Razieluigi

This thing felt like magic when it came out. Kind of still does.

Despite the headline, it used very different technology than the SNES, and direct ports were generally inferior to the originals. Which is not to say those versions were awful. The GBA was my first time playing Super Mario World and Yoshi's Island, but there would be little reason to play those versions anymore today.

But direct SNES ports were actually fairly uncommon on the GBA. It had a massive and excellent library of its own — one that remains well worth revisiting all these years later.

That's a gorgeous final result!

My actual NES is mostly retired, although I do keep it connected to an old CRT for the occasional round of Duck Hunt. Otherwise I'm happy to keep using my trusty RetroUSB AVS until (or if) something better comes along.

It's only a waste of time because they insisted it become one.

They should have just thanked eadmaster for carrying on their work and requested being credited in the final project.

How incredibly stupid.

I don't really need my Castlevania canon to be coherent if the game is good. (Please, please, please be good.)

That said, I've enjoyed the animated series quite a bit and would be fine if this game (and any future ones?) used it for narrative inspiration. If this is taking place in 1499, it would make sense to just have this version of Sonia be one of Trevor and Sypha's children. That gives them an easy way to combine the gameplay elements of both characters into one, and set this up as a direct sequel to Castlevania III.

It would be hard to argue with most of these, except that FIFA seems like a baffling inclusion to me. I get that it's popular, but is it really that innovative or deserving?

Personally, I'd pick Mega Man, Galaga, and Dragon Quest. All of them are tremendously influential. But as MSaturn pointed out above, there is no way to pluck 3 games from this list in a way that isn't grossly unfair to multiple other entries.

Except FIFA

@The_Nintendo_Expat Yeah, "port" was more common back when every arcade cabinet and console had unique architecture and every single game was made from the ground up for each machine.

Once middleware engines became the norm, I feel like we started hearing the term less and less often.

@Porco He's just being pedantic about what a remaster is. Based on its original use for recorded media like movies and music, unless you have access to the original source material, it's not really possible to "remaster" something. Adding brand new textures to a game would be like adding brand new instrument tracks to a song.

But video games aren't the same as movies and music, so it's understandable that the word is going to shift in meaning as it gets applied to a medium it was never intended for. While I'd love to see some more consistency in the use of words like remaster and remake, the constant pedantic hand-wringing over it is tiresome.

They should show confidence in their concept by just swapping out all the joysticks and buttons for dedicated system-level controls.

The face buttons can be replaced with sliders for screen brightness and saturation. The triggers turn the Wi-Fi on and off. A volume knob would fit perfectly where the left stick goes. And the d-pad can be replaced with buttons for taking and posting screenshots, so you can show the world how you've precisely dialed in all of your settings.

@Sketcz Ha. Yeah, I remember the banter being kind of bizarre, but took it to be the game's weird sense of humor and not evidence of a bad translation.

I think my favorite thing about the game is the risk/reward mechanic where your retaliatory strikes launch more missiles in proportion to the incoming danger. It always felt good to wait until enemy fire was right up your ass to press the trigger and have 100 missiles burst across the screen.

Loved this on Dreamcast and didn't realize there was disappointment about the translation, although I also don't remember the story being its selling point.

One problem with the DC version is that it doesn't support VGA so it won't work with the most common HDMI solutions.

I'm as much a fan of good ol' pixel art as much as anyone, but I can't imagine watching that trailer and not thinking the game looks gorgeous.

Very cool and fan translations are such a great thing to have, but the need for soldering means that they're really straining the definition of "reversible" here.

It's not to knock the project at all. It's an interesting solution. But I'd much rather invest in an Everdrive, load translated ROMs onto that, and avoid soldering anything to the PCBs of my precious OG carts.

@romanista Agreed. I doubt it's complex for them. I think they've just made the decision that they don't want to do it.

Of course, if the company would ever communicate with anybody about anything, perhaps we'd know instead of speculating.

