Innehållsförteckning för No. 252 från Retro Gamer

Stop the search and call off the dogs. There’s no need to be sweeping through bracken whilst carrying torches. I’ve found it. I have found the most niche gaming podcast out there. A couple of gentlemen in America take the crown for what must be a gaming podcast dedicated to the smallest audience. And I include myself in that demographic. The CoCo Show is hosted by Boat and Aaron and is a deep dive into the world of the TRS-80 Color Computer or the CoCo as it is affectionately known. I stumbled across this because I was looking for a podcast about retro games and I found Our Sinclair, another show they do. It sounded pretty cool hearing American accents talking about what is essentially a British phenomenon. Looking at…

UK gamers finally got their chance to pick up the PlayStation 3 on 23 March, and Sony certainly pushed the boat out. The flagship Oxford Street branch of Virgin Megastores allowed players to camp out in advance of the midnight launch, and those in attendance were richly rewarded when Sony boss Phil Harrison announced that every customer would also be taking home a 46-inch HD television. One week later, Chart Track confirmed that almost 165,000 of the machines had been sold in just two days, making it the UK’s fastest-selling home console ever – though not the fastest-selling console overall, as sales fell just short of the 185,000 consoles sold during the PSP’s launch weekend a year and a half earlier. Resistance: Fall Of Man was the most popular launch…

Here’s a challenge – take a look at some of the screenshots here without any mental playback of the associated audio. Can you imagine the underground areas of Super Mario Bros without that recurring theme? Can you see Super Mario 64‘s title screen without thinking “It’s-a me, Mario”? If you can do that, we’re impressed because we certainly can’t. You can hardly blame us – even the Goombas hop to the beat in Super Mario Bros, and that speaks to the importance of audio as a part of the overall Mario experience. The music of the Super Mario Bros series is extremely widely known – according to a paper titled Video Game Music: Not Just Kid Stuff by Matthew Belinkie of Yale University, 66% of American college students polled in…

It was 1979 and Mike Lorenzen had barely got his foot in the door at Atari Inc when he was asked to visit a shop and play a rival system. “I arrived on my first day and someone at the company had seen a golf game,” Mike tells us more than 40 years on. “They gave me an address to a store where you could play it in the lobby and said, ‘Implement that game exactly on the Atari 2600.’ I said, ‘Excuse me? That sounds illegal, immoral.’ And they said, ‘No, it’s on a different system so it’s wide open.’ That was the thinking in 1979.” Mike concedes that his memory of the exact other release is hazy, but he agrees with the suggestion it was probably the 1978…

IN THE KNOW » PUBLISHER: RAINBOW ARTS » DEVELOPER: BRAIN BUG » SYSTEM: PC » DUE FOR RELEASE: 1995 Super Star Wars was a stellar game. It was developed by LucasArts and Sculptured Software in 1992 and released for the Super Nintendo to great acclaim. It was not the first Star Wars platformer – that honour goes to Namco’s 1987 Famicom exclusive Star Wars, but it sure was the first to capture the magic of the first film in its entirety, with varied levels, challenging boss fights and some of the finest 3D scenes ever to utilise the console’s legendary Mode 7 graphic mode. The games press of the time could barely contain their enthusiasm: “This is the best platform/arcade adventure I’ve played for a long while!” said CVG’s reviewer,…

» PLAYSTATION » 1996 » TAITO  For a very long time now, I’ve had a fascination with a very specific type of fighting game. Rather than adopting the Street Fighter II template wholesale, these games attempt to do something different with the genre. They also have anime-inspired storylines and characters, and often some of the worst voice acting to grace a home console. If you present me with games like Destrega, Evil Zone and Tech Romancer, I’m all in – and I think Psychic Force is the game that kicked this off. Psychic Force takes place in the futuristic year of 2010, where the NOA group, led by the villainous Keith, want to establish an ideal world for their kind – the awkwardly dubbed Psychiccers who have psychic control over elements…

