Indie Review - Ghosts 'N Demons (PC)

Ghosts 'N Demons

Capcoms classic coin-op Ghosts N' Goblins has just celebrated its 30th anniversary, so what better way to celebrate this milestone (other than firing up the original in MAME) than to play an indie re-imagining of this classic coin-op? No, I'm not talking about Locomalito's wonderful Maldita Castilla, released in 2012, but a new kid on the block; the not-very-subtly-named Ghosts 'N Demons. Personally, I've always had a love / hate relationship with the 1985 original (and its sequel Ghouls 'N Ghosts, released in 1988) as, on the one hand, it contains gorgeous pixel art, a great soundtrack and tight, action-packed platforming. While on the other, it's an obnoxiously difficult game clearly designed to strip arcade patrons of their coins. 

Retro Review - Baluba-Louk No Densetsu (Arcade)

The original Tomb Raider

Ok, arcade fans! I am here once again to bring you another obscure coin-op gem that deserves your attention. This time it's the turn of the catchily titled Japanese game Baluba-Louk No Densetsu (just rolls off the tongue doesn't it!). Released way back in 1986, Baluba was another colourful 2d platform, collect-em-up, in a very similar vein to the Tehkan classic, Bomb Jack - one of my all time favourite games! Playing as a cute little explorer dude, your aim is to move around the small underground stages grabbing every single treasure chest, while avoiding the brightly-coloured beasties that patrol the stages. 

REVIEW - Don't Die, Mr. Robot! (PlayStation Vita)

"Spoiler : You Will Die!"

Sometimes the simplest things in life are the best - from a slice of bread fresh from the oven, to a cold beer on a hot day. This philosophy is carried across to the world of videogames, which is why classic 80's arcade games have such a strong following some 30+ years after their original release. While complex titles involving the use of more buttons than you would find in a helicopter cockpit have their place in gaming, it is the no frills, one or two button, easy to pick up & play titles that keep us enthralled for years - Just look at the roaring success of Rovio's Angry Birds and Namco's sublime Pacman Championship Edition DX for proof of this. Now there's another title that can be used as a perfect example of the 'simple = good' mantra - Infinite State Games' Don't Die Mr. Robot! on the PlayStation Vita.

Retro Review - Sega Rally Championship (Arcade, Saturn, PS2, PC)

Sega doing what Sega do best!

There have been many, many arcade racing games over the years, but some stand the test of time better than others. For every amazing and instantly gratifying title that can still be enjoyed 10 or more years after its original release, there are a hundred other bland, generic and instantly forgettable games out there. While racers on home consoles have evolved over time to offer more depth, more cars, more customisation, more tracks and more content in general, it's the simpler, less complicated arcade racers that hold up in the all important fun and replayability stakes. Each Gran Turismo or Forza game automatically renders its predecessor void as they focus heavily on realistic visuals while games such as Daytona USA and Outrun 2006 never lose their appeal. It's no coincidence that I use two Sega games as examples, as they are truly the masters of the genre. Almost every racer they have released has set the bar for the time, provided more thrill and spills than anything else out there, and provided a template for others to imitate, yet never better. The aforementioned Daytona USA and Outrun 2006 are two of the best games in their genre, but it is Sega Rally Championship that gets my vote for, not only best arcade racing game of all time, but racing game overall.

Coin-Op Classics - Fast Lane (Konami)

Life in the fast lane

Arcade games of the 80's and 90's offer up some of my favourite gaming experiences. Simple, fast and addictive, the truly great games are easy to pick up and play, yet hard to master. They keep you coming back time and time again in order to beat your high score, thanks to tight controls, exciting gameplay and that essential risk versus reward factor that puts your skills to the test, yet leaving you with the feeling that you can do better next time. Pac Man set the trend way back in the year of my own birth, 1980, with Ms. Pac Man improving on it further. After the yellow dot munchers came an absolute wealth of clones and wannabees, desperate for a slice of the action. Few were able to match Namco's seminal series, but games that tried something slightly different with the formula were often even better. Fast Lane by Konami is one such game. 

CoinOps & Vision - Bringing the Arcade to your home in spectacular style!

Bringing the arcade to your home

Microsoft's first foray into the console market, the Xbox, appeared in 2001 (or 2002 for us European gamers) and was a huge success. But, while I have fond memories of playing Halo 2, Mercenaries, Brute Force and Tao Feng : Fist of the Lotus with my buddies in our earlier twenties, it is not a console I hold with much regard these days. Aside from the games mentioned above, there isn't much else in the Xbox's library of games that holds any appeal. Even games such as Toejam & Earl 3 and Sega's arcade beat-em-up Strike Out left me extremely disappointed. Add in the fact that it's a fairly ugly brute of a console, with one of the worst official controllers ever made - right up there with the Atari Jaguar and Sega's horrible Dreamcast controller - and you have a machine that I am happy to leave in the past. Until now!

