Last Retro Game You Finished And Your Thoughts

here’s very few games I can think of that I’ve played for 64 hours or more, on Switch I think it’s only Animal Crossing. You’d hardly be alone with getting addicted to Picross in that way, there’ll be loads of folk who slurp up everything Picross-related they can get. As for me, I enjoyed what I played of Picross DS well enough but bounced off of Picross 3D pretty sharpish. That SEGA one on Switch didn’t hold my interest either. It’s not a game series that I’m mad for.

~



I’ve no experience with the Fatal Frame games, but I know they’re all about ghost-killing photography and all that Happy Halloween spookiness. So you’d imagine that bringing that premise to the camera-equipped 3DS is a conceptually sound idea, right? And making a whole game about it – which they did in 2012, called Spirit Camera: The Cursed Memoir – should be a worthwhile and successful experiment, aye? Hmm…

Less of a game and more of an occasionally interactive slideshow, Spirit Camera has you utilising your 3DS as The Camera Obscura, a mysterious device that enables spirit photographers to see supernatural phenomena inside of a cursed book called The Purple Diary. The game’s progression has you find ways to solve the riddles of the diary and escape it’s sinister curse. That’s performed by battling ghosts using the 3DS’s cameras, the system’s gyro sensors and Augmented Reality alongside an accompanying Diary of Faces, a ‘real’ sixteen-page AR booklet that’s required to play the game. In all truth though, the game is just about unplayable even using it.

A ridiculously shite game by 2023 standards, the 3DS’s technology is wholly ill-equipped for the game’s concept. The steam off of my piss is more powerful than the 3DS’s camera. The problem created by that and where Spirit Camera falls down immediately is that the gameplay requires you to play in a very well-lit environment. Trying to play in the dark, with just a bedside lamp on or even in natural daylight means that the AR functions just won’t work. You’d get pretty much the same experience by having your system turned off – just with much less frustration. I played Spirit Camera directly under a high-strength and harsh LED lightbulb, but even that didn’t let me consistently recognise the pages of the AR book. Playing a horror game under bright light: honestly, what a load of bollocks.

None of it’s worth the hassle either. The puzzles don’t show off the 3DS’s AR capabilities in any impressive manner, instead only highlighting it’s severe limitations. The combat sequences are slow, shallow and don’t amount to much more than spinning the 3DS around in a circle and hitting R when you see a ghost on screen. The narrative is rubbish too, it had me hammering the A button International Track & Field-style so that I could get past the cutscenes as quickly as possible. There’s nothing specifically positive to say about Spirit Camera’s production, gameplay, ideas and mastery of the 3DS hardware – it’s one of these rare games where they’ve made a horse’s ar…se of every aspect of it. Even its lifespan is dubious; I know I should be thankful that it lasted less than three hours, but that’s a complete rip-off for a game that I’m embarrassed to admit I paid £30 for last year. In my defence I thought it would go up in value as a gimmicky trinket! Ironically though, it’s near-worthless as an experience.

It's so much poorer than I expected. Spirit Camera: The Cursed Memoir is miles worse than Face Raiders, the free AR game that came preloaded onto your 3DS. 2/10.

That's a shame. I liked what I played of the Project Zero titles, and the Wii-U one in particular, fascinates me (albeit not enough to go and buy it). Maybe that's why it's called Spirit Camera instead of Project Zero 3D. They knew it wasn't worthy of the series.

Damning that, but I do love a good Cappa baw-booting. It's been too long.

64 hours of Picross... man alive. I loved Picross DS, liked Murder by Numbers, and unlike Cappa got on perfectly well with Picross 3D, but I honestly don't feel like the basic recipe itself has much left for me any more. It feels like I've 'solved it', if that makes sense. 64 hours of it... well, I'm glad you enjoyed it Jim!

Really Picross should be on the back of a newspaper or something, it's just something you should get to do 1 a week of.

Hey but I finally played the fabled

I enjoyed it enough so, but I can see why they decided to shelve it.

What it's doing on the SNES is absolutely mind-blowing, and it's interesting seeing not only the template that became Starfox Command, but also a lot of world-building that eventually became part of Starfox 64 (I didn't know Star Wolf were in this!).