It’s difficult to imagine a major games publisher putting out something as strange and wonderful as Katamari Damacy today. With development costs locked in an ever-upwards exponential spiral, publishers are more risk averse than ever, more likely to double down on existing, proven successes than take a punt on something new. Leave that to the indie darlings with little to lose. But things were different in the days of the PlayStation 2. With development costs still relatively low, big publishers were more willing to take a chance on experimental or niche games within the budget or mid-price range. The huge success of the PS2 helped: with so many consoles in people’s homes, even the strangest title could find an audience, and Japanese publishers kept them well supplied. Koei published the…

Dynablaster was a European brand name for Bomberman in the early Nineties, and while the character isn’t present here, the familiar gameplay is. Regular battles are on offer with online and local multiplayer, and key-collecting challenges against the AI can be taken on solo or with a friend. The graphics aren’t great but the action does at least run smoothly, and you can customise your character with points earned during gameplay. It’s a pretty lean package for the price and while it offers some fun – this formula is hard to screw up – we just can’t imagine anyone picking it over the Super Bomberman R games. NICK THORPE >> Score 55%…

Mario is arguably one of the most recognisable videogame stars on the planet and has appeared in some of the greatest platformers of all time. With the recent release of Super Mario Wonder, the team felt like paying tribute to gaming’s most famous plumber. DARRAN What’s your earliest memory of a Mario game? TIM Playing Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros in Jeffers toy shop in Portadown on one of those demo stations. And then crying because my mum wouldn’t let me spend money on a really cool Battle Of The Planets toy. Gutted! “Super Mario Land was the defining Mario game for me as a kid”NICK THORPE NICK Donkey Kong for the Atari 2600 was one of the very first games I ever played, but does that really count, given…

INFLATION NATION Dear Retro Gamer, Whilst having a catch-up on your fantastic magazine, issue 231 to be specific, something dawned on me as I was reading Hot Topic. My cousin, whose dad had chosen an A500 as the family computer, was very much in the minority. Seven-year-old me didn’t really register that I knew no one else who owned one. I’d spent hours playing Street Fighter II Turbo, all the Dizzy games and Speedball 2 to name but a few, with no idea about what a privilege it was. It got me thinking about what our parents were spending on computers back then, inflation adjusted. Darran’s point about the A500 being a hideously expensive machine was bang on – £499 in 1988 in today’s money equates to £1,711 pounds (respect…

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it in this column yet, but I became a grandfather last year. Yes: I’m that old. He’s brilliant, and one of the greatest gifts I’ve ever been given in my life. The fact it came in the same year that I lost my dad felt like the universe’s way of rebalancing. Circle of life and all that. A couple of weeks back, we were babysitting my grandson for the weekend, and decided to take him to the seaside. They live about half an hour from Cleethorpes – a place that is a bit of a time capsule of a Britain long since lost, and exactly the kind of town that I spent many a summer holiday in. It’s probably fair to say that those…

» ATARI 2600 » 1983 » ACTIVISION Ever since the Atari 2600+ has been announced I’ve been checking out the prices of games I used to love playing on the original console. While the Evercade already satiates my need for playing 2600 games thanks to a couple of cartridge packs, I find myself yearning for the system’s many Activision games. One I keep returning to is Larry Miller’s Enduro, a truly impressive racing game that you can typically pick up for around the £20 mark in good condition. Like a lot of Activision’s 2600 releases it’s not only technically accomplished but also has lots of interesting gameplay mechanics. Unlike other racing games of the time Enduro is more of an endurance test as you’re required to pass a certain number of…

Above all else, the driving force behind Mario’s success is exquisite game design – something that is acknowledged by players and game designers alike. “Mario games have a timeless charm and wide appeal whether it’s 2D or 3D,” says Philip Oliver, who along with his twin brother Andrew is a veteran developer with over 40 years in the business. “Objectives are obvious, rewarded en route and praised when completed. Enemies are interesting, individually not too tough, but get progressively more challenging based on abundance and locations. Even when you ‘die’, it feels fair. Not something that can be said of all games, especially back then! “I first saw Super Mario Bros on the NES at CES Jan 1990 in Las Vegas, by which time it was already a monster hit,”…

