Villordsutch reviews Retroid for the Game Boy…
The Nintendo Game Boy arrived on the gaming scene back in 1989 and it truly took the world by storm, combined with the Game Boy Color, Light and “Play it Loud” releases the Game Boy to date has sold 118.69 Million Units. What’s more scary if you multiply that by four that’s how many batteries it’s eaten!
Retroid Cover Art – Lovingly recreated in the Game Boy style
A decade and a bit before that however Atari delivered to the gaming market a very extremely simple game called Breakout, which involved you controlling a rectangular bat and your goal was to keep a lonely pixel bouncing into a wall; your ultimate achievement was to remove the bricks and then repeat. Still today this game exists in numerous forms, using two parts cement, one part pure addiction for the mortar between each and every brick that gets laid above the gamers bat.
Back in the late 80’s and early 90’s the Breakout clones appeared in full force with Arkanoid appearing on both arcade machines and home computers, with this and the likes of Batty causing ZX Spectrum owners to pull chunks of hair out. Numerous clones promptly spawned including titles on other machines including the Game Boy, specifically Alleyway and Kirby’s Block Ball, and it’s this era of Breakout that Retroid sings so fondly of.
Jonas Fischbach clearly knows what made this new wave of Breakout clones so addictive and he’s brought this back to 2016. He truthfully doesn’t shy away from the fact that at Retroid’s core sits the above games and we appreciate his honesty, but I’ll be honest here, I really don’t care as he’s already trapped me after the first five minutes of playing!
Retroid is everything that players who witnessed the rebirth of Breakout love -well designed yet tricky levels, a perfect scattering of power-ups, splendid minor animations and yet he doesn’t push it too far to rock the boat; you don’t feel like Retroid is spoiling the memory of the classics from twenty-five years back.
There are two negatives that I can place my fingers on, one actual, the other personal. The actual negative is that occasionally the bat feels like you pushing again treacle; though rare, it is odd and I’d describe it as lag however nothing else slows down and the ball continues at the same pace. The personal choice, which can be fixed in the options, is tgar Jean Michel Jarre is being played at me via Chiptune and I’m positive this French musical artist has been haunting me for the past forty-one years; this only adds weight to my theory.
Other than the treacle and JMJ, the only other thing to say would be that perhaps a code system for each level would have been a nice addition. Perhaps in a future update we could see this Jonas?
Retroid is available for free to download here and can be played on the GB Everdrive. However if you don’t have either a Game Boy or Everdrive you can download an Emulator to play it on your PC and Jonas recommends BGB which is extremely simple to use.
Rating: 8/10
Originally published September 21, 2016. Updated June 30, 2023.