But the experience of the game itself feels very brief. It suffers a bit from the problems of a lot of games in the mid 90s, where a bunch of new technology was being made available (early 3D, FMV, VR etc.); the effort to utilise the new power was at the cost of a lengthy game experience. I'm not great at Starfox games, so I didn't expect to be done in an hour on my first go!

Still a fascinating piece of history though.

Best to uphold GNamer tradition and talk bollocks about old games nobody’s thought of in decades at Christmas time. If you’re well-behaved you might get a festive treat on Christmas Eve, but for the here and now what better to type about than with Toy Commander: Christmas Surprise, a festive-themed demo that came with the Holiday 2000 copy of the Official Dreamcast Magazine.

Your mission is to help a jetpack-equipped Santa Claus to deliver five presents under the Christmas tree, but first you need to locate them across hidden places in various rooms. A couple of gifts are in plain sight but others are scattered around a house in hard-to-find places such as, er, down the toilet. The last gifts are protected by jealous, aggressive toys that you need to eliminate with your army jeep and fighter jet. These are stocked with a machine gun and an array of special missiles, making for a yuldtide game of seek-and-destroy that’s surprisingly enjoyable.

Right enough, Christmas Surprise is just one level of a thirty-five level game that’s only lightly modified with a Christmas theme, and it lasts maybe about fifteen minutes on a first playthrough. It was very good fun though, and I’m glad I found out about it. It’s made me want to play the fuller Toy Commander for myself. 7/10.

I'm wanting to dig deeper into the narrative. How did Santa misplace these presents, especially in locations like the bottom of the loo? Why are the toys fighting back, perhaps even rebelling against Mr. Claus? There's lots of unanswered questions here.

Er... you win the Christmas award then Cappa!

Actually, that legit makes me wish more companies would do Christmas freebies.

“‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse”.

Rewind the clock to 24th December 1988 however, massive stauners would have been stirring in the scants of gamers everywhere as they eagerly anticipated Santa Claus bringing them Maria’s Christmas Box on ZX Spectrum.

Thing is though, I’m built differently from the gamers of thirty-five years ago. If I want to feel festive I’d typically delicate the house and listen to Christmas tunes, or bake mince pies, or stick a Christmas film on in the background. Funnily enough, to get that Christmassy feeling it never crossed my mind to engage in a virtual game of strip poker with a digitised representation of Maria Whittaker, the pin-up model who used to get her boobs out on Page 3:



I was more of a Nikkala Stott man myself.

But like the body-curious teenagers of 1988, I was just too tempted to give Maria’s Christmas Box a crack. And honestly, as cheap, dubious and clatty as it all is, it plays a perfectly all right game of poker. It’s got all the skill, strategy and luck of the real thing, there’s five rounds across two difficulty levels, and winning each game removes an article of clothing from Maria’s wee Santa suit. There’s even big micro-computer diddies to see at the end of it if that’s what you really asked for at Christmas.

Merry Christmas GNamer Forum!   /10

Well, that'll learn me to browse the forum at work.

I've never been so delighted not have many pictures of myself available online.

Buskalilly wrote:

Well, that'll learn me to browse the forum at work.

Same!

Thankfully I'm working from home, so no odd looks at why I'm absolutely pishing myself laughing.

It's been ages since I've banged on about the Evercade, but first here's my thoughts on the recently-released Super Pocket Taito Edition. Coming from the designers/makers/producers of the Evercade, it's built in with a mighty eighteen games from the Japanese giant.



There’s nowhere more appropriate to begin than with Space Invaders. Is it the most historically important and culturally impactful game of all time? There’s a discussion for another time. Anyhoo, I wasn’t queuing outside the arcades in 1978 to play it and it was regarded as old hat when I was growing up in the ‘90s, but I can see how it might have grabbed everyone's attention. It’s been improved upon countless times, yet nearly fifty years later it remains an addictive score-chaser.  

