Retro Replay Retro Gaming History, Reviews & Emulation

There was a time when I judged practically every fantasy RPG against The Elder Scrolls. And if it didn’t offer the same freedom to explore, customize my character, and ignore the main story for fifty hours, it had an uphill battle winning me over. Unfortunately for Dragon Age: Origins, that’s exactly the mindset I was in when it arrived. On 3 November 2009, BioWare released Dragon Age: Origins for PC, Xbox 360,… Read more

Colorful villages, expressive character portraits, and gold trim absolutely everywhere. Vain Dream II is the kind of JRPG that makes you wonder how it passed you by. Unless you've explored the FM Towns library, there's a good chance you've never played it, or even heard its name. Now you can meet Warlick, hear Rauny's warning about enormous crows, and discover it for yourself: Retro Replay's English translation alpha is available! Alpha 0.4… Read more

David Crane put his name on a game box because he was willing to stake his reputation on what was inside. Players have since told him they would buy one of his games knowing who made it, much as a reader reaches for a favorite author’s next book. That connection was something he and his fellow Activision founders deliberately built. The programmer, artist, and designer behind a cartridge deserved a credit, and… Read more

To get Pitfall Harry running properly, David Crane tried the movements himself. He would walk around the lab, stop in a pose, and sketch the position of his leg. Then came the awkward part: making that pose look like a person when the figure was only eight pixels wide. Years later, describing those experiments to Game Informer, Crane could trace Harry back through several projects. He would work on the little runner,… Read more

Kat is searching a haunted mansion for her father, and a little ghost is watching her. That early photo scene in the Japanese Casper now has an English caption, along with the introduction and other picture-based scenes left unfinished in tashi's translation. Our Casper English Translation Continuation is available now as version 1.0-beta1. This is the 1997 Japanese Super Famicom adventure, a different game from the Casper released in North America in… Read more

The Empire has decided you are somebody else’s problem. A one-way trip through a magical portal deposits your party underground, where the food is largely fungal and the neighbors include things that would quite like to eat you. There is no welcoming speech about being the chosen one. Finding a safe place to sleep would be a perfectly respectable first achievement. Exile could make a few square tiles feel like a very… Read more

Jeff Vogel bought a PowerMac 6100 in 1994, went looking for a role-playing game, and failed to find one. So he started writing his own. There was already a Mac shareware RPG called Realmz, but he did not discover it until Exile: Escape From the Pit was almost ready to launch. Had he found it earlier, he tells us, his whole life might have gone differently. Then the Realmz developers at Fantasoft… Read more

Prolapse, the proposed PS5 exploit for firmware 14.00 and 14.10, faces fresh doubts about whether it can become a usable jailbreak. A new r/PS5_Jailbreak thread shares a pessimistic message attributed to Sonic-Iso, while zecoxao's public code remains labeled non working. The update weakens expectations of an imminent release. It does not confirm that Prolapse is canceled or that a future jailbreak for these firmware versions is impossible. What the update says The… Read more

David Crane put his name on a game box because he was willing to stake his reputation on what was inside. Players have since told him they would buy one of his games knowing who made it, much as a reader reaches for a favorite author’s next book. That connection was something he and his fellow Activision founders deliberately built. The programmer, artist, and designer behind a cartridge deserved a credit, and… Read more

Jeff Vogel bought a PowerMac 6100 in 1994, went looking for a role-playing game, and failed to find one. So he started writing his own. There was already a Mac shareware RPG called Realmz, but he did not discover it until Exile: Escape From the Pit was almost ready to launch. Had he found it earlier, he tells us, his whole life might have gone differently. Then the Realmz developers at Fantasoft… Read more

A room full of explosive barrels is a wonderful place to discover that your shotgun has become a liability. Sandy Petersen picks Barrels o’ Fun from Doom II as a map he is particularly proud of, and it is an excellent introduction to his work: a memorable situation, a nasty surprise, and a player suddenly having to reconsider the plan. Ask him about another famous level, Doom’s E2M2, and he starts pulling… Read more

Before Christian Bauer owned a Commodore 64, he wrote programs on paper and tried them on the computers displayed in department stores. A few commands could draw a fractal or play some music. That was enough to get him hooked. Music also supplied the first reason to write Frodo. Bauer wanted to hear SID tunes while working on his Amiga, so he built a card that could hold a real SID chip… Read more

When Ken Silverman was tuning Build, a failed experiment could disappear with the contents of a RAM drive. He would copy his working directory there before trying small optimizations. If the code crashed, he figured the changes probably were not worth keeping anyway. That is the sort of detail Silverman brings to this interview about the engine behind Duke Nukem 3D, Blood, and Shadow Warrior. We get into the maps that broke… Read more

Interview by David Becker, Retro Replay. Roberta Williams couldn't leave Colossal Cave alone. A puzzle would follow her to bed, and she couldn't rest until she'd worked it out. She had loved stories since childhood, but here was one she could move through, question, and get hopelessly stuck inside. After finishing it, she bought large sheets of white poster paper and began working out a mystery of her own. That became Mystery… Read more

October 26 to November 2, 2026. A PlayStation 4 trophy that refuses to unlock is a small but infuriating way to end a game. This week's shadPS4 release addresses that bug alongside changes to video, input, and system libraries. Azahar has a substantial new 3DS alpha for testers, while three Gear emulators refine play on high refresh rate displays. Across the four monitored categories, we found 183 notices across 68 projects. Most… Read more

