Indholdsfortegnelse for No. 243 i Retro Gamer

The Raiden series has been wowing gamers for generations and one of the most desirable games in the franchise has just made its return. Currently available in Japan for all contemporary consoles, Raiden III X Mikado Maniax will feature over 20 arranged background tracks from artists such as GoSatoBan, Yu Shimoda and Daisuke Matsumoto, as well as new game modes. The game was only originally ported to the PS2 and copies are now expensive, so this new version is welcome indeed. A UK release has been planned for later this year.…

» ZX SPECTRUM » 1984 » NEW GENERATION SOFTWARE During my 20s I applied for a job as a refuse collector, which involved a fair bit of driving. I didn’t get the job because I reversed the lorry I was driving around a corner and nearly hit a parked car, but I did enjoy the interview process. I remember being asked what previous experience I had and I cheekily replied that I had played a lot of Trashman on the Spectrum growing up, so I would be perfect. Luckily, the guy interviewing me knew the game and started to laugh, quickly telling me that the real thing wasn’t nearly as exciting, or dangerous. He probably had a point, because if I had to experience the crap that went on in…

To say that 1980 was a time of transition would be an understatement, as the gaming world was still adjusting to proper colour displays, cartridge-based games, computers in affluent homes and the first Game & Watches. One particular innovation that kicked the decade off with a bang was character, with Pac-Man and his ghostly pursuers making big waves simply for being something different to a car, tank or spaceship. Elsewhere, Cold War paranoia still had a firm grip on the minds of many, as demonstrated by Battlezone – the vector tank combat game that was reworked into The Bradley Trainer for the US army. Armor Attack was another vector game with a distinctive military theme. Those two could at least function as a power fantasy, which is more than could…

While this year is infamous for being the focus of a massive North American market recession that killed many consoles before their time, the cheap home computers that arrived in 1982 meant that things weren’t all doom and gloom. The ZX Spectrum provided a home for plenty of new games developed in the UK. Matthew Smith’s platformer Manic Miner captured the imaginations of many players, Ultimate made a name for itself with Jetpac and Atic Atac, and Deathchase was particularly thrilling. The Commodore 64 became popular internationally and had some superb games too. Beach Head allowed players to fight World War II battles on multiple fronts, Forbidden Forest gave players an early taste of horror and International Soccer was a strong representation of the beautiful game. Compilations like Cassette 50…

This was a year in which the Japanese consoles really delivered the goods. Konami moved its Goemon series from arcade to Famicom this year and Enix’s Dragon Quest set the template for Japanese RPGs of the future, but Nintendo’s focus was on the Famicom Disk System, with The Legend Of Zelda serving as the add-on’s flagship title. Later in the year, it offered platform games with increasingly elaborate structures. Metroid’s innovations are inescapable, and Castlevania’s accomplished horror action is famed for good reason. Not to be outdone, the Master System offered Alex Kidd In Miracle World, which added variety with shops and vehicles, as well as its unique rock-paper-scissors boss battles. Platform games also had a good year in the arcade – as well as Bubble Bobble, Wonder Boy brightened…

If you were a fan of beat-’em-ups, arcades at the end of the Eighties were the place to be. Whether you favoured Golden Axe’s fantasy theme and spectacular magic attacks, the four-player cartoon action of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or the more traditional urban combat of Final Fight, there was something for everyone. Elsewhere in the arcades, Strider’s acrobatic action and the driving games Super Monaco GP and Hard Drivin’ turned heads. Strategy games including North & South, SimCity and Populous were in vogue on the home computers, as were shoot-’em-ups like Battle Squadron and Xenon 2: Megablast. It was a good year for point-and-click adventures like Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade and The Colonel’s Bequest too. Meanwhile, games like Shadow Of The Beast and It Came From The…

» NES » 1989 » RARE Back when collecting older games was a much cheaper hobby than it is today, I used to enjoy picking up collections in bulk, and it’s easy to see why when I look back at an excellent NES collection I scooped up in 2007. It might as well have been a complete NES starter kit – an American top-loading NES, with plenty of system staples like the Mario series, Metroid, Contra, DuckTales and Ninja Gaiden. However, the main reason I came to enjoy buying in bulk was that I’d typically end up with games that I never would have sought out on their own, but ended up loving. In this collection, Cobra Triangle was the king of that category. The game puts you in charge…