Review - Twin Tiger Shark (Xbox Indie)

An indie tribute to classic arcade shmups, now on your Xbox 360!

Wide Pixel Games, or Mikael Tillander as he is known to his friends, is back with another Xbox indie title following a string of enjoyable and well made titles. Twin Tiger Shark is a vertical scrolling shmup that obviously has a hard-on for classic coin-op shooters from the late 80's and early 90's, most notably those of developer Toaplan. Both the visuals and sound mimic the look of the arcade games of yesteryear perfectly, giving it an air of authenticity that will delight fans of titles such as Capcom's 1942 series, Raiden and especially Toaplan's Twin Hawk, Twin Cobra and Fireshark. Indeed, the likeness is so spot-on that I initially thought it was a straight-up clone of one of those titles, so much so that I had to boot up MAME in order to discover which one it was. I never found a match, of course, but it pays such faithful tribute to their various titles that it's hard to tell - from the almost identical plane to the one used in Twin Hawk, the similar plane formations, background environments and soundtrack of Fireshark, or the enemy vehicles seen in Twin Cobra, every element of Twin Tiger Shark appears to be from a Toaplan title.

Retro Review - Jackal (Arcade / NES)

4 Wheel Shmup Action

Jackal (or Top Gunner as it was known in North America) is a classic Konami arcade shoot-em-up that often gets unfairly overlooked. Not only does it feature the developer's wonderful, and instantly recognisable, style of visuals and sound of the time, but it also offers some great blasting action and some original ideas in a genre usually swamped in predictability. Essentially a vertical scrolling shmup, Jackal has one significant difference that separates it from your standard Fireshark, 1943, or Raiden affairs - the ability to explore the stage at your own pace. After being dropped via parachute onto a beach, your two man team set off in their military jeep and, as you move vertically upwards, the screen scrolls with you. You can stop and move around at your leisure, with the screen following you to the left and right for a short distance should you move off the central path, and even backtrack a little way.

Retro Review - Mean Arenas (Amiga / CD32)

The Running (Pac) Man

Top down Maze games are one of the oldest and longest running video game staples. When Pac Man sent everyone maze-crazy in 1980, there followed a decade long tsunami of clones, rip offs and cheap imitators, especially for the home computer systems of the time. With the advent of the 90's, it seemed that these simple arcade eat-em-ups had become stale and developers moved on, but there were a few notable exceptions. While the 16-bit consoles only received a few Pac Man inspired games; such as Zoom and Mr Do, Commodore's Amiga got its mitts on a fair few, thanks to its more homebrew nature, and cheaper disk based format. Most notable of these Pac Man spin-offs is Mean Arenas, which blends dot collecting and enemy avoiding with a deadly game show theme 'borrowed' from cheesy 80's action flick, The Running Man, or Robotron 2048 follow up, Smash TV.

Review - Final Freeway 2R (Android)

Magical Sound Shower

Sega's Outrun is an arcade classic, and a major player in the evolution of the arcade racer. Yu Suzuki's  high speed coin-op featured sprite scaling, to give a real sense of speed, and coupled it with the iconic convertible red Ferrari and the glorious seaside roads to drive on. It also featured branching paths, which allowed the player to choose which route to take at the end of each stage simply by heading left or right, with each stage providing a different and colourful environment to race through.

Review - Artibeus (PC)

Artibeus is a simple indie game for the PC which tasks you with collecting fruits around a spooky castle. Oh, and you are a bat. A fruit bat maybe? (ho ho). Terrible jokes aside, the game is a 2D game that requires nothing more from you than using the arrow keys to move said bat around the single screen stages, nabbing all the fruit and avoiding the instant death enemies that float randomly around.

Retro Review - Elevator Action Returns (Arcade)

A sequel done right!

The original Elevator Action from 1983 is often hailed as a coin-op classic, up there with the likes of Dig Dug, Galaga, and Donkey Kong, but personally I have never really cared for it. With bland visuals, a slow pace, and incredibly repetitive gameplay, I have always found it a bit, y'know, boring. This is certainly something that I can't level at Taito's 1994 sequel, which took the basic template set in the original and enhanced and improved upon everything to a huge degree. It may have taken over a decade for it to appear, but Elevator Action Returns is bigger, badder and much, much better.

Retro Review - Mopiranger (MSX)

The strangely titled Mopiranger is classic top down, arcade style game clearly based on the exploits of a certain yellow dot-munching circle. Coming out on the slightly obscure MSX system back in 1983, Mopiranger was one of many Konami titles to grace the platform, and contains the developer's usual high level of charm and playability.

Coin-Op Classics - Three Wonders (Capcom - 1991)

Capcom Threesome!

