Retro Gamer No. 220

DARRAN JONES Playing R-Type Delta and feeling overjoyed that one of my favourite franchises had successfully made the jump to 3D. Expertise: Juggling a gorgeous wife, two beautiful girls, a SNES-loving cousin and an award-winning magazine, all under one roof! Currently playing: Mr Driller: Drill Land Favourite game of all time: Strider ANDY SALTER I’ve only played R-Type on the ZX Spectrum and the main thing I remember was being prompted to put the key bindings in at the start Expertise: Modding games, no ‘vanilla’ versions for me, thanks! Currently playing: M&B2: Bannerlord… Modded of course Favourite game of all time: Rome: Total War GRAEME MASON Seeing those amazing Spectrum screenshots of the original game in Crash magazine before marvelling at the game itself. A technical marvel by Bob Pape. Expertise: Adjusting the tape azimuth with a screwdriver Currently playing: Galencia Favourite game of…

I can still remember the first time I played Irem’s R-Type. It was in a small arcade next to an indoor market in Poole and it was wedged in between a couple of cabs, one of which was Double Dragon. It had a unique aesthetic style that immediately separated it from other shooters I had played and I quickly fed the new cab some money. It didn’t take long for me to lose my available ships, but I fed more cash in, impressed by the novel charge system and the great and varied power-ups you could collect. Eventually I was able to reach the boss we now know as Dobkeratops and what a marvellous monstrosity it was. Irem’s game had a distinct biomechanical style that immediately reminded me of the Alien…

([A-Z])%hen it comes to TV shows about videogames, there are fondly remembered ones, and then there is GamesMaster. From 1992 to 1998, Patrick Moore’s titular character would issue challenges to wide-eyed kids and celebrity guests alike, all of whom would battle it out for a coveted Golden Joystick. At the head of it all, the charismatic double-entendre devotee Dominik Diamond assumed hosting duties for almost all of the series’ run. The show transcended the games to become a piece of the Nineties pop culture landscape in its own right, and now Read-Only Memory is publishing GamesMaster: The Oral History, a book in which Dominik Diamond threads together memories of the show with interviews from over 40 people including the cast, crew and guests, to charting the ups and downs of…

I did it. Remember the other month I was saying how I had all these old consoles that had been modded and I never used them? A GameCube with a flash drive, a Nintendo 64 that had been upgraded to HDMI, an original Xbox with a hard drive installed, a Dreamcast with HD output and a packed memory card. They were all just sat there under the TV making me feel guilty. I bought them with the intention of streaming them. Except I didn’t. I didn’t even play them. I just cursed them every time I looked behind the telly and saw the absolute mess of cables and plugs lying there. I got rid of them. Well, not all of them. Two of them. The GameCube and Xbox. Gone. Both sold…

It was the French composer Claude Debussy who said, “Music is the space between the notes.” In short: without music being given the room to breathe, you’re left with a cacophony of noise. I don’t know if any of the rest of you used to experience this, but often older games for me spread far beyond the boundary of what you see on the screen, precisely because they were more minimalist. The restrictions that have long been swept away by technological progress is precisely what made them so vivid and iconic. Almost all the games that have stayed with me through my life are the ones where so much of their promise was merely hinted at. I’ve played all the Call Of Duty games, but even if you pointed an AK-47 at…

Blaze Entertainment’s Evercade was our favourite console launch of 2020 and proved you didn’t need the latest tech to deliver a great gaming experience. It now has a new home console planned called the Evercade VS and Blaze’s managing director Andrew Byatt and marketing manager Sean Cleaver are here to tell you all about it. When will Evercade VS launch? Andrew Byatt: The Evercade VS is going to be available from 3 November 2021 and available for pre-order from May 28. The pricing will start from £89.99/$99.99/€99.99 and will be similar to how the handheld was released, with a starter and premium pack variant and a special collector’s pack with Funstock. What can you tell us about the new arcade releases? Sean Cleaver: We’re delivering on the promise of arcade titles. The new arcade…