They say that all the world’s a stage, and Mario has certainly played a lot of roles over the years. After all, he wasn’t even a plumber to begin with – he was a carpenter in Donkey Kong, and worked in factories in his Game & Watch years. In the 2012 Game Informer interview mentioned earlier in this feature, Shigeru Miyamoto explained that he sees the star and his supporting cast as akin to a troupe of actors. “If you’re familiar with things like Popeye and some of the old comic characters, you would oftentimes see this cast of characters that takes on different roles depending on the comic or cartoon,” he explained. “They might be a businessman in one [cartoon] or a pirate in another. Depending on the story…

» GAME GEAR » 1995 » SEGA CS5  You’ve got to admire Sega’s persistence with Columns. Common sense would suggest that since the original was a common pack-in with the console, Game Gear owners were unlikely to be incredibly excited for the fifth Columns game of the decade. Common sense be damned though, this was Super Columns – a game upgraded with a new Story mode, extra attacking options and the ability to turn your columns into rows by rotating them. Take that, Puyo Puyo. In fairness, the gameplay does feel significantly different, especially in competitive matches as you now have the ability to really mess with your opponent. With the Story mode consisting entirely of battles against the CPU, this focus on creating meaningful interaction is welcome. Creating combos will…

November 1988: Ian Harling is lost – in thought. He has recently left Bristol-based developer Arcana, where he contributed graphics to Amiga and Atari ST titles, to go it alone as a game designer. All he needs is the perfect setting for his first project, destined to be a recreation of a historic conflict. He begins by looking at the English Civil War before settling on the more contemporary Vietnam War. “Vietnam hadn’t been used as a setting for the kind of title I wanted to do,” he tells us. “It also offered a lot of possibilities for subgames. On a deeper level I’d grown up watching the Vietnam War take place, seeing the protests and horrors of it all. It seemed very unjust – but to be honest, it…

If you wanted to design a competitor to the Mega Drive and SNES, you’d probably want to give it a high colour palette, the ability to scale and rotate sprites, and a fast CPU that developers were familiar with. The option for expansions down the line would be useful, and a SNES-style controller could hardly hurt. Funtech’s Super A’Can offered all of those things to Taiwanese gamers, and did so in a grey plastic casing that clearly took some inspiration from the design of the SNES. Unfortunately, Funtech decided to release the Super A’Can at a time when players were far more interested in the new 32-bit CD-ROM consoles with 3D games than 16-bit cartridge machines. The result was that the Super A’Can quickly became a resounding flop, which was…

There’s something so primal about a sweety body. SENTIENT ■ DEVELOPER: PSYGNOSIS ■ YEAR: 1997 ■ You probably wouldn’t think it just by looking at it, but Sentient is one of the most ambitious games to ever grace the PlayStation. In this first-person adventure title, you take the role of medic Garritt Sherova, who has been sent to investigate a breakout of radiation sickness aboard the Space Station Icarus, only to arrive and find out that might be the least of his worries. With the captain dead, the crew divided and the Icarus on a collision course with the sun, things are clearly sounding quite dire. But of course, since you have protagonist powers, only you can save the station from certain destruction, and you do this by walking around and…

Having engendered a programmer’s mentality early on in his life, Clive Townsend began coding on the Sinclair ZX81 before moving to its successor, the ZX Spectrum. The embodiment of a teenage coder, Clive created several games for his local software house, Durell Software, before working steadily in the games industry, following a familiar path of Game Boy, mobile and PC development throughout. Having rediscovered his ZX Spectrum roots with recent homebrew releases, it’s high time we learned more about the man behind one of the Spectrum’s most extraordinary series of arcade adventures. This is Clive Townsend, In The Chair. Hello Clive! Do you remember your first encounter with videogames? Hello! I can’t remember the first game, but I remember being at school registration, and one of the guys wasn’t there.…

