Retro Replay Retro Gaming History, Reviews & Emulation

Put a Sega CD disc in the drive and let that boot screen run for a moment. The logo spins, the music starts, and a Genesis that used to swallow cartridges suddenly feels like a different machine. Then the loading begins. The future had arrived, and it occasionally wanted you to sit quietly while it found the next bit of data. That's a more enjoyable way into these machines than another chart… Read more

Every year, around Thanksgiving, I get the same itch. I want to play Skyrim again. Something about the bare trees, chilly weather, and approaching winter makes the world outside feel a little more like Tamriel’s northern province. And suddenly, I’m ready to start another adventure. On 11 November 2011, Bethesda Game Studios released The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim for PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3. I’d already spent countless hours exploring Morrowind… Read more

In the early 1990s, while American players were enjoying their Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis consoles, Fujitsu was offering Japanese players another fascinating way to spend an afternoon. The FM Towns Marty arrived in 1993 with a CD-ROM drive, a floppy drive, and access to part of an impressive computer-game library. It never received an official American release. For most of us on this side of the Pacific, it remained one of… Read more

My father probably will never read this. He has never had much use for the internet. That is all right. I have been meaning to thank him anyway. Our NES arrived at Christmas in 1987. I remember it as the beginning of a very good run for my imagination and, eventually, a rather demanding part-time job for my father. Somewhere along the way, that gray box brought a gold cartridge into our… Read more

A passenger ship crashes by an apartment building, and 50 aliens scatter. You arrive with a camera, but the passengers are invisible. In UFO: A Day in the Life, you choose a room and an hour, watch the residents go about their day, and take a picture when something seems off. Back aboard the UFO, Mother examines the photo to see who you caught. Love-de-Lic built the search around a full day… Read more

Shingo Yabuki has been practicing Kyo’s moves. When he finally asks Kyo to take him on as a pupil, you can tell him to get lost. Shingo, naturally, refuses to go anywhere. That exchange tells you more about The King of Fighters: Kyo than a screenshot of its life bars ever could. SNK released this PlayStation spin-off in Japan in 1998, and it never received an official U.S. release. You play as… Read more

I’m about to commit what some Fallout fans would consider a capital offense. Fallout 4 is my favorite Fallout game. Go ahead, New Vegas fanboys. Tell me I’m wrong. I’ve heard the arguments, and I probably agree with most of them. The dialogue system is pointless, the leveling is uninspired, and the voiced protagonist was a terrible idea. And yet, eleven years later, I still can’t stay away from the Commonwealth. On… Read more

The train pulls into a mountain village, and Grandpa is supposed to be waiting outside. First you have to find your ticket. Then you have to find Grandpa. By the time you meet a girl in a purple yukata near the river, your first summer trip on your own has already gone a little sideways. Famicom Bunko: Hajimari no Mori is a storybook adventure built around looking, talking, and deciding where to… Read more

Pinball Deluxe kept crashing in SameBoy. Lior Halphon checked the timing, simplified the game’s behavior, and tried the same experiments on a real Game Boy. The handheld carried on playing. The emulator did not. The answer, as Lior recounts it, was an interrupt behavior documented by fellow researcher Gekkio. With the game’s timing already so tight, one extra cycle could be enough to bring it down. The real hardware in that story… 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

Link can already run through Kokiri Forest on a PC in the new Ocarina of Time. In one early test, the forest appears, the grass casts shadows, and the path looks inviting enough. Turn toward a different part of the woods and the scene washes out almost to white. Inside the Great Deku Tree, the same tester records a much cleaner view. That's what the first week of Switch 2 emulation looks… Read more

November 2 to 9, 2026. A Super Scope feels right only when the aim follows your hand. This week, Snes9x GX added USB mouse aiming on Wii and Wii U, while its sister NES and Game Boy Advance emulators rebuilt the menus where players handle controllers and saves. SameBoy 1.0.5 makes another pass at the Game Boy Printer, infrared behavior, and the sound quirks of early Game Boy hardware. Azahar reached its… 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

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

Asako and Mayuko come to carry some records. There’s a stone figure in the room, and Mayuko thinks it looks almost alive. She’s right. Soon Ushio has his spear pointed at the Stone Eater, and Tora is complaining that the statue is trying to eat someone he called dibs on. That argument is one of the scenes you can now follow in English in Ushio to Tora, Yutaka’s 1993 Super Famicom action… Read more

Pinball Deluxe kept crashing in SameBoy. Lior Halphon checked the timing, simplified the game’s behavior, and tried the same experiments on a real Game Boy. The handheld carried on playing. The emulator did not. The answer, as Lior recounts it, was an interrupt behavior documented by fellow researcher Gekkio. With the game’s timing already so tight, one extra cycle could be enough to bring it down. The real hardware in that story… Read more

The sailors on the Titanic already think something’s off about your group. They have a point. In Gainax’s 1998 PlayStation adventure Silent Möbius: Case: Titanic, Katsumi and the A.M.P. investigate the ship deck by deck. The grand old liner looks familiar until you see the red moon hanging over it. It’s an adventure game about talking to people and poking around the ship. You move from room to room through menus, and… Read more

Snow covers the mountains, but down in the valley it’s warm enough for spring. The villagers say a golden statue keeps the cold away. There’s a dragon nearby, and it has plans for the statue. That’s one of ten adventures Sega created for the 1990 Mega Drive version of Sorcerian, Falcom’s side-scrolling action RPG. You start in Pentawa, where you can build a party of up to four and visit the shops… Read more