Retro Gamer No. 233

DARRAN JONES I’m going for the WipEout Omega Collection because the VR update for it is sensational. Expertise: Jugging a gorgeous wife, two beautiful girls and an award-winning magazine, all under one roof! Currently playing: Silent Hill: Shattered Memories Favourite game of all time: Strider ANDY SALTER Don’t think I’ve played a WipEout game, maybe a demo. Sure it was a racing game that involved combat but I never really got excited by it. 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 ANDREW FISHER WipEout on Saturn. I have only played the early titles, and I love the Tim Wright (Cold Storage) music on this one. Expertise: Forty years of gaming, from Commodore 64 to Switch Currently playing: Super Seymour Saves The Planet Favourite game of all time:…

It has taken me 48 years to realise I’ve never been cool and I’ve never been hip. I never frequented nightclubs much as a youngster and you’d have to pay me to embrace dance music – clubbing just never appealed to me. Unlike myself, the original WipEout is cool and impossibly hip with it and its dance-enhanced soundtrack saw clever marketing bods showcasing it to eager 20-somethings in UK nightclubs during the Nineties. It wasn’t just coolness or clever marketing that allowed Psygnosis’ game to soar as effortlessly as its anti-grav vehicles did on WipEout’s crazily constructed tracks, though, it was a bloody good game and it was succeeded by some bloody good sequels as well. In addition to revisiting the original WipEout and its many sequels, we also converse with the…

The last five years have been an interesting time for Sega fans, as the company has been actively breathing new life into some of its dormant series. While some of these are internal projects, like the Sakura Wars revival or Virtua Fighter 5: Ultimate Showdown, plenty of others have been handled by external studios, such as the Panzer Dragoon remake by Forever Entertainment. Really getting into the spirit of raising the dead, the publisher and its development subsidiary MegaPixel Studio have turned their attention to The House Of The Dead. The lightgun series last shambled onto consoles in 2012, and the original 1996 game has been effectively dead and buried since its Saturn and PC ports in the late-Nineties. That arcade classic has now been exhumed, rebuilt from the ground…

Blaze has announced a new Game Of The Month scheme for Evercade VS owners. For the remainder of 2022, new retro-inspired indie games will be delivered for free via the console’s Wi-Fi connection, with the available games switched each month. These are available for a limited time only and you won’t get to keep your saves, and you can’t play them on the Evercade handheld. However, all ten games will be compiled on the Indie Heroes Collection 2 cartridge later in the year, allowing permanent ownership for both handheld and VS owners. April’s game, if you missed it, was Tapeworm Disco Puzzle.…

Movie website Deadline recently broke the news of a new Sega movie project, this time based on the Streets Of Rage series. Derek Kolstad, the creator of the John Wick franchise and writer of Nobody, reportedly wrote a script for the adaptation on spec. The project is also said to involve dj2 Entertainment, which produced both Sonic The Hedgehog movies, as well as Escape Artists which worked on The Equalizer franchise. The movie has yet to be officially announced, and no actors are currently known to have been cast for the film. We’ll keep an eye on this project. Who would you want to play Axel and Blaze in it?…

As I’m writing this, I’m looking out the window and it is a beautiful day. The sun is shining, it’s great T-Shirt temperature and everyone looks happy. It’s absolutely stunning. Meanwhile I’m indoors bashing this out. Before I started writing something that will hopefully tickle your pickle, I spent two hours typing up a 4,500-word case study for the counselling course I’m somehow close to finishing. A wonderful spring day and I’m sat at a computer indoors. This is not new. I’m taken back to middle school (I only recently found out that hardly anyone knows what a middle school is. It’s in between primary and proper big school. For the sake of this story, I’m ten). There was a computer club every lunchtime. You used to be able to rock up…