Just as in the Intellivision original, Shark! Shark! casts you as a fish that must eat smaller fish. Doing so encourages growth, which expands the range of edible fish but slows you down – which becomes a big problem when the shark makes its regular rounds. Plenty of new enemies have been added, but eating progressively larger quotas of fish does become monotonous over 12 rounds of single-player action. Fortunately, the addition of multiplayer for up to four players gives Shark! Shark! some greater longevity, with a limited but well rounded selection of modes available including co-op and competitive play. All told, this is a decent refresh of a cult favourite. NICK THORPE >> Score 71%…

» XBOX 360 » 2008 » PROJECT SOUL If ever you need a way to pep up your franchise, guest characters, particularly those from other franchises, are a sure way to generate some interest. Namco first took this approach in 2002 when it added an exclusive character to the home-console versions of Soulcalibur II. Spawn appeared on Microsoft’s Xbox, Heihachi could be found on PlayStation 2, while GameCube owners arguably benefitted the most thanks to the inclusion of Link. Sure, it was a little annoying that each character was locked to a specific console, but it did make sense from an exclusivity point of view. Namco took a similar approach with Soulcalibur IV in 2008, but this time the inclusion of classic Star Wars characters felt a little more egregious. While…

Nintendo has struck gold with its constant supply of Directs that keep eager gamers up to date with everything happening in the world of the popular publisher. The latest appeared on 14 September and featured a mix of remasters, remakes and retro collections coming to the Switch. There were also important updates to some previously announced titles. By far the biggest news came in the final segment of the Direct with a remaster of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door being confirmed for a 2024 release. First released on GameCube in 2004, it was acclaimed by gamers and critics, winning several awards. The new graphics look excellent, and it will be interesting to see if any enhancements to the original gameplay will be implemented. “The first three Tomb Raiders are getting…

“I like creating title screens of retro games because it tells the story of the whole game”SARAH ROBERTS Sarah Roberts is an artist living in Surrey. She makes pixel art mainly out of Perler beads and cross-stitch which she makes available to buy. Readers can follow her on Instagram @pixel_artist and go to etsy.com/shop/pixelartist1 to make purchases. We recently caught up with Sarah to hear more about her inspiration and the process behind her distinctive art. Your artwork is amazing. Do you have an artistic background? I have always been interested in arts and crafts since I was young. After I left school, I was lucky enough to find work in that industry, working for several prop companies and a well-established jewellery company (doing stoning, enamelling and quality checks). I…

There’s a reason why Mario has graced the cover of Retro Gamer multiple times. He’s become one of gaming’s cornerstones, a character that’s every bit as synonymous with videogames as Pac-Man, Lara Croft or those pesky little aliens from Space Invaders. There’s a good chance that even your dear old nan will recognise Mario – that’s how much of an important cultural icon he’s become. Originally making his debut in single-screen platformers like Donkey Kong and Mario Bros, in 1985 he starred in his first side-scrolling adventure, Super Mario Bros, and the moustachioed hero hasn’t looked back since. For many gamers and developers, the Super Mario Bros series is considered a template for how to create the perfect platformer. Many have attempted to emulate Mario’s success over the years and…

It’s hard to believe now, but Mario’s jump was a platforming first when he and it were introduced in 1981’s Donkey Kong coin-op, and his barrel-smashing hammer attack was equally novel. In his first solo title – Mario Bros – he could skid to a halt mid-run, and he swapped his hammer for heading the underside of platforms to flip foes before kicking them off the screen. The mechanics in Mario’s next outing were simpler, in that he used his jump in Super Mario Bros for the NES to deter foes as well as for platforming, which former Rare coder Chris Sutherland describes as an evolution. “In Donkey Kong, Mario would jump in an arc, but you had more control in Super Mario Bros. There was also risk/reward, because you had…