MEGA DRIVE ■ With its cheerful music, colourful display and carefree style, Marko’s lights up the Sega Mega Drive – at least visually. Unfortunately, some fiddly control issues undermine the football-as-a-weapon mechanic in places, but it’s still a fun game with plenty of amusing variety. MEGA-CD ■ Hardly released and incredibly rare as a result, Domark handed conversion duties on the CD version of Marko’s to Interactive Studios. Vastly improved audio and amusing comic interludes aside, there’s very little difference in the actual gameplay. A shame. GAME GEAR ■ The view is inevitably even more zoomed-in on the Sega handheld, and the gameplay suffers as a result, not helped by the absolute age it takes for Marko’s ball to return. Graphically still impressive, but comfortably the poorest iteration of the…

■ Will Wright had always been fascinated by flight models and helicopters, so for his first game, he developed a shoot-’em-up with a helicopter. It was originally released in 1984 on Commodore 64, with a later conversion to the NES. Wright mentions having the time of his life designing the whole map (the nation of Bungeling) the player would fly around in, while being quite less interested in designing the action mechanics. Despite this, Raid featured many interesting mechanics for the time, especially in how the Bungeling’s war industry worked according to a hierarchy. If the player left the factories alone, they would slowly build a superweapon which, if complete, would spell game over. The player had to hurry in crippling their war industry (by bombing factories first), only then,…

Many boys grow up dreaming of joining the Royal Air Force and flying fighter jets over enemy territory. For Chris Lancaster, half of that was true. “My main interest growing up was electronics and I knew the RAF provided some of the best training for a career in electronics,” he explains, “I had absolutely no interest in aircraft at all! I joined in January 1977 and in 1980, I applied for a posting to Sealand, which nobody ever did because it was a maintenance unit and everyone wanted to work on aircraft. So I got it!” The base’s proximity to Liverpool, tied to his growing interest in the emerging world of home computers, led to him writing games for some of the major software houses of the day – and…

■ “He was the most untidy person I’ve ever met, apart from me,” grins Chris, when asked about his memories of Matthew Smith. “The first time I went to his house, this big old Victorian place, and saw his computer room… well, it was something else. It had this big fireplace and the mantelpiece was lined with tins of rice pudding with spoons sticking out the tops. He was chatty and friendly and we talked a lot about how he’d written Manic Miner. This was before I’d started on it. I mentioned some of the techniques I was going to use and he was really interested. He even said, ‘Ah I can use that and fit more levels in.’ This was when he was starting to think about Jet Set…

<Amiga AGA: Sonic Sloth Games released Turrican II AGA, ported from the MS-DOS version with new graphics and hidden secrets. It also supports The A500 Mini. Find it at sonicslothgames.itch.io/turrican2aga /> <Amstrad CPC: Inspired by the Locomalito game, 21 Bloques released Darkula64. Download it via bit.ly/darkula64 /> <Apple IIGS: Check out Brutal Deluxe Software’s Karate by visiting bit.ly/karate-gs /> <C16: Misfit’s latest is X-Massacre, where you shoot enemies and protect presents. Choose your own price and get it at misfit.itch.io/x-massacre /> <C64: Preorders for physical versions of Terrestrial (previewed in issue 241) are open at bit.ly/terrrestrial-c64 while the digital download is at psytronik.itch.io/terrestrial /> <Mega Drive: Final Fight MD got a playable demo. It’s available at bit.ly/ff-md-demo/> <MSX: The Retro Programmer is working on a conversion of the classic Deathchase. A…