Arguably Taito’s biggest success (after Space Invaders, natch) is Bubble Bobble. It’s classic status is forever assured, directly influencing the creation of literally dozens of other well-remembered (and long-forgotten) single-screen platformers throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s. Two of which are included here alongside Bubble Bobble, namely Don Doko Don (where you control a hammer-wielding gnome instead of being a bubble-blowing dinosaur) and The Fairyland Story (where you play as a fairy and morph enemies into cakes). With simple gameplay mechanics and bouncy aesthetics, they’ve all stood the test of time – they’re three really good games for this sort of device.  

Chack’n Pop is a predecessor to Bubble Bobble, one in which I presume that they quickly recognised that the game they’d made was no fun at all. They thankfully never revisited this style of game, it’s an inaccessible and brutally unfair load of b…llocks. I’ve given this a few goes across Taito’s various past compilations and each time I can’t believe how bad it is.  

Unsurprisingly Elevator Action makes an obligatory appearance here, having you dodge bullets and head down elevator shafts to survive. While it’s primitive and repetitive it’s reasonably moreish and it’s a game no like many others. I’d have preferred the 1990s sequel– Elevator Action Returns jazzes the whole thing up – but the 1983 original is still perfectly decent.  

Operation Wolf is trotted out yet again too. An ambitious gallery shooter for the time certainly, but even on the Super Pocket’s built-in Easy Mode it’s still stupidly tough. Hmm. Needs a lightgun.  

Cannae go wrong with Rastan, the mythological hack n’ slash platformer from 1987 that rips off Conan The Barbarian in the manner not seen again until Nintendo charged £40 for Mario Strikers Battle League.    

I’m nuts for arcade football games and I’m really happy with the inclusion of Taito’s unofficial arcade game for the Italia ’90, Football Champ. The Tammy Toepoke passing of the ball sometimes frustrates but everything else is excellent entertainment – it’s a very high-energy and violent kickabout, the likes of which sadly don’t exist anymore.  

Side-scrolling beat ‘em up Growl cares not for a balanced and gradual difficulty curve, for it only exists to hoover up all your 10ps. Happily on the Super Pocket it’s Free Play, meaning you can just about brute force it. Growl’s main gimmick is that you can save animals from evil poachers – there’s good humour in watching a stampede of elephants crush the baddies.  

I think The Legend of Kage was the subject of an Angry Video Game Nerd video back in the day and I don’t understand why. I almost always enjoy acrobatic ninja games like these, and while it’s no Revenge of Shinobi I’ve had decent fun from The Legend of Kage whenever it’s been on other Taito collections.  

I grew up understanding that The NewZealand Story was one of the greatest platformers of all time, it had been highly revered in the UK multiformat magazines and often ranked somewhere in their semi-regular ‘Top X Games’ lists. I quite like The NewZealand Story, but I don’t think I remember it just as fondly as many others. Still, I appreciate it’s originality, it’s upbeat nature and certainly it’s inclusion on the Super Pocket.  

Unannounced and unadvertised until very close to the Super Pocket’s release, Puzzle Bobble is perhaps better known as Bust-A-Move, the match-three bubble-popping puzzler that’s still being hawked today. It’s the most recent thing on here too, coming from the halcyon days of 1994. Jings, that’s practically yesterday! While Puzzle Bobble is evidence that the core formula hasn’t changed an awful lot in the last thirty years, I nonetheless think it’s a proper classic. The lack of a multiplayer option on the Super Pocket itself is the only disappointment, but it’s not as if there’s no other ways to play Puzzle Bobble or it’s 363 sequels.  

I’ve got no memories of playing Cadash before, so I booted it up for a quick ten minutes before sharing my thoughts here. I like that you’re a big beefy swordsman whose so powerful that you can annihilate everything in front of you with one swing of your sword; I don’t like that there’s loads of text about magic and boring stuff like that; I really don’t like that there’s lots of tiny enemies that damage you; I utterly detest that shallow pools of water can kill you. Still, I’ll give it another crack sometime.  

Much like Cadash, I had no memories whatsoever of playing Volfied, so this could well be my first bash on it. At first, I had no idea what to do. I spent my first couple of minutes wondering if it was some sort of broken and knackered horizontal space shooter. Trying every button combination however lead me to discover that it’s actually a sci-fi version of Qix. No bad! I like Qix! Speaking of Qix: where the hell is Qix?  

