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.

If you’re a writer for magazines covering new-fangled games systems, your biggest worry regarding interviews is whether your potential interviewees will talk to you. With retro-gaming publications, things aren’t so simple. Before you can get to the all-important ‘will they or won’t they?’, detective work is often in order, to track down people who worked on classic games.

In my experience, potential interviewees fall into four camps. The most common is the ‘enthusiastic yes’, often from those still working in the industry, but sometimes from people who just have great memories of it. Guys like Jon Hare (Sensible Software), Alexey Pajitnov (Tetris) and Alan McNeil (Berzerk!) particularly stand out from my work for Retro Gamer as people willing to go above and beyond to talk about their old games.

The second group is the ‘bewilderment’ one. You track someone down, ask them to do an interview, and they act like several kinds of excitingly exotic fruit have simultaneously started growing out of your ears. “Are you serious?” is a question I’ve been asked more than once, although the people who ask that usually end up joining the first group, happy to wax lyrical about their classic creations.

The third group contains those games creators (or ex-games creators) who simply have no interest in reliving the old days, for whatever reason. It’s pretty clear some guys got totally screwed back in the day, and many simply don’t want to dredge up bad memories. Others simply haven’t got the time nor the inclination to talk to some strange British guy with an obsession for games titles a third of their way to a bus pass. Thus, sadly, the chances of making-of features on Paradroid, Hunter’s Moon and River Raid bounded majestically into the distance, never to return, along with the time it had taken to track down the relevant parties.

The fourth group, however, is perhaps even more frustrating. Often, a quick Google can provide contact details of the people I want to talk with. If not, contacts of contacts or cunning use of various social networking websites often does the job. Sometimes, though, every avenue is exhausted, and you just have to give up. Unless, of course, you have a blog, which might be read by people who might just know the whereabouts of people you’d like to talk to.

And so here’s a quick list of the top-three people I’ve been trying to track down for a number of hours that’s now grown so large that it’s just not funny any more.

1. Mervyn J. Estcourt. This is the big one for me. This guy wrote the utterly fantastic 3D Deathchase (merely ‘Deathchase’ to its friends) on the Speccy, which, to sane people, is also known as the Best Spectrum Game Ever. It finds you hurtling through a digital forest, Return of the Jedi style, hunting down bad guys. Sadly, I’ve never quite been able to catch Mervyn himself.

2. Pete Harrap. My calling Pete a sadist in issue 28 of Retro Gamer actually irked a couple of people, but it was meant in the nicest possible way. And let’s face it, there can’t be too many people who’d create a game (Monty on the Run) that forced you to select an ‘escape kit’ from a fairly large list of somewhat random items, and then have an indestructible and stationary deadly monster right at the very end of the game if you happened to pick the wrong item. Gah! However, Pete’s a genius, and I always preferred Monty to Miner Willy.

3. John Van Ryzin. Ex-Activision guru John Van Ryzin created the utterly amazing H.E.R.O., my favourite game. This classic title tasks you with exploring caverns to rescue trapped miners, all the while blasting paths through lava walls and avoiding the various beasties that pepper the levels.

So, if you know any of these people, please point them towards this blog, and maybe—just maybe—they’ll be interested in talking to me. (Please note: under no circumstances should any private contact details be sent to me, although I guess work ones would be OK.)

Retro Gamer 52 plopped through the letterbox this weekend, and it’s something of a belter. Although there are a number of highlights, the eight-page making-of about the utterly lovely Star Wars arcade game (the vector one with the scratchy samples) is the standout for me.

Although I’m a tad jealous that Darran Jones grabbed that one for himself (well, there have to be some perks for being editor, right?), I also got to write about a classic arcade game: tile-based action-puzzler Klax. This game was devised by Mark Pierce, who now heads the excellently named Super Happy Fun Fun; Mark clearly still has boundless enthusiasm for arcade games, and was a pleasure to talk to.

His game is, in some ways, an oddity. Similarly abstract to Tetris, Klax spawned a slew of home conversions, which I had great fun working through. (Most bizarre: the top-down Game Boy version from 1990, which is actually less advanced than the impressive Atari 2600 effort.) For a while, I wondered why Klax has largely been forgotten, bar an appearance on Midway Arcade Treasures and as half of the dreadful Marble Madness/Klax GBA double-pack from 2005. The answer, I decided, is this: Klax is hair-pullingly, teeth-grindingly hard.

Tetris pretty much lulls you in and takes a while to go crazy, and even relative novices can go for a good while on Zoo Keeper before it overwhelms. Klax, on the other hand, requires ninja tile-juggling skills to progress any distance into the game. One only wonders what Mark Pierce and his partner in crime Dave Akers were like at the time the game was released—presumably, happily completing Defender blindfolded and one-handed.

That all said, the difficulty level didn’t stop me spending a few happy hours, erm, ‘researching’. Perhaps I need toughening up anyway, since one of the games I’m going to be writing about in the not-too-distant is one of the toughest arcade games of the lot.