DIB DIB DIB, DOB DOB DOB Hello Retro Gamer, I was just wondering if you could perhaps do a review on the wonderful (and strange) game called Planet Dob, released by Hudson Soft in 1999. It’s part 3D platformer, part point-and-click adventure and it just captures the essence of the whole ‘Y2K aesthetic’. The music is also lovely, made by the Japanese band Date Of Birth (perhaps that is why the main character is called Dob). It is pretty obscure since it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia article but it’s quite fun. John Johnathan What an interesting game, John. It feels like Planet Dob would be a good game to lead a Minority Report, especially since we’ve not done one for ages. Leave it with us and we’ll see what we…

One of the highlights of Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration was the resurrection of Akka Arrh by Digital Eclipse. It would appear that Atari isn’t done with its lost game as Jeff Minter has now placed his own unique spin on it. We had a chat with him to find out how it happened. So Jeff, how did you come to work on this new version of Akka Arrh? There had been talk with Atari about possibly doing some updated versions of things in their IP catalogue. I’d been interested in Akka Arrh since I first heard about it, and the whole story of the game ROMs being held secret by a collector and then ‘liberated’ so everyone could have a go. Were you able to play an original Akka…

If there is one thing that you can’t accuse Retro Gamer of, it is wallowing in nostalgia. Oh, alright then – we’re not exactly Luddites around here but as we’re sure you will all know, we are sometimes partial to expressing the notion that, just maybe, they don’t make them like they used to. But when it comes to the Eighties, doesn’t that actually seem like a fair thing to say? We’re not just waving the retro flag for the sake of it, gaming really was different back then. For a start, there was the rapid pace of technological change. We went from monochrome machines with a single kilobyte of memory at the start of the decade, to the growing acceptance of polygon-pushing powerhouses in arcades at the end. Anyone…

The popularity of shoot-’em-ups showed no sign of fading in 1981, as the genre continued to evolve. Defender introduced bi-directional scrolling stages that responded to your movement, Galaga’s clever enemies could steal your ships, and the varied sections of Gorf and Vanguard also made their mark on the genre, as did Atari’s Centipede. Tempest was a highly exciting new concept too, helped by its colour vector graphics and unusual tunnel format. But arcade maze games were the hot new trend in the wake of Pac-Man’s success. The likes of Mouse Trap and Lock ‘N’ Chase allowed you to reconfigure the maze as a means of defending yourself, while Crush Roller added complexity with underpass and overpass sections. Elsewhere in the world of coin-op games, Sega’s Turbo raced to the front of…

The proliferation and openness of home computers really bore fruit this year, as developers explored all kinds of delightfully unusual concepts and deep gameplay models. The size of games really opened up with big adventures like Impossible Mission, Elite and Jet Set Willy, and big stages in games like Boulder Dash. Characters like Jeff Minter – who else? – could give us the games with names like Revenge Of The Mutant Camels and Sheep In Space, which you just wouldn’t see on shelves today. We even ended up with actively political games like Wanted: Monty Mole, which touched on the controversial miners’ strike. You could even see these new design sensibilities in licensed games like Ghostbusters. What could have been a simple action game offered a variety of gameplay elements,…

Much of the hardware on the market was mature by 1987, meaning that for the most part the dominant theme of the year was making the most of that hardware – and this yielded some brilliant results. The Last Ninja was at once beautiful and expansive, Driller offered proper 3D in the home and Archer Maclean managed to squeeze a third combatant into IK+. Extreme sports also hit the scene, with titles like Skate Or Die and California Games, while budget releases like Feud and Dizzy continued to thrive. The same went for the NES, already four years old on a technical level but just arriving on UK shores. Nintendo’s machine benefitted from the star power of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!, as well as the first entry in Capcom’s long-running Mega Man…

C64 ■ A lively title tune introduces the C64 original, which then makes way for more subtle in-game music. Its skilfully animated fighters are nicely defined, and its four backdrops are beautifully rendered. Its hit detection is perfect, and it even has a bullfight bonus stage! ZX SPECTRUM ■ Its music is limited to beepy pre-bout jingles and it lacks the C64’s sampled battle cries. It also has monochrome combatants and less colourful backgrounds. But the Spectrum Exploding Fist plays well, and has all four of the original’s backdrops. There’s no bull, though. AMSTRAD CPC ■ As it uses the Amstrad’s 16-colour mode, the CPC Exploding Fist is as vibrant as the original, and it plays identically, apart for its lack of bull. Its second fighter has purple instead of…