At two in the morning, Christian Bauer’s new SID filters produced a wall of noise. He had spent a long weekend measuring real chips and rebuilding the sound emulation in Frodo. He went to bed. The next morning, a pair of function parameters turned out to be in the wrong order. After fixing them, he tried the C64 demo Edge of Disgrace again. This time, the music sounded so good that he… Read more

Christian Bauer took his Amiga 4000 to a meetup of Mac users and showed them text scrolling in an editor. It was running inside ShapeShifter. The reaction, he remembers, was considerable. An Amiga running Mac software was not necessarily the slow curiosity people expected. Basilisk II grew out of that earlier work, but by 1999 its job included hosts without a real 68000-family processor. The Mac desktop could move again, this time… Read more

A new BeOS workstation could be exciting and inconvenient at the same time. Christian Bauer had moved from his Amiga 4000 to a BeBox, a machine whose two processors and new operating system appealed to him. That did not make the Mac applications people wanted to use disappear. SheepShaver put a Mac environment inside that other desktop. Its original PowerPC-hosted form could execute guest code on the real processor. After Be’s decline,… Read more

Michael Pavone paid around $2,000 for a copy of Outback Joey while trying to emulate its exercise peripheral. The first copy was a fake. After getting a refund and finding a genuine one, he still had to work backward from the game’s code because the bicycle sensor and heart-rate hardware were beyond his budget. That is one of the more expensive detours in a conversation that also gets into disappearing sprites, frozen… Read more

October 19 to 26, 2026. Helios gave Sega 32X games a closer look at palette changes and DMA, while xemu issued two original Xbox releases in two days. Igir's new version gives people sorting and patching large game collections more formats to work with. The four monitored categories carried 145 notices this week, but many were successive development snapshots of the same emulator. 32X, Mega CD, and original Xbox Helios 26.1023 works… Read more

Dave had barely typed “Prolapse” into the group chat before Mark asked whether he knew the developers personally. Not their usernames. Personally. An email address would help. A forwarding address would be tremendous. Sony is offering twelve months of PlayStation Plus to anyone who helps it catch the hackers behind Prolapse, the PS5 kernel-exploit project targeting firmware 14.00 and 14.10. The company wants names, leads, and preferably someone willing to explain the… Read more

Dr. Eggman is a feminist. That's the assessment of the North American Sonic Heroes manual, which introduces him as “a romanticist, a feminist, and a self-professed gentleman.” Quite a character reference for a man whose usual response to a setback is to build a larger robot. The mustache says supervillain. The biography says he would like a moment to discuss how unfairly the mustache has been portrayed. The actual English biography from… Read more

Nintendo has announced the boldest, most innovative move in gaming history: charging you up to two hundred dollars for the privilege of replaying a pair of Wii games you already own. Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario Galaxy 2 are officially coming to the Switch 2, and the bundle clocks in at a cool $150, edging toward $200 once you factor in collector’s editions, amiibo, and whatever random plastic accessory they force… Read more

An Innocent Gesture with a Dark Twist For more than two decades, fans of Super Mario World believed Mario was simply pointing forward when Yoshi stuck out his tongue. It looked playful and harmless. Mario gave the signal, Yoshi obeyed, and the duo worked together as partners. That illusion shattered in 2017, when Nintendo veteran Shigefumi Hino, the designer who created Yoshi, revealed that the original concept was very different. According to… Read more

Every Controller I Have Smashed In Rage, Ranked By The Quality Of The Meltdown There are difficult games, and then there are the ones that melt your brain until the only solution is to weaponize the nearest controller. We tell ourselves it’s just a game, but anyone who has stared down Alma in Ninja Gaiden Black, crawled across spikes in Celeste, or been betrayed by the blue shell in Mario Kart Wii… Read more

A Consistent Cutoff Leonardo DiCaprio has built a reputation for consistency in his personal life, and it appears that this rule now extends to his gaming habits. According to sources close to the Hollywood actor, he has officially stopped playing Final Fantasy IX after the game reached its 25th anniversary. Released in 2000 for the original PlayStation, Final Fantasy IX is widely regarded as one of the greatest entries in Square Enix’s… Read more

You know the moment. A game is sitting at its title screen, nobody has touched the controller for a while, and somehow the music has become the main event. The next level can wait. This bit deserves another loop. We have given that habit a much bigger home. Retro Replay's Video Game Music Library is live, with 95,901 tracks across 60 systems at the time of this announcement. Pick a system, find… Read more

A room full of explosive barrels is a wonderful place to discover that your shotgun has become a liability. Sandy Petersen picks Barrels o’ Fun from Doom II as a map he is particularly proud of, and it is an excellent introduction to his work: a memorable situation, a nasty surprise, and a player suddenly having to reconsider the plan. Ask him about another famous level, Doom’s E2M2, and he starts pulling… Read more

Before Christian Bauer owned a Commodore 64, he wrote programs on paper and tried them on the computers displayed in department stores. A few commands could draw a fractal or play some music. That was enough to get him hooked. Music also supplied the first reason to write Frodo. Bauer wanted to hear SID tunes while working on his Amiga, so he built a card that could hold a real SID chip… Read more

If you don’t know the name Shigeru Miyamoto, he’s someone you can thank for the video game industry being what it is. In 1981, Miyamoto created a small arcade game called “Donkey Kong,” which not only saved Nintendo of America from financial ruin but also helped solidify the video game industry at a time when it was in flux. Just four years after his success with “Donkey Kong,” Miyamoto released his next… Read more