Retro Gamer

DARRAN JONES It’s Hugo, after I fell in love with him while playing Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike. Expertise: Juggling a gorgeous wife, two beautiful girls and an award-winning magazine, all under one roof! Currently playing: Trauma Center: Second Opinion Favourite game of all time: Strider ANDY SALTER I don’t really have a favourite character, but the first character I played as was Blanka, probably because he looked the strangest. Expertise: Modding games, no ‘vanilla’ versions for me, thanks! Currently playing: Total War: Rome Remastered… Modded of course Favourite game of all time: Rome: Total War ANDREW FISHER M Bison/Vega from Street Fighter II, after years of perfecting his Psycho Crusher. Expertise: Forty years of gaming, from Commodore 64 to Switch. Currently playing: Katamari Damacy REROLL Favourite game of all time: Wizball TIM EMPEY I always enjoyed destroying Darran with Alex (and with Yun too) back…

Few games have seeped into popular culture like Capcom’s Street Fighter, from appearances on multiplex screens, to mentions in everything from Family Guy to The Simpsons. While it didn’t have the most auspicious of beginnings, its sequel tore up the fighting game rulebook and set standards for years to come. We’ve been lucky then to not only quiz Capcom developers, but also speak to the people whose lives have been touched by the iconic series, from other developers to blog writers and tournament players. The reach of Capcom’s series outdoes even Dhalsim’s and its impact on the genre and gaming in general hits harder than any of Ryu’s fireballs. It’s quite simply in a class of its own and the incoming release of Street Fighter 6 shows that interest in the…

War and conflict have been themes for videogames since practically the birth of the medium itself. From early titles like Tank and Space Invaders to modern releases like Call Of Duty and Splatoon, gamers love to attack each other, whether it’s with digital replicas of real-life weaponry, or fantastical armaments. One person who is well aware of this fascination is Ian Kikuchi the senior curator (historian) of Second World War and mid 20th century at Imperial War Museums and the curator of a new exhibition called War Games: Real Conflicts | Virtual Worlds | Extreme Entertainment. “The idea to do an exhibition about war and videogames came to me while working on an earlier IWM exhibition about movies and war cinema, back in 2016,” Ian says. “Just like films, games are…

I am old enough to remember when Sunday was so boring it physically hurt. Actual pain caused by boredom. Growing up in the Seventies may look glamorous on those retro TV shows but honestly the Seventies sucked. Sundays were the worst. EVERYTHING was shut. This is not an exaggeration. Literally everything, churches to one side, was closed. If you needed bread or milk, tough. Should have got it Saturday. Even the petrol stations were shut. And to make matters worse, TV was awful as well. Antiques Roadshow, Songs Of Praise and Bullseye. Shoot me now. This Sunday malaise was lifted significantly when we got our first computer, the much-maligned and underrated Dragon 32. Kids around the country breathed a sigh of relief when computers became more common. At last – there…

This year marks the 20th anniversary of Super Mario Sunshine. It tends to be the one most overlooked when considering the history of the Mario series, but having gone back to it recently I’ve concluded it deserves better than that. It’s much like Super Mario Bros 2 in that it looks, sounds and smells like a Mario game… while introducing a unique central gameplay conceit that isn’t exactly universally loved. Whereas Super Mario Bros 2 (we can argue whether it’s even a legitimate Mario game some other time) featured vegetable-lobbing… Sunshine introduced the world to FLUDD – a forerunner, in many respects, to Nintendo’s own Splatoon. I’m sure you’re all familiar with the idea, but Mario’s main goal in Sunshine was to clean the island of Delfino of toxic slime, by…

In the last year, WAVE Game Studios has been troubling the wallets of Dreamcast owners with high-quality physical releases of games such as Intrepid Izzy, Postal and Shadow Gangs, and has even produced the first Dreamcast demo disc in 20 years for Sega Powered magazine. We spoke to Daniel Crocker, who runs the publisher with his brother Nick, to find out more about its rapid ascent. How did you and Nick come to form WAVE Game Studios? We started off in the homebrew scene in about 2003, we were modders for Senile Team’s Beats Of Rage engine. So the indie scene was always something that we were aware of and any time a new release would come out, we would grab it because [it was] something for our beloved system. But the…