Galacticon, by Radin Games, is a modern-day arcade game, but for home systems. It’s got a great look for what you’d like to see for one of these. There are obvious elements of Joust with the platforms, and gravity being on, causing your guy to fall to the ground unless action is taken. There’s some Defender in it as well, due to how the horizontal shooting works and feels.
What aspects of design and gameplay are necessary for a game to create a “new retro” vibe? Pixel graphics mostly, for me. I recall the hype for the Sega Dreamcast, with its ability to play Virtua Fighter 3. I think Virtua Fighter and its associated sequels are perfectly fine games, but VF looked like shit compared to Mortal Kombat II, with its pixel graphics. Don’t hit me for this brave yet controversial take. Galacticon has chunky pixels and built-in scanlines, it is better than how anyone remembers things looked in the 1980s. Enough time has passed where I would get a nostalgic feeling for large, early polygons, but the art direction of Galacticon makes it an all-timer, for style.
Galacticon has also given me thoughts on what modern retro games, distributed as software only, can’t quite do: the sheer impossibility of the variety of controls. Walking into “Time-Out” at the mall meant that at one point I saw a game with handlebars from a bike, a roller and a steering wheel with multiple buttons to kill people driving. I can imagine Galacticon showing up in glory in an arcade with some unique control that would make the cabinet difficult to move and incredibly valuable 40 years later.
In terms of gameplay – the humans are the bad guys in this one, everyone is sick of the humans. You find yourself flying around the screen, shooting the guys on space jet skis, but also rounding up species of three different colors. You then take the guys you capture to a kind of jail. There’s room for four of them in a cell, and three cells per level from what I have seen, and you have to be a little careful to not let one species overwhelm in numbers their enemy species, because if they do, they’ll kill them. This is exactly how prisons work in America, so go in ready for conflict ripped from today’s headlines. The things you are trying to get are sometimes tough to get into jail even when you think you have everything correct to do so, I have unofficially been considering those guys as “Casey Anthonys.” I’ve only gotten far enough in the game to see that after packing away the little dudes you need to capture, you then go to another board where you shoot asteroids and get power-ups.
Radin Games has another offering that also has a great new retro feel in Eternum Ex, which features an old guy with a wizard’s stick, which makes me think of recent offerings. I don’t know what the “Ex” means, specifically, but judging by the age of the protagonist, I’ll guess that he became radicalized after his divorce. Radin Games are one of my favorite active developers, here they are on Steam with other games published by Flynn’s Arcade.
Galacticon was played on a Windows 10 computer and a Steam Deck.