Mark Greenshields was an experienced Commodore 64 programmer, having produced Split Personalities for Domark. He had also authored several programming books, and had written numerous other games, including Hades Nebula at Paranoid Software, which was one of the last games published by Nexus in late 1987. “After Paranoid, I went back to being a freelancer,” says Mark. “I stayed down south and lived in Croydon for a while, working for Probe, Quicksilva and a few others, then I got a call from Richard Naylor, who was at Cascade Games in Harrogate.” Mark and Richard’s paths had crossed a few years earlier when Richard was at Domark. “I was a self-taught programmer, learning Z80,” says Richard. “I heard Domark were looking for help to add French text to a game. I…

KIDS’ TV ■ Mostly through its dealings with Alternative Software, Enigma Variations produced a whole collection of budget games and educational titles based on kids’ TV shows, including The Wombles, Postman Pat, Sooty And Sweep, Thomas The Tank Engine, Super Ted and Count Duckula. SELF-PUBLISHING ■ Enigma Variations self-published a handful of games, buying licences itself for IPs including The Famous Five and Defenders Of The Earth. The latter was a TV cartoon series featuring, among other characters, Flash Gordon. The Famous Five was based on a popular Enid Blyton book. KICK OFF ■ Enigma Variations wrote the NES, Game Boy and SNES conversions of Kick Off/Super Kick Off for Anco and Imagineer, as well as the Commodore 64 conversion. Years later, Mark Greenshields bought the Kick Off IP and…

COLONY BOSS ■ This long-necked creepy crawly lunges continuously. When you destroy its head, it spits pulsating chunks of acid in your direction. HOW TO BEAT THEM: It’s easy. Stand dead centre and just keep shooting, casually moving to evade its attack. It’s trickier when it starts spitting, but just keep moving and firing. BEETLE XENO (ROUND 1) ■ This strange-looking beast scuttles around the screen, protected by a bunch of indestructible orbs that spin around it. It has no direct attack. HOW TO BEAT THEM: You can’t hurt it when the orbs are spinning, so wait until they gather up and get in as many shots as you can. Your evasion game needs to be A+. THE QUEEN (ROUND 1) ■ The Queen is static, like in the film, but she…

» MANUFACTURER: NEC » YEAR: 1989 » COST: $199.99 (launch), £200+ (today, boxed), £100+ (today, unboxed) When NEC adapted the PC Engine hardware for the North American console market in 1989, most observers expected the TurboGrafx-16 to quickly leapfrog the Genesis, as the company was an electronics giant and Sega had struggled with the Master System. Things didn’t quite go that way, though – the system didn’t have the head start that its Japanese counterpart had enjoyed over the Mega Drive in Japan, NEC’s staff weren’t experienced in the games business and third-party software support was hard to come by. One of the most heavily derided decisions NEC made was to redesign the hardware. The small form factor of the PC Engine, enabled by Hudson Soft’s elegant hardware design, was…

GAMEPLAY MECHANICS ■ Mechanically both games are remarkably similar, with Kid bouncing on the ball to reach higher platforms and eliminating enemies by kicking it into them. As with Marko’s, the ball control needs some work, and the Kid just about edges it thanks to a California Games-style minigame. LEVEL DESIGN ■ Initially comparable, with both games starting in contemporary town areas. However, Soccer Kid clearly has more debt to Sega’s Sonic The Hedgehog, with slopes and fantastical locations in its latter levels. It also includes end-of-level bosses and more varied backdrops. 2-0 to the Kid. GRAPHICS ■ While Soccer Kid’s visuals are as cute and friendly as Marko’s, it’s clear the attention to detail with the latter’s animation is far higher. True, there’s a lot more variety to Kid’s…

