Retro Replay Retro Gaming History, Reviews & Emulation

Super Mario Kart Horizons is one of the most ambitious ROM hacks in recent years, reimagining the classic SNES racer with twenty brand new tracks, four custom battle maps, an original soundtrack, and presentation elements like a custom manual and box art. The project, available at RomHacking.net and RomHackPlaza, represents the culmination of over a decade of tinkering, iteration, and dedication from its creator, Gridattack. Horizons has also been the subject of… Read more

A casual Mortal Kombat XL player, Legi0n, just pulled off a story that feels straight out of the arcade era: she showed up to a local and won the whole thing while holding her five-day-old newborn. Two posts on X captured the moment and lit up the FGC timeline: https://twitter.com/JuicyGameNight/status/1972096240017191239 The photo of one of her matches—shared by her husband—sparked a whirlwind of reactions. Some joked that the baby was calling the… Read more

When Capcom prepared to bring the blue bomber from Japan to the American market, the character went through one of the most famous name changes in gaming history. In Japan he was known as Rockman, a name tied to the playful music pun with his sister Roll, as in Rock and Roll. Yet when he arrived in the United States he was suddenly Mega Man. For decades the official explanation has always… Read more

When players first explore Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest on the NES, they eventually come across Dracula’s grave. What might look like a simple detail is actually a hidden historical reference that ties one of gaming’s most iconic villains back to real history. The inscription on the grave reads “1431–76,” which are the exact birth and death years of Vlad Tepes, better known as Vlad the Impaler. Vlad Tepes ruled Wallachia during the… Read more

The PlayStation 1 was more than just a console. For many of us who grew up in the late 90s, it was the beginning of a brand new chapter in gaming history. Sony’s first entry into the home console market brought cinematic storytelling, massive 3D environments, and unforgettable soundtracks that felt light years ahead of what we had known before. With Nintendo and Sega still dominating the industry, Sony arrived and carved… Read more

Final Fantasy VII’s Lost Detective Story: How Cloud Almost Became Detective Joe When most people think of Final Fantasy VII, they imagine Cloud Strife standing in front of Midgar’s skyline, sword on his back, as the camera pans up toward the giant Mako Reactor. It is one of the most iconic scenes in all of gaming. Yet few fans know that before Cloud ever existed, the game’s story looked radically different. The… Read more

Top 10 SNES Best Games The Super Nintendo Entertainment System was never just a machine, it was a part of growing up. For kids of the early 1990s it meant long afternoons in front of the television, controllers tangled on the carpet, and the kind of memories that still feel warm decades later. Released in North America in 1991, the SNES gave us bright colors, soaring soundtracks, and worlds that felt endless… Read more

The Arkadian was born in 2015 as the brainchild of Jon O’Neal, a musician with a passion for both heavy rock and the timeless soundtracks of video games. Influenced by artists like Stemage, Viking Guitar, Mega Beardo, and Master Sword, he began crafting arrangements that fused 70s and 80s-inspired metal with the melodies gamers grew up with. What started as solo experiments in a basement studio quickly grew into something bigger... a… Read more

Before 42Bastian Schick and Lars Baumstark had official Lynx documentation, they had a damaged handheld, a dumped copy of Gauntlet, and a homemade SRAM cartridge. Changing the game usually left it frozen. Then one modification worked, and they had a clue: part of each cartridge sector was escaping the checksum. 42Bastian wrote a disassembler, then a small 65C02 simulator, while Lars worked on the hardware. Their experiments grew into a Lynx with… Read more

Robert Holmes was in line for the Monorail at Disneyland with his daughter when he heard the Gabriel Knight theme as someone’s ringtone. Music written for a Sierra adventure had turned up in somebody else’s day, well outside the game. He still sounds a little surprised that people remember it at all. Before Sierra, Holmes had worked in studios, live music, and postproduction in Los Angeles. A lunch with Mark Seibert brought… Read more

In 1994, Carl Forhan found out on Usenet that Atari had made a color handheld and a new console. He had grown up playing his dad’s 2600, but the Lynx and Jaguar had arrived without him noticing. A cheap Lynx bundle and a used Jaguar gave him a way back in. Then another Usenet post mentioned a cartridge that could load programs into Lynx RAM. Soon he had a cartridge from Germany,… Read more

Tony Dickinson remembers leaving Sonic standing at the end of a boss fight so he could keep listening. The animal capsule could wait. Later, he recorded Sonic Adventure’s “Open Your Heart” onto a cassette and carried it around on a Walkman. Command & Conquer soundtracks went onto burned CDs for middle school listening. Eventually, he sent Frank Klepacki an arrangement of “Hell March.” That arrangement grew into something considerably bigger than a… Read more

Scott Adams told his coworkers he was going to write an adventure game for his TRS-80. They laughed. He had spent the previous week coming into work early and staying late to play Colossal Cave Adventure, and now he wanted something like it on the computer at home. Sixteen kilobytes would have to do. Long before “indie developer” became a familiar label, Adams was making games at home and trying to sell… Read more

October 12 to 19, 2026. The Saturn and original Xbox have the biggest news this week. Ymir moved beyond its SDL renderer, then quickly fixed a Windows ARM launch crash. xemu delivered a numbered release with audio and timing repairs that touch several games. The four monitored categories carried 184 notices, although many were daily builds of the same project.Saturn and Xbox releasesYmir 0.4.0 changes the picture, then 0.4.1 fixes a launch… Read more

That stack of PS2 cases beside the television has a new reason to come off the shelf. Swordpdf’s PS5SX2, a homebrew port of PCSX2, now offers a way to insert a supported PS2 DVD into a jailbroken PlayStation 5, copy the game to storage and launch it through the emulator. The disc supplies the game data, while the PS5 runs the resulting copy. This is a community project for modified consoles, not… Read more