I wouldn't blame anyone for getting the A3D. Like most of their hardware, it's nicely made and well-reviewed. I'm not enough of an N64 fan myself, but that's just me. Agreed, though, that the complaints about 4K are completely missing the point of the thing. There are lots of things worth complaining about when it comes to Analogue. That is definitely not one of them.

I was one of the weirdos that really liked the 3D effect and kept that slider cranked up.

But with or without it, the 3DS was a gem. Mine is still going strong and will hopefully last the rest of my life, but it's nice to know there will be options to continue playing these games even if the hardware fails.

@Gryffin Not the Dock, although you'd need one to use the DAC. Analogue released a digital-to-analog converter that would have allowed you to connect the Pocket Dock directly to a CRT display. It works with some of their older consoles and support was promised for the Pocket. It was a natural assumption that this would be compatible with their future consoles as well.

But support for the Pocket was quietly scuttled, and then the Duo and 3D were released without the slightest mention of support.

So they baited their own customers into buying an $80 peripheral before making it functionally useless for the vast majority of them.

@Gryffin The big one is DAC support, which is especially egregious since Analogue sold people an expensive peripheral that is now useless if it was purchased with the expectation of this promise being fulfilled.

Gameboy Camera support — being able to save images directly to the SD card — was also promised in their roadmap years ago and never delivered (you can work around this with screenshots, but still not what they promised).

Once upon a time, they also promised Super Game Boy support and never delivered. External developers eventually stepped in with a separate FPGA core, but this doesn't work with actual cartridges.

The Pocket is still a great device at a hardware level, and the extra FPGA has allowed external developers to really make it shine. But first-party support has been a disgrace.

I love my Super NT and Mega SG. But as far as I'm concerned, those were made and sold by a completely different company than the one that exists today. Nowadays, Analogue seems to actively dislike it's own customers.

@JackGYarwood I honestly had no idea that movie had ever been in the works!

In general I'd rather seen new games than other media, but it's a shame that all these great characters have been put to pasture. Sega was a force to be reckoned with back in the day.

What a cool find! And a fun reminder of one of gaming's most joyous eras. Sega harnessed its own terminal delirium to power a wild creative engine, churning out a remarkably diverse and colorful parade of games at incredible speed.

Many of those gems were flawed, including Space Channel 5, but they were fun and energy was undeniable.

Like so much of Sega's languishing IP, Ulala and her Swingin' Report Show are long past due for a revival.

Hey, look at that. Maybe in a few more decades, they can fnish their own history and finally update the Pocket to include the features they promised 5 years ago and haven't yet delivered.

Or they can just spend all their time perfecting different colors of translucent plastic. That's just as good.

@Sketcz Especially as a mega-fan of FF VI, the hype was intense.

Still had a great experience despite the fumbles, and I've played it multiple times since. It's one of those games where I like the characters and world a little more than the game itself (I've never loved the Materia system, honestly), but it's a classic for a reason.

I'll always have a soft spot for VR on the Genesis. It's remarkable that it's as good as it is, and it's a cool bit of history being the only game to use the SVP chip.

That said, nowadays the Switch port is where its at. I love how well these simple, untextured polygonal graphics lend themselves to upscaling.

Not directly related to the current Steam version, but this brings back memories of trying to play this game when it was finally released on PC back in '98. I didn't have a PlayStation, so I was crazy excited about finally getting to play this.

Everything went fine until the Chocobo race, which would just crash my computer every single time. And there's one mandatory race, so this was game-breaking.

In those days, PC gaming generally meant spending 80% of your time troubleshooting and 20% of your time actually playing games, so I was used to this kind of nonsense. But I tried everything and just could not get it to work. Whatever conflict my hardware was creating was insurmountable.

In frustration, I finally took all the discs to one of the computer labs at school and quietly installed the game, hoping nobody would notice.

It ran, but these machines had no real graphics acceleration so it must have been at like 5 frames per second. Still, that was enough to let me muddle my way through the race and generate a new save file on the other side of it. I quickly made a copy of the file, uninstalled the game, and hightailed it out of there.

