ARCADE WATCH
Keeping an eye on the coin-op gaming scene
Game Donut Dodo Do!
Developer Pixel Games
Manufacturer Exa-Arcadia
The problem with a lot of contemporary games that try to look like old ones is that they get the finer details a bit wrong, cramming in a lot more colours than would’ve been possible in the 8bit era, for example, or even (please hold on to your lunch, purists) rotating sprites rather than animating them properly. Donut Dodo Do! gets closer to an authentic vibe than most, partly thanks to the founder of developer Pixel Games having direct experience of what it was like to create games in 1982, when he started out with a 48K ZX Spectrum. The static playfields also help, as does presentation in 4:3 format and the straightforward donutgathering objective, although if we’re being picky we’d say the music feels more like it’s plucked from an ’80s console rather than a vintage coin-op. As a modern arcade machine, the game is coming from Exa-Arcadia as part of its drive to bring consumer games into the coin-op realm, adding twoplayer support, a new female character and more to a game that originally arrived as Donut Dodo on PC and Switch in June 2022. New bezel art from a former Capcom artist who worked on the Mega Man series should help it stand out when it arrives in 2023.