» DREAMCAST » 2001 » SEGA ROSSO I’ve written before about the time I used to spend wandering around the local sports centre after my karate classes finished. Beyond the arcade games I played and the occasional volleyball lesson, another thing I commonly did was watch people playing squash, mostly because the courts were so close to the dojo that the occasional loose ball flew in during lessons. Unfortunately, squash isn’t a sport with a particularly distinguished history of videogames, but Sega did use it as the basis for an interesting 3D Breakout variant. The goal of Cosmic Smash is quite simple – wallop that ball into the blocks at the far end of the court, and keep doing it until they’re all gone. There are occasionally unbreakable blocks that…

SIMTOWN ■ A simplified version of the classic SimCity game aimed at a younger audience. With a more kid-friendly interface and an overall lower difficulty, SimTown allows younger players to build their completely functional towns, with roads, residences and shops, while listening to the citizens’ advice. SIMGOLF ■ This was Maxis’ failed attempt at trying to create its own line of sport games. SimGolf lets you control the swing of the stroke while using only the mouse. It also features a comprehensive course editor which gives players the chance to create their very own holes. SIMEARTH ■ Expanding the SimCity idea to its natural limits, SimEarth puts the players in charge of the entire planet, guiding the inhabitants from being unicellular beings to travelling towards the stars. Interacting with the…

» System: PS5 (tested), PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Switch, PC » Buy it for: £15.99+ » Buy it from: Online, Strictly Limited Games The Breakers games are cult Neo Geo favourites, overshadowed by the system’s greatest fighting games but good enough to earn a following of their own. The emulation here is solid and plenty of features have been added – Training, Team Battle and Online Versus modes are all present, with dependable rollback netcode. The CRT filter is quite disappointing, but the ability to display move lists in the wallpaper is a really nice touch. It’s a stretch to call it a collection, as it comprises two games and Breakers Revenge is just an updated version of the original, but they have been handled with care and…

<INTRO> IT TAKES DEDICATION AND KNOWLEDGE TO BE A HOMEBREW PUBLISHER. ALLAN TURVEY LAUNCHED MIDNIGHT BREW GAMES (BIT.LY/MIDNIGHTBREW) WITH A SET OF FIVE SPECTRUM GAMES PREVIOUSLY UNAVAILABLE ON CASSETTE, EACH INDIVIDUALLY NUMBERED IN A PROTECTIVE SLIPCASE – ROUST, ASTEROIDS RX, CHEZ MAXINE, NIXY THE GLADE SPRITE, AND NIXY AND THE SEEDS OF DOOM. GOOD LUCK TO ALLAN AND THE TEAM, AND TO ALL THOSE STILL COMMITTED TO THESE CLASSIC MACHINES AS WE MOVE THROUGH 2023. </INTRO> <BODY> “I have promised my wife a little break now. This Lilly journey has been time-consuming,” Pål tells us. “While most of my friends had C64s, I had an MSX. My access to new games was not that great, so I started to look into programming. Around 2019 I discovered that the MSX scene…

<BODY> We’ve been following the development of this vertically scrolling shmup, and the result is a fun shooter with neat play mechanics. Shooting a chain of nine enemies releases a Power-Up (to increase shot power) or a Nova Bomb (dropped with N to wipe out all enemies on-screen). However, if you wait too long, or get hit, your chain resets to zero. There are five stages with a boss on each to defeat, and while the bosses are small they put up a tough fight. The end result is a solid little blaster.</BODY> SCORE: 79%…

Fans of Crash, Zzap!64 and other classic Newsfield magazines were dealt a cruel blow in January when they learned that Roger Kean had passed away after a long battle with MND (Motor Neurone Disease). Roger, alongside his partner Oliver Frey (who sadly passed away in August 2022) formed Newsfield Publications with Oliver’s brother, Franco in the early Eighties and quickly launched magazines like the aforementioned Crash and Zzap!64, creating an engaging, welcoming style that many other mags would emulate. Newsfield’s magazines were also notable for their young reviewers, many of which have gone on to form industry careers of their own. “Roger gave me my start in the games industry and magazine journalism – I have everything to thank him for after 35 years playing games for a living,” recalls…

