Retro Gamer

DARRAN JONES Tearing through Cloudy Highland with Risky Ride blaring, as it reminds me of when I went on a birdwatching trip to Scotland. Expertise: Juggling a gorgeous wife, two beautiful girls and an award-winning magazine, all under one roof! Currently playing: The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time Favourite game of all time: Strider ANDY SALTER As someone who doesn’t really play racing games, or visit the arcades, or owns an Xbox it will be no surprise that I’ve never played this. Expertise: Modding games, no ‘vanilla’ versions for me, thanks! Currently modding: Kenshi Universal Wasteland Expansion Mod Favourite game of all time: Rome: Total War although I guess it’s the Remastered edition now. PAUL ROSE With any OutRun it’s about those endless blue skies for me. Expertise: Winging it Currently playing: The…

I absolutely adore OutRun 2. It’s not only my favourite game in the series, but my favourite arcade racer of all time. I first discovered it at Bournemouth Pier’s arcade and its insane powersliding and exciting visuals completely floored me. I would often play it at lunchtimes and I was lucky enough to review Sumo Digital’s excellent Xbox adaptation when I worked on games™. I still play Coast 2 Coast regularly to this day (Risky Ride is my song of choice) and it’s a game that always manages to make me smile. What a delight then to not only feature it on this month’s cover, but to complement it with an incredible 32-page book that contains no less than 40 amazing Sega arcade games – from Out Run and Virtua…

Back for its second year, One Life Left, also known as OLL, brought together gamers from across the country for a weekend of entertainment, competitions, exhibits and plenty of hands-on retro fun. The convention took place at Norwich’s Norfolk Showground between 15 and 16 April with the aim to bring a wide variety of gamers, developers and exhibits together while celebrating games old and new. Jon Gage, the event’s head organiser, told us that, “Games are for everyone and while people will have their own favourite games and genres, a physical convention brings everyone together to celebrate this shared interest. We made a conscious effort to showcase as much variety as we could at OLL ’23, including both retro and modern indie titles, and both smaller and larger content creator…

One of our favourite moments from February’s Nintendo Direct was the announcement that Baten Kaitos and its prequel were being updated for Nintendo’s Switch. Despite receiving a fair amount of critical acclaim on release, both titles flew under the radar of many gamers and the second game, Baten Kaitos: Origins, didn’t even receive a European release, staying exclusive to Japan and the US. “The character design, background music and other aspects of Baten Kaitos were developed by very talented creators [Monolith Soft and tri-Crescendo], and the RPG series is highly acclaimed by customers as a masterpiece,” Koji Nakajima, who is producer on the remaster, proudly tells us. It makes sense then that Bandai Namco would want to give the series another release, particularly when you consider how big the Switch’s…

I am very late to the Sea Of Thieves party, but what a party it is. I’d been aware of it for a while. I’d seen podcaster and streamer Sean Bell had been playing it and labelling his streams Sea Of Friends. A really joyous and gentle stream that did have real moments of tension when some sweaty kids would arrive and do everything they could to sink The Good Ship Bell. As a viewer it was thrilling, I now know as a captain or member of the crew, it is bloody annoying. Actor James Buckley also played the game online. It looked ridiculously hard to me. How do you know where to get the skull that activates the doo-dah that unleashes the ghosts that then fires the cannon? About…

Unless you’ve been sleeping with your head beneath a supercomputer mainframe for the past 12 months, it is unlikely to have escaped your attention that the AI apocalypse is finally upon us. Rather than the Hollywood version that we’ve been conditioned to believe will happen, the true war with the machines is far more insidious, beginning with stealing work away from artists, writers and other creative people. Allegedly, I’m a creative person by trade, so I suppose I should be more scared than I am. Certainly, I had a wobble at the start of this year where I began to wonder whether I’d lose writing gigs due to AI. However, then I had a word with myself and realised I’d been here before. Lest we forget, I used to work…