Within moments I thought I recognised Kiki Kaikai’s gameplay from somewhere; a swift Google shows that it’s the introductory arcade version of what eventually became Pocky & Rocky on the SNES. It’s not a thrill-a-minute first outing though, and in all honesty I think Pocky & Rocky is very overrated.  

It’s been said on here loads of times that there’s not enough games starring waterbomb-hurling hippopotamuses, and Liquid Kids gratefully scratches that itch. It’s a cutesy, relaxed and appealing little platformer, and it’s good stuff.  

Lastly, Space Invaders ’91 is the sole console game available here, and it’s a fairly run-of-the-mill Mega Drive remake of the original. It updates the graphics and moves around the defence bunkers, but otherwise it’s pretty no frills.  

Blaze Entertainment’s fourth go-around with their Evercade system is, to their credit, really well done. It’s nicely portable, comfortable to use, has a bright and colourful screen, sounds good, supports save states and has loads of quality games built into both the Taito and Capcom versions. On the downside, the screen is too small for all of the Evercade's TATE Mode shooters (the ones that display vertically) and the shoulder buttons are a little awkwardly placed for the likes of Duke Nukem 3D and Worms Armageddon. All the same, for under fifty quid I’ve been impressed. 8/10.

Interesting. I don't think I'd ever get one of them retro consoles, but in terms of games, looking at that list, Taito really did have a good track record. New Zealand Story feels like it should have some kind of epic reboot.

The New Zealand Story got a less-than-epic reboot in the early days of the DS, called The New Zealand Story Revolution. All seems well for the first while, but then you reach bits that rely on the DS's stylus, touchscreen and microphone, and it becomes clear that this is an unnecessary faff and a bit game-ruining.

I gotta shout out Light Crusader on the Mega Drive. Being a Nintendo Console kid, I missed out on Treasure's quality, and don't always see the God-like reputation they have been given (although I did enjoy Dynamite Headdy). I don't know how often they turned their attention to the fantasy realms, but this game really works out. Initially confusing to be honest - you start off in a town, assuming you're heading on a Zelda-style overworld, but actually the rest of the game takes place in a dungeon under the town's graveyard. But everything works pretty well; the isometric view doesn't hamper gameplay too much as it does with other games, with only a few depthy-heighty quandries. The combat is basic but fine. And there are smatterings of puzzles as well, more so in comparison to e.g. a Link to the Past. I'm really glad I played this

Also when you're low on health, a voice sample says "it's gonna kill ya" which is wonderfully incongruous.

Jim, I'm always amazed how many Treasure games I haven't heard of. That sounds fun, especially compared to the surprisingly puzzle-lite LttP.

Oh, I thought I posted in here but I didn't.

I played through all of Donkey Kong Country on my flight to Mexico.

It's a fun little game. I still prefer Super Mario World, of course, but once I got my head around the momentum of Donkey and agility of Diddy, it was a good romp. The trial-and-error difficulty grated at some points, but the ability to save and option to go back to Level 1 and farm lives negated some of that.

The visuals are a little muddy today, but the music is still grand and I can only imagine how mind-blowing this was for kids in the 90s. I think this was probably the SNES' real answer to Sonic back in the console war days. Shove your blast processing up your arse.

Ape Year 2024 has begun.

Jimbob wrote:

I gotta shout out Light Crusader on the Mega Drive.

I don’t always see Treasure’s God-like quality either, but off the top of my head I can list a handful of absolute belters that they developed. There’s the two Gunstar Heroes games, the two Sin & Punishment games, Mischief Makers and Dynamite Headdy to start with. With that sort of hit ratio, that’s why I’m always compelled to try Treasure’s different games, and why I look forward to the new game they say they've got in development. That said, I played through Astro Boy Omega Factor on the GBA for the first time last month – that’s another highly-regarded Treasure developed game, but honestly not one that I thought was all that great.

I think Light Crusader is something I’ll get round to. It’s the fantasy theme that’s always put me off, but the gameplay sounds nicely varied from what you’re saying.

Buskalilly wrote:

Ape Year 2024 has begun.

In the simian console wars and whether you want to shove your blast processing up your arse or not, Ape Escape is the game you're wanting to playing in Ape Year 2024.