In a column for Retro Gamer that I wrote years ago, I dissed the VIC-20. I did it for a laugh, thinking it would create a bit of back and forth and that most people agreed that the VIC was a bit rubbish. I might as well have done a whoopsie on a picture of The Queen. It kicked off. People wrote in, furious that I called a console that meant so much to them a ‘brick’. People tweeted abuse at me. I was genuinely surprised that anyone would take a throwaway comment like that so seriously. I shouldn’t have been. We are all very protective and passionate about our hobbies and if we see someone attacking our pastime, we take it very personally. Like I say, this was years…

Nintendo had finally confirmed Wii as the official name of the console hitherto known by the codename Revolution, with the company claiming that, “Wii sounds like ‘we’, which emphasises this console is for everyone.” Nintendo’s UK PR manager Rob Saunders was quoted as saying, “The names of our competitors indicate a beefed-up version of what they already offer. The name Wii demonstrates that the system is something totally new to the world of gaming.” Reactions were mixed to say the least. Official Nintendo Magazine was dutifully positive in calling it an “unusual name”, but NGC left subtlety at the door and noted that “it sounds like a bodily function”. More damningly, games™ described the announcement as “possibly the day that Nintendo threw the towel into the next-generation ring”. With monster…

This was the year that third-party publishers really made their mark on the console world, with a glut of games flooding the market. There were some great ones to be found, though – Activision’s contributions included Carol Shaw’s brilliant shooter River Raid, the biplane dodge-’em-up Barnstorming and the excellent Pitfall!, while Imagic gave us the innovative Intellivision game Microsurgeon and the smash hit shooter Demon Attack. Parker Brothers didn’t have those original concepts, but it had some real licensing might and brought games like Frogger and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back to market. Not to be outdone, the console manufacturers leaned heavily on licensed games to sell their machines. GCE’s newly released Vectrex offered the likes of Berzerk and Scramble, while the ColecoVision had a great launch on the…

If there’s one thing that people love, it’s a bit of novelty, and this turned out to be an excellent way to get people back into arcades. Hang-On gave players a full-body experience with a massive motorbike that had to be tilted for control, straddling the line between videogame and fairground ride. The racer’s success inspired plenty of similar games from many companies through the rest of the decade, including Sega’s own Space Harrier later in the year. Regular old games weren’t done though, as a number of genres were taken to new heights this year – or new heights of difficulty in the case of platform games, as Ghosts ‘N Goblins was tougher than a two-dollar steak. Gradius offered a novel power-up system and some fascinating shoot-’em-up stage design, while…

The moral authorities were sure to be out in force when they saw the kinds of games that started showing up in arcades in 1988. Namco’s Splatterhouse was a beat-’em-up love letter to the gory horror films that were so popular during the decade, while NARC went for the over-the-top action-movie route, justifying its bloodshed by casting the enemies as drug traffickers. Of course, the real thing wasn’t too far away as RoboCop was a hit in both the arcades and the home for Data East and Ocean Software. Even on the home computers, it was hard to avoid these themes – gore was also a key feature of the cult cyberpunk adventure Snatcher, the Japanese game that was arguably Hideo Kojima’s most famous work of the decade. Back here…

In 1984, Alfred Milgrom, the cofounder of Australian developer Beam Software, admitted to Your Computer magazine that his firm had a problem. Although its latest adventure games were the envy of its rivals, those competitors’ action games were technically far superior to Beam’s. But the solution to Alfred’s dilemma was already within his grasp, in that his C64 conversion specialist Gregg Barnett was keen to do something more original. Which makes sense, given that Gregg’s creative drive almost led to him making movies. While studying computer science at Melbourne University in 1983, Gregg had applied to the Australian Film And Television School. The school was a big deal in Australia at the time. Mel Gibson had gone there, as had many other famous Australian actors and directors. But the advice…