At the time, it felt like I was committing some kind of nefarious espionage. In retrospect, I don't remember why I didn't just use one of my housemates' computers to do the exact same thing. But the mission was a success, and I was finally able to move on with the game and finish it.

Happy times.

I loved the PSP. It's hard to overstate how much it felt like the future when it released, and it had a solid library to back it up. Obviously it sold well enough to warrant a follow up.

The Vita was a nice piece of kit at a hardware level, but just kind of flopped otherwise. The "bubble" UI looked cheap and amateurish compared to the PSP's elegant cross bar, and the software support just wasn't cultivated properly. Sony really let it whither on the vine, and unfortunately learned nothing from the experience, treating both of its VR headsets largely the same way.

The Vita is one of the only pieces of gaming hardware I own that I actually regret buying. But its failure shouldn't be pretense to rewrite the PSP's legacy.

I mean, he's wrong. But on the long list of this guy's dreadful opinions, this barely registers. I love that these right-wingers will spend their days freaking out about immigrants taking their jobs — something that literally doesn't happen — but will hold the door open for software algorithms to do exactly that.

Retronauts just posted an Earthworm Jim episode the other day so I've had the franchise on my mind. Loved those first two games on my Genesis back in the day and still love to break out those carts now and then. They were wild and creative. Something generative AI can't ever be.

I got pretty good at this game as a kid, but would always fail once inside the Technodrome. Years later, in grad school, I finally committed to getting it done.

Farming scrolls in Stage 3 is montonous but very helpful. And no shame in cheesing the final stretch by moving slowly to despawn the jetpack guys as in the video above.

Shredder actually goes down pretty easy once you've been through all that.

I still like to pop this game in every so often. The first few stages are so nostalgic, and while the game is deeply flawed, there's a lot of ambition on display here. I like the more bad-ass take on the Turtles themselves. Plus the music is vintage 8-bit Konami and I love it. But I doubt I'll ever bother to finish it again.

Boy, that is one ugly controller.

Shocking. This always sounded like a very good and sensible idea that was likely to be a huge success.

At this rate, it's going to wind up materializing as a pop-up store in some midwestern strip mall sometime in 2032.

I wish I got paid as much for being incompetent as the typical CEO.

There's something fun about the era when graphics were still abstract enough that you could plausibly interpret characters in a variety of ways.

Once we got into the 6th console generation, in-game models became too definitive to really allow this kind of lattitude.

This stage is definitely an example of awful game design and deserves its notoriety on that front, but it's not as hard as people make it out to be. Just be willing to die a few times while you figure it out, and it'll be muscle memory in no time.

Once you beat it, you'll move on to stages that are far worse (in both difficulty and design).

@axelhander A computer algorithm regurgitating existing art is nowhere near the same phenomenon as an actual person being inspired by existing art. What an absolutely preposterous comparison.

I love how we use the word "adult" to mean "utterly juvenile."

Pretty funny, though.

@DiacloneFx It's just that 4:3 screens aren't really a thing anymore so it's harder and more expensive to source those kinds of parts. There isn't a functional point to it. It's a practical economic decision.

I just don't understand the point of a handheld like this at all. There are just so many options now for playing these games on dozens of more versatile hardware choices in myriad form factors. Unless you're just absolutely ride-or-die with original cartridges (which I get on some level, but on a handheld where now you have to travel with bulky games?), or have a fixation on filling that space on your shelf for the Nomad your heart always wanted, I'm not sure who the market for this is.

Hm. I loved and finished the original Ecco when I was in high school, although I never got around to any of its 16-bit sequels. Also replayed the Dreamcast game a couple years ago and found it enjoyable despite its many frustrations.

It's an uneven franchise, for sure. I'd welcome a triumphant return, but this all goes in the "cautious optimism at best" box until proven otherwise.

@Broosh Interesting. I did have the stand-alone disc and remember it running like a slideshow and hanging frequently on my 360.

Maybe it just never ran well even on OG hardware and I had unfair expectations. Or maybe a bad disc?