As long as Rise Of Kong is part of Ape Year 2024 and somebody reviews it in here or somewhere similar, I'm all for it.

Peggle (2007)



Fancy a game of Lucky Hit? I'd never played this Pop Cap gem, largely dismissing it as a mobile game back in the day. More fool me, as I smashed through this in the space of a week. For those still operating phones with buttons, you fire balls at pegs with the goal to hit all the red pegs so that they light up and disappear. With only ten balls, you quickly need to plan your course of action, but for the most part, it's just highly satisfying shooting a ball around a board. Definitely has a bit of pinball ASMR to it.

9/10

In 2020 I typed up a handful of reviews for some of the retro games on Evercade, and repeated that in 2021. In 2022 I typed up some more for the arcade-centric compilations. Here in 2024, I'll move onto the Evercade's many retro-inspired indie games.

Evercade’s first twin-game cartridge was for Tanglewood and Xeno Crisis.



Tanglewood stands out for being a proper and legitimate 2018 Mega Drive game that was made with actual development tools and for the actual Mega Drive system. To my mind that makes it as much as Mega Drive game as something like Sonic 1 or Streets of Rage, and not a modernised one like Sonic Mania or Streets of Rage 4. The game describes itself as “a stunning puzzle-platformer offering a true 16-bit, challenging experience that will make fans of the golden gaming era feel warm and fuzzy”. Most of that is true enough. Tanglewood is hugely impressive on a technical level, and while there’s perhaps moments where you feel that the developer had understanding and know-how that his peers from the Mega Drive’s heyday didn’t, it feels very authentic in its design and in the way it mixes up its gameplay.

That said, Tanglewood took me something like six hours to complete, which is mammoth in Mega Drive platformer terms. In all truth, Tanglewood outstayed it’s welcome. And in that time, I never felt that the puzzles evolved enough beyond what I’d seen at the start. The lack of music was a bit rubbish as well. I get that its absence is to create ambience, but for me only the tippy-top, Breath of the Wild-calibre games can get away with that.

Tanglewood is good, but in my opinion it’s not a Mega Drive classic like some reviewers called it. However, it’s unique, atmospheric, and interesting enough that I’d just about recommend it to folk who are into their retro platformers.



The other half of this collection is another neo-retro game, Xeno Crisis. After originally being developed for the Mega Drive, this 2019 top-down arena shooter has since arrived on absolutely everything, from PlayStation Vita to Dreamcast to Neo Geo to GameCube. Just like Tanglewood, Xeno Crisis matches up well with the Evercade. That’s because it uses a control system that suits the layout of the Evercade’s buttons. Your D-Pad controls your marine, and the four face buttons shoot up, down, left and right. You can do an evasive roll with the L button, and lob a grenade with the R button. If you’ve ever played Total Carnage or Super Smash TV, then you’ll instantly know what Xeno Crisis is all about. The game’s weapons, upgrades system and enemy design is pretty much what you’d expect, though the twist here is that every room in the game’s seven stages is procedurally generated.

Looking, sounding and running brilliantly, I think Xeno Crisis is everything you’d want from an arcade action game. Its difficulty holds it back from true greatness, but nevertheless I’d consider one of the best games of the five hundred-plus that are on Evercade. Granted, that’s a library that includes the Mega Drive ports of Summer Challenge and Winter Challenge (boak!), Football Madness on the PS1 (chunder!) and Sword of Sodan (dies!), but Xeno Crisis is cracking stuff wherever you find it.

I’m not crazy about the idea of dual Evercade cartridges and a couple of the ones that they’ve released in 2022 and 2023 are pretty mince. At least here you’ve got genuine value for money though: both these games usually sell digitally for about fifteen quid each. Tanglewood is free on Antstream if you’re arsed and I’ve seen Xeno Crisis drop to as low as £3.99 on Switch. I endorse giving them a go, they’re a good pair of games. 7/10.

I’ll contribute my reflections on the much-hyped Full Void.



