Retro Spectives

Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow sits tucked away in the middle of 30 different Castlevania games.  First released for the Gameboy Advance in 2003, it takes strong inspiration from Symphony of the Night - yet is running on far weaker hardware.  It introduced the Soul System - where killing enemies grants you their powers - a mechanic so ingrained into popular games today that it's almost ubiquitous.  Y...

Catherine is a game about relationships, infidelity and the shackles of love. It’s also a game about pushing blocks. Released in 2011 by Atlus, Catherine initially appears to be the odd duck in the Persona developer’s catalogue. Characters in their 30s, real-time gameplay and a sub-hundred hour runtime. But a deeper look reveals many familiar themes such as order, chaos and the great lengths playe...

On the Retro Spectives Podcast we adore our survival games.  Every year when we do a cheat episode we find ourselves drawn to the games that force you to live on the edge.  Whether it's Pathologic, Rainworld or Resident Evil, we enjoy the pain and suffering of never having enough and managing those frustrating meters.   So it's no surprise that 11 Bit Studios 2018 smash hit Frostpunk caught our ey...

WIth the seventh year of the Retro Spectives Podcast officially done and dusted, it is once again time for our Mailbag Episode!  Every year we take the time to answer questions from our listeners about old games and new, our favourite beverages and the nature of the podcast itself.  Thank you so much to everyone who listens - you’re the reason we keep doing this all these years later. So, as is tr...

Warcraft II is one of the most influential RTS games of all time.  It brought the genre to the mainstream with insane sales, and set the standard for UI and tech trees for years to come.  Blizzard had cracked the code on what made RTS games tick, and it laid the groundwork for the classics that would come in its wake. But for all its influence, how much fun is Warcraft II to actually play today? ...

Yu-Gi-Oh!, along with Magic: The Gathering and Pokemon, is one of the original big 3 trading card games.  Starting its life as a Manga, then a tv series, the story about the card game eventually became a card game.  Since then Yugioh has morphed through many different iterations and is still going strong today, even if its present self doesn’t have much to do with its humble beginnings.  Nestled r...

Released towards the end of the Nintendo 64’s lifespan in 2000, Perfect Dark was the culmination of several years of FPS development on consoles.  After Rare released Goldeneye in 1997, they wanted to take another spin at the formula, but this time with an original IP.  Enter Perfect Dark, featuring many of the cornerstones of FPS design that defined Goldeneye, but far more refined. The game featu...

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is without a doubt one of the most influential video games ever made.  Unlike some titles that struggled with the transition to 3D, Zelda absolutely smashed it, setting the blueprint for what successful open world level design looked like for many years to come. It introduced (or popularised) many mechanics, including lock-on, c-button item selection and even a...

Resident Evil changed everything.  When originally released in 1996, what was once a niche genre for enthusiasts was now a blockbuster staple in every second home.  All of a sudden people were craving zombies, horrifying monsters and disturbing themes.  It was so popular that Square, far more known for its more traditional JRPGs, decided to throw its hat in the ring and make Parasite Eve. On the s...

Director Fumeto Ueda has been hailed by many as somewhat of an auteur of the gaming landscape. A creative whose style embraces minimalist desolation. Known best for his work on Shadow of the Colossus, Ueda's directorial debut took place in 2001 with Ico, a boy-meets-girl action-adventure released for the PlayStation 2. Born with horns in a small village, Ico was seen as a great misfortune and was...

Third person cover based shooters were all the rage in the late 2000s.  Unveiled in 2003 in Killswitch  and later popularised with Gears of War, they became an essential part of most third person action games.  Coming in 2010, Vanquish sought to revolutionise this paradigm by giving the player an omnidirectional slide boost to move around the battlefield in an attempt to energise its plodding paci...

Video games usually place you in the role of the plucky adventurer.  You are the wizard, the warrior, or the rogue, and it's your duty (and often destiny) to save the world.  On your journey, one of the most important things to do is to acquire more powerful gear to make your character stronger.  But who exactly are you buying that gear from? Enter: Recettear.  First released in 2007 (and later 20...