Released in 1990, Konami’s Aliens was not the first videogame based on James Cameron’s hit 1986 movie. In the four years prior, Activision had released two separate tie-ins for 8-bit computers, while Square had created its own take for the Japanese MSX. In fact, the 1990 coin-op was not even Konami’s first Aliens game. Well, officially it was, but the Contra series had already plundered the movie for ideas and imagery. The first Contra game featured two alien bosses that were clearly inspired by HR Giger’s famous creature design, while Super Contra featured hundreds of ‘Warrior’ aliens running amok in a familiar looking ‘hive’. This begs the question: why did Konami go to the expense of acquiring the official licence in 1990 when it could have carried on churning out…

■ The Marko’s team wanted to differentiate itself from the rest of The Kremlin. The Cartoon Mavericks was born with a snazzy intro and dual-effect Domark logo courtesy of Jolyon Myers. ■ Marko’s Magic Football became Marko for its US release, presumably because Marko’s Magic Soccer Ball doesn’t quite have the same ring to it. ■ Radnor Road came from a road in Weybridge where a friend of Tony West’s lived. He chose it as he was limited on character blocks. ■ The SNES version initially had a much fuller range of ball control, including aftertouch. However, they were omitted in order to keep the game similar to the other versions. ■ Jolyon Myers designed another beautifully animated Marko as he swam underwater, which was also cut from the final…

Will Wright just wanted to be left alone to finish The Sims. The developer had been working for four years on a life simulation, ever since shipping SimAnt in 1992. But, alas, after the huge success of SimCity 2000, Maxis had been struggling to come up with an identity for its series of Sim titles. In 1996, the company was not doing well financially and desperately needed some of that Wright magic. The developer mentions how, at that time, he had been keeping busy on three different projects, one of which was going to be The Sims, the third being a smaller game which Maxis asked him to complete in time for Christmas, SimCopter. The idea behind the game was that the player would be flying around in a helicopter…

■ Regular readers of Retro Gamer will know we are especially fond of Jeff Minter’s 1984 shmup Sheep In Space and so we were intrigued when Chris told us of a game he had begun work on in 1984, right after finishing Manic Miner. “I had this idea of lumping sprites together, so they’d be on top of each other, and that led to this idea of rounding up sheep lost in space,” he recalls. “Your spaceship looked like a big Stetson hat, flying around and herding these sheep. I went to a computer show that year and I often used to chat to Jeff Minter when I saw him. He was launching a new game at that show called… Sheep In Space! I couldn’t believe it. That was the…

» System: Switch (tested), PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PC » Buy it for: £9.99+ » Buy it from: Online A mysterious disease has swept the world and turned humans into biomechanical monstrosities, so it’s up to OmegaBot to put things right. The opening stage feels basic and unremarkable, but the level designs and enemies become more interesting from the second stage, while a regular drip feed of new weapons and abilities soon provides a satisfying moveset. The game becomes quite challenging as it goes on and feels like a linear Mega Man game might do, both for better and worse – the occasional frustration that comparison implies is present. Still, OmegaBot is solidly entertaining for the four or five hours it lasts. >> Score 75%…

<BODY> After platform game Knights ’N Slimes, Monte returns with this slick overhead racer. There are three sets of six courses with the Mud Flats initially open. Controls support the four-player interface and the forthcoming Protopad. You can choose a single course to race or enter the Championship of six races, while Battle Royale mode is for three or four human players. There are four ‘characters’, that behave differently when controlled by the computer. Coins collected in the nine-lap races or earned from achieving high positions can be spent in the Shop on speed and steering upgrades, nitro boosts and oil slicks to spin out competitors. Earn enough points to win the Championship and it will unlock the Highlands and winning there unlocks the Ruins. Progress through the game is…

Hi Retro Gamer, I felt like the Mega Drive Mini 2 might not be for me, and thanks to your review I made the decision not to buy it, so thanks for saving me some cash. It did make me think of something, though. If there are companies making money off of new Mega Drive cartridges and companies selling Mega Drive clones of all kinds of quality, there must be a market for bringing the console back. Why doesn’t Sega just cut out the middle man and re-release the Mega Drive properly, with a cartridge slot and newly manufactured games, instead of doing these limited mini systems? You’d think a new run of Alien Soldier carts would probably sell pretty well. Tom Potter We can’t say for sure, but we’d…