Regardles, I'll welcome a way to play this in higher quality!

Excellent news. It's ridiculous how difficult it is to find ways to play this game, and the 360 backwards compatibility is notoriously bad for this title.

Even as a huge Dreamcast fan and someone who usually prefers an authentic controller experience when playing classic games, the DC's controller was poorly thought out at the time and has not aged gracefully in the decades since.

Nice that this is out there for those who want it, but the DC is one console where I'm going to choose comfort over authenticity. The StrikerDC referenced in the article really is the best choice today.

At this point, my retro collection is about as complete as it can possibly get. It's crazy and young me would be gobsmacked at all the gear he'd have one day. From actual carts to Everdrives, and from OG hardware to high-quality modern clones, there is hardly a game made before 2000 that I can't play any time I want in one form or another. My media console is absolutely stacked with an embarrassment of riches.

If I have a retro gaming resolution, it's to avoid checklists and backlogs and to simply get back in touch with the fun spirit of gaming from when I was younger. Not everything needs to be finished. Not everything needs to feel like a project. It's fine to just pop a game in for a while, have a good time, and then move on. Like I used to.

I'm not sure I'll ever break completely away from modern gaming. There are still good times to be had. But the landscape nowadays can get pretty unpleasant and it's wild how easy it is to forget that this is all supposed to be fun. Retro games are just much better at reminding me, and I hope 2026 is full of them.

In 1999, we were only just starting to glimpse a future in which every single movie and television show ever made didn't need to get a tie-in video game.

@Tyaku I enjoyed the 3D effect more than most, but I don't think that this says anything about people clamoring for 3D to return.

The 3DS was a fantastic console with a killer library even if you kept that slider set to zero at all times.

Pretty cool, espeically being able to obtain save data.

Although it's worth noting that the Pocket's save states are already a good way to preserve your saves since that data is included in a save state. I've experimented with a few different GB/GBA carts, and it's definitely possible in most (maybe all?) cases to restore save data to a cart by loading a save state that includes it.

@Guru_Larry Like most genres, definitions are pretty flexible and ill-defined with a lot of cross-pollination making it even harder to pin anything down.

I think "roguelite" is generally used to describe games with iterative runs through stages, often but not always randomly/procedurally generated, but in which some new abilities or perks perist into future runs to create a broader sense of progression.

By that definition, games as disparate as Vampire Survivors, Hades, Balatro, and Ball x Pit are "roguelites".

But there are no hard and fast rules with any of this stuff. Much like movies and music and any other form of media, games can mix and match all sorts of genres.

It's funny to think of an era when this genre was rare enough that the best anybody could think was to reference the only two prominent examples of it.

Nowadays, it feels like everything is a Metroidvania. Hell, even Yar's Revenge and Pac-Man have dipped into the genre.

It's definitely a cumbersome term, but it gets the point across. And proposed alternatives like "search action" aren't really any better.

This is incredible. Looking forward to digging through all this!

I don't know, but I'd kill to have an arcade accurate version of Q*bert on Switch.

@KingMike Ha. Two-directional scrolling in those pre-MMC days was a rough ride.

@Blast16 I don't know for sure, but RetroRBG reports "for older, non-x-series carts, simply use [the] latest firmware v2.13" so you may need an update but should otherwise be good?

I've never really been able to wrap my head around the controls for this one. Something always feels backwards no matter what settings I use.

But the sequel is a gem, and easily one of the best uses of the Wii controller across its entire library.

I still enjoy a "big" mass appeal game now and then. Titles like Horizon and Spider Man come to mind. But I don't have the time or energy for more than maybe one per year. The endless quests and achievements are meant to provide value, but eventually start to feel like homework constantly tugging at the to-do list portion of my brain.

Increasingly I gravitate toward retro games and the indie titles that evoke them. Play for a bit. Have fun. Stop.

SouljaBoy version when?

Oooh — love stuff like this. Will definitely have to load this onto my Everdrive and give it a look.