In 1998 Bioware changed the gaming landscape with Baldur’s Gate, a Dungeons and Dragons inspired adventure.  Taking cues from second edition D&D and the many stories written about it, Bioware wrote a low level adventure that jammed everything they could find inside it.  They attempted to copy mage spells directly from the manual, and even added in famous characters like Drizzt.  It was exactly wha...

The Ace Attorney games were an insane success, far beyond what Capcom could have predicted.  After 4 mainline games in the series though, it was time for something new, and creator Shu Takumi refused to do anything normal.  With a desire to explore characters in a far deeper way than was possible with Ace Attorney, he decided the only way to go about this was to have the main character be a ghost....

Space Sims used to be a vibrant and well populated genre.  Back in the 90s they command shelf real estate, right next to the latest and greatest RTS and Point and Click Adventure games.  Coming at the tail end of this era was Tachyon: The Fringe, released in 2000 by Novalogic games, well known for their regular flight sims and the Delta Force series.  You play as Jake Logan, a freelancing mercenar...

With another year done and dusted, Pat and James crack open another batch of listener questions.  After curveballs like Killer 7 and Deadly Premonition , these should be a breeze. Right ..?  On this episode, we discuss: What are the best - and worst - smelling video game levels? Can you tell us the story of how y’all met and decided to start this podcast?  Was the fear of Baldur’s Gate 2 something...

But can it run Crysis?  This was the motto that surrounded every single PC build for literal years after the release of the game in 2007.  Crytek were not satisfied with what they had achieved with Far Cry in 2004, and decided to push graphical hardware to its absolute limits with their brand new and shiny game.  And boy, did they succeed, with a poorly optimised but breathtakingly gorgeous game. ...

After their magnum opus that was Resident Evil 1, Capcom were not going to sit on their heels.  Coming out just two years after the first in 1998, Resident Evil 2 sought to have everything the original had and much, much more.  It connected its two character’s stories in far more meaningful ways, increased the size of each player's inventory (and their respectives arsenals) and had more cinematic...

The Legend of Zelda is perhaps the most iconic video game series of all time.  Boasting 19 mainline entries, and an endless swathe of critical acclaim and awards, it's hard to find someone who hasn’t at least heard of the action/adventure story of Link and Zelda.   It all began back in 1986 with the release of the first game for the Famicom in Japan.  The game begins immediately with an open ended...

Killer7 is one weird game.  Developed in tandem by Grasshopper Manufacture and Capcom and first released in 2005, its very existence as a game defies description.  Within moments of starting, you’re placed into a world with talking bondage ghosts, a TV channel that drains your blood, and abstract puzzles that would fit right into Resident Evil.  Combine this with a cinematic third person slow rail...

System Shock 2 is considered by many to be the finest immersive sim ever made.  Released in 1999 in a coventure by Looking Glass Studios and Irrational Games, it sought to combine the classic 3D dungeon crawling of the original with pen and paper inspired RPG systems.  While resource management and exploration were still a key part of the experience, you were now restricted in what you could initi...

Over the years, we’ve played games from pretty much every genre under the sun, but there is one that is notably missing - the racing sim.  We’ve dabbled with arcade racers like Burnout 3, and have played several kart racers - Diddy Kong and F-Zero GX to name a couple.  But this is the first time we’re trying to learn how to actually drive a racing card under somewhat realistic conditions. And what...

Hitman: Blood Money, first released in 2006 by Eidos, is considered by many to be the best Hitman game ever made.  After the first few games played around with novel ideas and concepts to mixed success, Blood Money honed in on the formulae of specific, small and dense environments filled with ‘accidental’ scripted opportunities to murder your target.  Gone are the long and slow walking through the...

Final Fantasy VII is a landmark title not only for the JRPG genre, but for all video games.  First released in 1997 and developed by Square, it took the format of the previous games and brought them to life with 3D models and environments.  Featuring an ambitious and creative setting, a complicated plot with intrigue and a seemingly deep and engaging combat system, the game seemed to be firing on...

Rain World is a game that was released to very mixed reviews.  With a whopping 59 on Metacritic, it was panned for its controls, difficulty, tedium and general obtuseness.  But take a gander at the community reviews and you get a very different picture. The thing is, Rain World can at times be all the things that its critics hate so much that they give it a lower score than your generic AAA Ubisof...