in the late Noughties], but I think [Japanese rhythm-action games] were trying a bit too hard to appear cool and therefore were quite difficult to enjoy actually playing. Games are supposed to be fun, but those games were too difficult to approach – I remember thinking, ‘I really want to play music games that are just fun…’ So it was with that in mind – wanting to increase the fun quotient [of Japanese rhythm-action games] – that I produced the plans for Samba De Amigo.” Why insist on using maracas as the instrument players had to use?…

When did you first encounter Sega Rally, and what did you make of it? “Probably in an arcade in Weston-Super-Mare. For the time it was so realistic, the physics and the sensation that you got from the force feedback was amazing. You could almost feel the texture of the road surface and knew instinctively when you were about to slide out. I think that my friend and I spent a small fortune trying to best each other. We were hooked from the first play and could not stop until we mastered Lakeside.” Sega Rally’s deluxe cabinet incorporated a force feedback wheel and seat vibration. How important is this physical sensation to the overall experience? “I believe that it is vital. Rally is a visceral experience, it is all about feeling…