Telling a story about rogue AI that keeps humanity oppressed in a dystopian future, you control an isolated teenager who breaks away to their freedom through a mixture of cinematic platforming and light puzzling. Full Void carries it’s influences very perceptibly; there’s flashbacks of Flashback, it’s Another World in another world. It’s a decently accomplished game with some characteristics to call its own though, creating a sufficiently bleak atmosphere to go alongside it’s excellent presentation. It’s very player-friendly too, as your frequent deaths aren’t punished severely due to the game’s generous checkpointing. In fact, the Evercade version’s instruction manual advises that you die in as many ways as you can think of; the games developers’ evidently want to proudly show off all their art and animation. Quite rightly too, as it’s a superb-looking game on the Super Pocket in particular.

At just three hours long though, most aspects of Full Void don’t feel fully realised. For example, the game-ending ‘boss’ is a brilliant spectacle but it’s preceded by room-after-room where you’re either crawling through shafts or switching off burst pipes. It’s dull, and it feels like wasted motion. There was plenty more scope for sequences like the one the game ends on, I felt. Likewise, there’s a smart mechanic introduced halfway through the game where you can assume control of some of the AI that’s chasing to capture you. It sadly doesn’t amount to much; it doesn’t change the gameplay often. The same can be said for Full Void’s story, which is presented in a handful of cutscenes but doesn’t have much value throughout the game.

Full Void is a fairly good game that I think would be an all right eShop/PSN/Steam download in a sale, but my enthusiasm is dampened by the fact that it’s here on its own. It’s the Evercade’s first and, to date, only single-game cartridge. The big problem with that is that I can’t see myself playing it again. Full Void is a linear one-and-done sort of game; I have nothing else to see here, I have no reason to return to it. Due to that, I think Full Void on Evercade is a very poor value proposition. It’s developer has other titles in its portfolio, and Full Void on Evercade needed propped up by a couple of other games to simply provide the cartridge with some longevity. I don’t think what’s here nearly justifies being an £18 cartridge by itself. 6/10.

~

On another note, Blaze released their Indie Heroes 3 cartridge today. It features Donut Dodo, and, I'm not sure how they've managed it, but on the Taito Super Pocket it's the most broken game I've ever played. The start button moves you Right, the select button moves you Left, the Down button moves you Up in the options menu, and no other buttons work - you can't jump, pause the game, add credits, nowt. It's utterly baffling altogether.

Full Void is a bit of an odd one, I keep meaning to get to, as I'm sure seen it's getting/got a physical release on Switch which be what £40. Which makes this not seem as bad of a price, and it's about £12 on the eShop.

It's when you see one of the Evercade carts has a few Valis games on it, and just three of those are like £50 on Switch. Which puts the values all out of whack.

The Cappuccino Kid wrote:

On another note, Blaze released their Indie Heroes 3 cartridge today. It features Donut Dodo, and, I'm not sure how they've managed it, but on the Taito Super Pocket it's the most broken game I've ever played. The start button moves you Right, the select button moves you Left, the Down button moves you Up in the options menu, and no other buttons work - you can't jump, pause the game, add credits, nowt. It's utterly baffling altogether.

But... wouldn't they have similar controller inputs if it's supposed to be compatible with the Evercade? I'm trying to work out from a programming perspective how that can go wrong.

masofdas wrote:

It's when you see one of the Evercade carts has a few Valis games on it, and just three of those are like £50 on Switch. Which puts the values all out of whack.

I’m not sure if it’s simply down to the rights holders charging more for the licensing of these games, but it’s definitely the case that Evercade collections are generally providing less value for money than they did three years ago. There’s been a fair few collections announced in 2022 and 2023 where I’ve thought ‘…is that it?’.

Jimbob wrote:

But... wouldn't they have similar controller inputs if it's supposed to be compatible with the Evercade? I'm trying to work out from a programming perspective how that can go wrong.

Who knows how that’s happened. They’re publicly saying it’s some sort of issue that’s arisen between testing and the cartridge’s mass production. I’m not at all convinced though, I don’t think it was tested full stop. On their Discord they seem to be getting arsey about folk complaining about how Donut Dodo plays on the Super Pocket and Evercade EXP too. I think it’s well justified though, Blaze should take their medicine here.

Blaze have previous with this sort of thing as well. Amongst other issues they've had/created, I remember they shipped Top Gear on PIKO Interactive Collection 1 with a glitch where you’d permanently boost in every race and in every mode.