Retro Gamer 53 yomped on in a couple of weeks back, containing my six-page feature on Marble Madness (including an utterly gorgeous two-page spread showcasing the game’s six levels). Despite being a slight game (seasoned players can speed through the entire thing in about four minutes), it’s one of the prettiest arcade games ever released, and it no doubt influenced a slew of modern titles, such as the likes of Super Monkey Ball.

Designer Mark Cerny, who now largely works as a consultant in the industry, mostly on console titles, provided a great overview of how the game came to be. However, one of his insights that didn’t see print was the fact that Marble Madness, to his knowledge, has never before received the kind of feature found in this month’s Retro Gamer.

This got me thinking. Most other publications that dare to acknowledge retro gaming do so in a somewhat cursory manner, perhaps grudgingly giving over a couple of pages each month to a single classic title. And even when the results are worth reading (Edge’s coverage of retro titles has been of a typically high standard), you’re still only looking at 13 titles a year. With so many great games out there, created by people who, judging my those I’ve spoken to, are fast forgetting how the games ended up like they did, this just shows how important to gaming a title like Retro Gamer is.

For more on Retro Gamer, check out the brand-new Retro Gamer website. And for more on Marble Madness, check out Bernhard Kirsch’s excellent site.

I’m forever blowing (up) bubbles

I sometimes wonder whether the games industry has some kind of collective amnesia. That’s the only thing that explains how in an age where gamers feast heartily on fast-paced action-puzzlers (Zoo Keeper, Bejeweled, Meteos, the 54-billion Tetris variants), Magical Drop has been absent from consoles since 1999.

If you’re not familiar with the game, Magical Drop is a kind of reverse Columns crossed with a smattering of Bust-a-Move, tasking you with blowing up bubbles—lots of bubbles. They appear from the top of a well, menacingly jolting downwards periodically. The object of the game is to get your strange little clown to grab bubbles and stack lines of three or more like-coloured ones, whereupon they blow up. Like any action-puzzler worth its salt, cunning positioning of exploding bubbles leads to chains, which results in positively elephantine scores and your hapless opponent’s stack descending more rapidly.

Five titles have appeared in the series to date—three in the arcade (two on Neo Geo), and two home ports in 1999: Magical Drop F for PlayStation and the rather duff Magical Drop Pocket for Game Boy Color.

For me, the third game, the imaginatively titled Magical Drop III, remains the series high-point. The graphics are crystal clear, lacking the overdone effects of the later PlayStation game. And like Magical Drop F, it has a single-player story mode, with your little avatar faced with varied wells, offering new traps and features, such as blocks that only vanish when a certain number of chains have been formed.

This being a Japanese arcade title from the 1990s, some of the characters are a little dubiously designed (such as the various Anime-styled, scantily clad girls—although one at least plays atop a flying pig), but the concept and sheer fun of playing the game shines through any suspect presentation.

According to a swift bit of online research, G-mode currently holds the rights to the series, and has even helpfully added a large ‘contact’ button under the slightly ominous ‘Serious about licensing?’ bit on the relevant page of its website (so come on, publishers—what are you waiting for?). That said, this is alongside a chef-like cartoon character that’s either showing you how to press a button or emitting tiny red lasers from his forefinger. If the latter is the case and represents G-mode’s actual staff, I guess that explains why Magical Drop PSP and Magical Drop DS have yet to appear.

 

Taking a bow when your clothes are that flimsy = not a good plan.

This is a public service announcement

Feeling low? Life getting you down? Tired of being force-fed yet another pointless, dull and tedious brain-training game when looking for something great for your Nintendo DS? If so, you need Space Invaders Extreme!

Reviewed on this here site back in April, Space Invaders Extreme is out today in the UK, and you’re a total banana if you own a DS and don’t pick up a copy. (And if you’re from the US, you’re a double banana, seeing as you’ve already had over two weeks to get your copy.)

We now return you to your usual programming.

Can you play Last Ninja 2 on Wii? Shuriken!

In the second game of System 3’s once-lauded series, the last ninja finds himself mysteriously dumped in modern-day New York (well, the New York of 1988, hence the distinct lack of dozens of Starbucks). Once again, his mission is to defeat the evil shogun Kunitoki, with only his wits, weapons and a dreadful control method to aid him.

Plot-wise, this is the kind of high-concept garbage that makes for dodgy Hollywood movies (“Hey! Let’s put a caveman in 2008! No, wait! How about a rap star in the 1800s?”), but the juxtaposition of ninja and New York somehow works, resulting in the best title in the Last Ninja series.

The refined graphics go some way to help, and the variety of locations—Central Park, downtown, sewers, an opium factory, an office block—offer a sense of variety and real-world wonder that the original game and its sequel can’t match. Sonically, the game also appeals, with Matt Gray’s thumping SID tunes driving you on.

Where the game fails, much like the original, is in its lack of gameplay. Combat is tedious and borderline canned, and gauging distances for numerous fussy jumps is regularly made problematic by the isometric viewpoint. On the C64, this is bad enough, but Wii owners will likely find the game an exercise in frustration when playing using the Wii remote.

My advice is to leave your happy childhood memories of the game alone, along with those for things like Thundercats, Bagpuss and The A Team, which are also rubbish in the cold, harsh light of the modern day.

The Last Ninja 2 is available now on Virtual Console for 500 Wii points (£3.50ish). As Nebulus came out at the same time, you should get that instead. It was also glossy and visually exciting in the 1980s, but it happens to still be a decent game.

No, I’m the last ninja! No, I’m the last ninja! Etc.

It’s not easy bein’ green

Nebulus is cute. It has a cute little character, Pogo, who lives in a cute little world populated by cute little hostile nasties, and cute little sound effects accompany Pogo’s jaunts to the top of cylindrical towers that, for whatever reason, our bipedal frog-like chum has decided to rid his world of.

Don’t let this fool you, because if ever there’s a game that’ll make you want to smash a joystick to pieces (or your Wii, if you’re playing on Virtual Console), this is the one. And that’s because this game is hard.

The premise is simple: climb to the top of each tower via a maze of stairs, lifts and collapsing platforms. Once atop a tower, Pogo demolishes it (presumably, they aren’t well built; either that or Pogo hides extremely powerful explosives up his bottom), and you get to relax for a few seconds by playing a bonus game that finds the wee green guy catching fish using a high-tech submarine.

One might wonder: if Pogo has access to such technology, why not just hire a spaceship and blow the towers to pieces? But if he did that, we wouldn’t have this game. Instead, you’re lumbered with creeping slowly up the towers, ever mindful of the tight time-limit and the fact that absolute precision is required to pass many of Pogo’s adversaries.

This would all be fine if the game was utter rubbish—it could then be cast aside and you could get on with playing something a mite less frustrating. But the fact is that even 21 years after Nebulus first arrived on the C64, it’s still annoyingly captivating. You’re sucked in by the disorientating manner in which the towers are navigated (unlike most platform games, there are no edges—instead, Pogo moves ‘around’ the towers, which rotate in real-time on the screen, an effect that was astonishing at the time and still looks pretty today) and the utterly devious puzzles. And when you finally demolish one of the structures, you feel a true sense of achievement. Just don’t expect to get very far until half your joysticks are in tiny pieces.

Nebulus is available now on Virtual Console for 500 Wii points (about £3.50), and the sedatives you’ll need to calm yourself down after a few games are probably available from your GP.