October 5–12, 2026. The week’s clearest emulator releases were a Dolphin hotfix, a substantial SameBoy update, and a new FCEUX version. Igir also expanded the way collections can be named and sorted. Across the four monitored categories, we found 166 notices; most of the console entries were successive development snapshots. The full dated log groups them below.Console and handheld releasesDolphin 2609a fixes the first 2609 releaseDolphin labels 2609a a hotfix for its… Read more

September 28–October 5, 2026. This week brought a substantial shadPS4 release, a fresh DOSBox-X build, and a coordinated set of Gear emulator updates. There are 162 notices, many of them successive development snapshots of the same project. The dated log below groups every notice; the analysis here covers changes confirmed by project releases or source repositories. The releases that matter shadPS4 0.19.0 moves PS4 compatibility forward shadPS4 0.19.0 is a tagged release,… Read more

Week of September 21–28, 2026. This is Retro Replay’s first weekly emulator briefing: one place to follow meaningful releases, nightly builds, arcade work, classic PC changes, and library tools. We reviewed this week’s release notices, then checked the highlighted changes against project release notes and source repositories. A dated build in the log below is a development snapshot, not necessarily a stable release. The week at a glance The four feeds carried… Read more

Eden 0.2.1 is now available as a stability-focused hotfix for the open-source Nintendo Switch emulator. Rather than introducing a huge new collection of features, this release focuses on problems discovered after Eden 0.2.0, including large-library crashes, issues affecting 12th-generation Intel CPUs, Windows updater problems, a Mario Kart 8 Deluxe controller-related freeze, and several smaller stability bugs. If you are looking for general information about Eden rather than this specific release, visit our… Read more

Twenty-five years ago, Rockstar gave us an entire city to explore, a criminal empire to build, and more ways to get into trouble than we knew what to do with. And video games would never be quite the same again. On 22 October 2001, Grand Theft Auto III arrived on the PlayStation 2, taking the franchise out of its familiar top-down perspective and dropping players into a fully realized, three-dimensional Liberty City.… Read more

Some heroes are born great. Others have greatness thrust upon them. And then there’s Sir Daniel Fortesque, who managed to become a legend despite getting killed almost immediately in his first big battle. On 21 October* 1998, MediEvil arrived on the original PlayStation in North America, introducing gamers to one of the most unlikely heroes of the 32-bit era: a one-eyed, jawless, undead knight with a reputation he hadn’t actually earned. I… Read more

Some sequels give you more of the same. Others take everything you loved about the original and turn it into something truly special. For me, Fable II was the latter. On 21 October 2008, Lionhead Studios released Fable II for the Xbox 360, returning players to the fantasy world of Albion for another adventure filled with magic, monsters, moral choices, and that wonderfully peculiar British sense of humor. The original Fable was… Read more

The cabin alarm goes off while you are halfway around Camp Crystal Lake. Children are in trouble, your counselor is already hurt, and another zombie has picked a wonderfully inconvenient moment to climb out of the ground. This is where Friday the 13th becomes interesting. Jason is frightening, but getting to him can be just as stressful. The 1989 NES game has spent decades absorbing jokes about its purple killer, awkward controls,… Read more

Seventeen years ago, Gearbox introduced us to a planet full of murderous psychopaths, terrifying monsters, more guns than anyone could possibly need, and one of the most annoying robots in video game history. And I couldn’t wait to get there. On 20 October 2009, Borderlands arrived in North America for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, with the PC version following on 26 October. Developed by Gearbox Software and published by 2K Games,… Read more

Fallout: New Vegas — Sixteen Years Later, I’m Still Wandering the Mojave Getting shot in the head and buried in the desert was merely character creation. On 19 October 2010, Fallout: New Vegas arrived in North America for PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360, bringing another massive post-apocalyptic adventure to the Fallout universe. After Fallout 3, New Vegas was an automatic pre-order for me. There wasn’t much debate about it. I took… 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

A Garage Sale Becomes a Legal Battlefield What began as a quiet Saturday morning in Saratoga, New York quickly escalated into what some neighbors now refer to as “the day Nintendo declared war on suburbia.” Local resident Robby Thompson held a simple garage sale in his driveway, offering old household items, clothing, and a box of retro video games. One of those games happened to be a sealed copy of Super Mario… Read more

A Feature Masquerading as a Flaw Since its release in 2017, the Nintendo Switch has been celebrated as one of the most successful consoles of all time. It blended handheld convenience with home-console performance, revitalized franchises like Zelda and Mario, and sold over 140 million units. But along with this success came something else: the infamous Joy-Con drift. What began as a flood of user complaints, characters walking off cliffs without input,… Read more

The cabin alarm goes off while you are halfway around Camp Crystal Lake. Children are in trouble, your counselor is already hurt, and another zombie has picked a wonderfully inconvenient moment to climb out of the ground. This is where Friday the 13th becomes interesting. Jason is frightening, but getting to him can be just as stressful. The 1989 NES game has spent decades absorbing jokes about its purple killer, awkward controls,… Read more

Gezine spends a few seconds on the PS5’s version screen, then opens ★Debug Settings. That’s the video. No game, no lengthy explanation, just a trip through two menus that most owners would scroll past without a thought. But the number on the first screen is 14.10, and that makes the second screen a much more interesting place to end up. This is current PS5 software, the version on Sony’s official system-software page.… Read more

Grace is behind the counter, the books are not selling, and Gabriel Knight has found something much more interesting to do than improve the situation. There have been murders in New Orleans. He thinks they might make a good novel. Grace has had considerable practice listening to his good ideas. You can understand why Gabriel would rather hang around St. George’s Books than worry about the business. There is coffee, a newspaper,… Read more