In the early Eighties, home-console controllers tended to be vertically oriented, with a large number pad, relatively few action buttons and some kind of unusual directional input. With the Vectrex being designed to bring the arcade experience home, the default Control Panel was a horizontal design rather more in line with the arcade standard. Though it was shorter than the joysticks found on arcade cabinets, the self-centring analogue joystick was familiar to players, and the inclusion of four buttons was more than enough to handle the games of the day. When not in use, one controller could be stored in a recess beneath the console’s vector display. Unfortunately, time has revealed that the controller is perhaps the most failure-prone part of the Vectrex. The spring used to centre the joystick…

» ATARI LYNX » 1989 » EPYX Unlike a lot of my friends who decided to buy Game Boys, I placed my faith in Atari’s Lynx. As history has since told us, said faith was badly misplaced, but it’s easy to see why the handheld was so appealing for 16-year-old me. After all, it was immensely powerful for the time and magazines suggested there was a lot of strong developer support for the console. Best of all – for me at least – the console was guaranteed a bunch of Atari arcade games and I was a big fan of Atari games old and new. The thought of playing the likes of Roadblasters, STUN Runner and Paperboy on the move was too good an opportunity to turn down and I…

Mortal Kombat is quite an interesting franchise as it’s one that has generally improved with each successive main instalment. Yes there have been some huge stumbles along the way (most of the spin-offs, for example, are absolute garbage) but the core games have tended to always improve on the original game’s appeal, which was gore, gore and even more gore. Created by Ed Boon and John Tobias as a competitor to Capcom’s phenomenally successful Street Fighter II, Midway’s brawler mainly relied on two things to wow gamers in the arcades: its realistic digistised characters; and an unhealthy amount of over-the-top blood and guts that immediately made it stand apart from virtually every other game of the time. Sure the animation was incredibly ropey and naff in the first game, and…

SPINE RIP We may have Mortal Kombat on the mind this issue, but Sub Zero’s original Fatality was a real shocker back in 1992. The ninja simply rips his opponent’s head off with the backbone still attached, neatly preparing them for a career as a backbench MP. Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 hid the decapitation behind a black screen, but later games restored it. In a word? Gory. POGOSTICK Chukklez may look more at home at the Gathering Of The Juggalos than the wrestling ring, but Def Jam Vendetta’s resident clown is no laughing matter and this move more than proves it. First he slams his opponent’s head into the mat, before using them as a pogo stick – arms for footholds, legs for handles, skull repeatedly smashed on the canvas.…

» PLAYSTATION 2 » 2000 » NAMCO How much do launch games really matter? If the PlayStation 2 is any indication, not much. Sony’s second console is widely considered to have had a pretty poor selection of games on day one, but it went on to become the best-selling console of all time. Was it actually that bad in the first place, though? Looking back, the best games of the launch line-up cover a variety of genres and had plenty to offer anyone lucky enough to have made it through the preorder nightmare. Those lucky few could have walked out of the store with Fantavision, SSX, Tekken Tag Tournament, Timesplitters, or of course Ridge Racer V – hardly shabby. There’s no doubt that Namco was playing it safe with Ridge…

We loved the original Horizon Chase, as it effortlessly captured the spirit of console racers like Top Gear. Sadly, while there’s plenty to enjoy with this sequel, it doesn’t quite capture the majesty of the original. The World Tour returns and it’s filled with well-designed tracks and challenging AI, while there’s a good range of vehicles and unlockables. The online side of the game is perfectly fine as well with a number of challenges and there’s even the ability to play against PC owners, although it was sometimes hard to find games. Sadly, we experienced quite a few crashes during play and the framerate is also erratic which takes away from the overall experience. Here’s hoping a patch will improve things. DARRAN JONES >> Score 68%…

AXELAY…