Three Wonders is an arcade game by Capcom that lives up to its moniker by featuring not one. Not two. Not three. No, wait. Three (sorry). Three games for the price of one. For your shiny quarter / twenty pence you could choose from either Midnight Wanderers, Chariots or, the bizarrely named, Don't Pull, each one offering a very different gaming experience, and - unlike many other x-in-1 games - each one could easily have been released as its own arcade cabinet. 

REVIEW - Waimanu (Nintendo DS & GBA Homebrew)

Flightless wonder

I'm a sucker for any game featuring penguins (or ducks for that matter). I don't know why, but from Penguin Adventures on MSX and Penguin Land on the Master System, to the gluttonous shenanigans of Yume Penguin Monogatari on the Famicom, I have found the flightless fowl to bring a delightfully cute air to any game. Waimanu - named after a prehistoric form of penguin - continues this trend by featuring a super cute blue penguin with an apparent affliction of gigantism, such is the monsterous proportions of his forehead. Despite this handicap, he still manages to star in his very own homebrew puzzle game on the Nintendo DS and, more recently believe it or not, the Gameboy Advance. Waimanu is a single screen puzzler with a top down maze view, much like the original Sega penguin arcade game Pengo, released in 1982, in which you must push blocks of ice - and later bales of hay, or rocks , depending on the backdrop - into the enemy blobs that patrol the maze. Pushing a block will cause it to slide in that direction until it hits another block or the sides of the maze and, should any enemies stray into its path they will be squished - the annilhilation of all on-screen foes resulting in victory.

REVIEW - Donkey Me : Raiders of the Lost Ark (PC)

I hate snakes!

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Well, if that is the case then Donkey Me must surely be on its knees with a mouthful of the original Donkey Kong arcade game, as it's so close to Nintendo's giant Ape's 1980 adventure that I am surprised Nintendo's lawyers haven't tried to shut down the developer's site. I am glad that this hasn't happened, though, as Donkey Me is a fantastic homage to the original platform game, but also manages to inject its own identity by expanding on the original formula and adding the graphical style and sounds of the fantastic Indiana Jones movies (so that would be Lucasfilms' lawyers added to the mix then).

REVIEW - Volgarr The Viking (PC)

I do enjoy a good hack and slash adventure, and have done since I first clapped my eyes on Taito's epic Rastan coin-op way back when I was a wee nipper. Navigating a 2D fantasy world, wielding a mighty sword to do battle with hideous beasts has always had an extremely appealing lure. As much as I enjoy my platforming action involving cute anthropomorphic characters, bright sunny forests to explore and coins / apples / gems (delete as appropriate) to collect, there is something captivating about a darker realm, with volcanoes, temples, graveyards and dragon's lairs. Rastan still remains one of my favourite arcade games of all time, and while many games have attempted to reuse this winning formula, I have never found anything to beat it for satisfying my 2D hack and slash itch. So it was with gratuitous levels of excitement that I approached Volgarr the Viking, after all, it has all the correct ingredients to match or even (gasp) beat Rastan as the chop-em-up 2D platformer of choice.

REVIEW - Maximus Action Carnage (PC)

War is Hell

Maximus Action Carnage is a amusingly titled retro shoot-em-up from Bruno R. Marcos, author of the impressive Arcade Game Studio - a program that allows users to create their very own arcade style games. A vertically scrolling shoot-em-up (sorry, Shmup) with a war theme, MAC is clearly based on Capcom's classic 1985 coin-op hit, Commando. The year is 1942 and the Japanese Army have invaded and conquered South-East Asia. With the Allied forces retreating or having surrendered to the Japanese, it is down to one last soldier, a man who refuses to give in, who refuses to stop fighting. That man is you, Maximus Malone.

REVIEW - Pac-Man Championship Edition DX + (XBLA)

Wakka Wakka Wakka

Still officially one of the best games on XBLA, as voted by me, Pac-Man Championship Edition DX (Phew!) is one the greatest updates to a classic game ever created, as well as being more addictive than the tastiest of crack rocks. I have ploughed many, many hours into the 2010 release, shunning such trivial necessities such as sleep and food in order to spend hour upon hour munching dots and ghosts to a psytrance soundtrack. Now, 3 years later, we have some fresh new DLC to devour like the gluttonous Pac-Man whores we all are. 

Review - Verminian Trap (PC)

Here is another new arcade style game from the talented Locomalito. I am a huge fan of his work as his games take me back to the smokey arcades I spent a great many hours in during my youth, thanks to the retro aesthetics that perfectly ape the look and sound of classic coin-ops like Ghosts 'N Goblins and 1943. His most recent releases, including the excellent Gaurodan, have been old school shoot-em-ups, and now he turns his talents to a top down maze blaster.