Retro Gamer No. 224

DARRAN JONES Sin And Punishment. I remember taking it into work and some members of gamesTM didn’t believe it was running on an N64. Expertise: Juggling a gorgeous wife, two beautiful girls, a SNES-loving cousin and an award-winning magazine, all under one roof! Currently playing: Magic: The Gathering Arena Favourite game of all time: Strider ANDY SALTER Never really played much N64 back in the Nineties and I’d already started moving away from console gaming due to the PC. I guess GoldenEye 007 was technically impressive… for a console game. 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 Looking back I don’t think GoldenEye 007 was a huge technological leap but I remember thinking it looked great. Maybe I was taken by the…

Retro Games wasn’t fooling anyone when it teased an image that looked suspiciously like an Amiga 500 back in October 2020. That tease became a reality in early August with the reveal of its THEA500 Mini, a brand-new miniature system based on Commodore’s popular Amiga 500. Despite having worked on the new system for the past year, not to mention producing THEVIC20 and working on updates for THEC64, Retro Games’ chief technology officer Chris Smith revealed to us that this new system has been planned for quite a while now. “We had been planning the project for several years and had already secured the various licences needed to be able to start the project.” Commodore’s 16-bit machine is incredibly popular, but it’s not the only loved system in the Commodore range.…

David Pleasance will be no stranger to Commodore fans, as he was a prolific figure during the company’s Amiga years. The former managing director of Commodore UK was behind the extremely successful Batman Pack for the 16-bit computer and published a Kickstarter-funded book in 2020 called Commodore: The Inside Story, which effortlessly doubled its original funding goal thanks to over 1,200 loyal backers. David is back with a brand-new book which promises to be another first-hand account of David’s time during the company’s final tumultuous years and what happened once the Amiga name was sold off. But what was the reasoning behind David making such a book in the first place? “Because I discovered there was an incredibly intriguing story that needed to be told and that our community was hungry…

There are so many computer game podcasts out there, how do you choose a good one? Well, I am happy to give you my faves. Firstly, How Did This Get Played? is a joy and kept me sane during lockdown. Heather, Nick and Matt play terrible and weird games and chat about them. It’s really that simple. Sweary, funny and a real joy. I’ve tried flirting with the hosts online to try and get an invite but alas, it seems my time on I’m A Celebrity stealing strawberries means nothing to those guys. I have given up debasing myself on social media and accepted I shall just have to be a listener. Those guys have standards. Some people that have zero standards are the hosts of The Computer Game Show podcast. It…

One of the greatest conveniences of living in this era is being able to fill in gaps from our formative years. For better or worse, with all music, movies, TV and games essentially on tap, over the past decade or so I’ve been able to return to things I half-remembered, or – better still – those I’d heard about, but never experienced first-hand. Sometimes, this is a mistake. Plenty of TV shows and games have failed to stand the test of time. The big octopus thing in Doctor Who’s The Power Of Kroll had been remembered by me as a feat of visual effects on a par with anything CGI could muster. The reality… not so much. It has been similar when revisiting many old games. Often, I’ll find that modern TVs or…

Fans of retro magazines are well catered for at the moment. Crash, FREEZE64, Amiga Addict and Ninty Fresh are just a few of the fine magazines available and now another contender has entered the ring. Editor Tim Hugall, along with Sam Forrester and Simon Pike, explain why they felt the time was right to launch Sega Mania. Where did the idea of Sega Mania originate? Tim Hugall: The original idea was a book focused on my personal gaming experiences growing up and Sega was a huge part of that. I love writing but due to family commitments I could never get away with long drawn-out writing sessions. A magazine seemed so much more manageable (I was wrong) and would also be open to collaboration. Although I’ve worked on many forms of media…