Retro Replay Retro Gaming History, Reviews & Emulation

Years of work ended not with a release but with silence because of harassment, licensing wars, and community entitlement. Update 1: The First and Last Update of This Post! So apparently I got Rick Rollbacked, emulation-style. A buddy tells me, “Hey, DuckStation has a secret rollback netplay build, go ask for it in the dev’s Discord.” Like a gullible idiot, I did. What I walked into was less “beta download” and more… Read more

Disclaimer: I am totally joking about piracy. Never would I ever. We do NOT promote that here.  For years I convinced myself that physical media was dead, that shelves stacked with DVDs were nothing more than a relic of the early 2000s, and that streaming would carry us into a brighter, more convenient future. I told myself I didn’t need discs anymore. Everything I wanted would always be a few clicks away,… Read more

The Game Boy Advance remains unusually easy to love on a phone. Its library ranges from quick, pick-up-and-play platformers to long RPGs and strategy games, and its compact original screen maps well to a modern Android display. Metroid Fusion, Advance Wars, Golden Sun, Pokémon FireRed/LeafGreen, and Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow are still worth playing because they were designed around strong controls and clear visual language, not because they need nostalgia to carry… Read more

The Neo Geo Pocket and Neo Geo Pocket Color never had the reach of Nintendo’s handhelds, but SNK’s compact machines earned an unusually devoted audience. Their best games feel built for short sessions without being slight: smart fighting games, excellent arcade conversions, and action titles that make remarkable use of a small screen and a clicky directional control. They are also among the easiest retro systems to enjoy on an Android phone… Read more

The WonderSwan is one of handheld gaming’s most interesting near-misses. Designed under Gunpei Yokoi’s influence and launched by Bandai in Japan in 1999, its compact shape, efficient battery use, and unusual rotating screen gave it an identity all its own. The later WonderSwan Color expanded its visual range, while the SwanCrystal refined the family further. For Android players, it is also a refreshingly uncomplicated system to revisit. WonderSwan emulation is not demanding… Read more

The ZX Spectrum is still one of the easiest old computers to carry in your pocket—and one of the hardest to reduce to a simple “pick an app and press play” recommendation. Its games were built around a distinctive keyboard, joystick standards varied, and many classics assume that you can press more than one key at a time. A good Android setup has to respect those quirks rather than hide them. The… Read more

The MSX is easy to underestimate if you grew up with consoles. It was a family of compatible 8-bit home computers rather than one box, and its strongest footholds were Japan, parts of Europe, and South America. That history produced a library with a distinctive personality: ambitious arcade conversions, text-heavy adventures, computer-style RPGs, and formative Konami work including Metal Gear, Vampire Killer, Gradius, and Penguin Adventure. Android is a particularly comfortable place… Read more

The Amiga is a wonderful fit for Android, but it is not as plug-and-play as an NES or Mega Drive. An Amiga game might expect a joystick in one port, a mouse in another, a keyboard command at the title screen, or several floppy-disk swaps. The payoff is a library with a character all its own: crisp arcade conversions, ambitious platformers, point-and-click adventures, strategy games, demos, and creative software built around the… Read more

Interview by David, Retro Replay A boss theme can follow you long after the battle is over. For Console: The VGM Band, those melodies became a reason to pick up instruments, find other musicians, and discover what happens when music written for a game has an audience standing in front of it. A familiar tune is the starting point; the groove, the arrangement, and the energy of a live band are where… Read more

Interview by David, Retro-Replay. Before there was Tiberium, before Kane stepped in front of a camera, and before players began building bases on Arrakis, there were two friends in Las Vegas finding out what they could make together. Louis Castle was working at a computer store when he met Brett Sperry. An invitation to use a printer led to a conversation about computer art, then to a creative partnership. In 1985, that… Read more

Interview by David, Retro-Replay. An adventure game can begin with a painted cityscape, a conversation, or a mystery the player cannot leave alone. Steve Ince has helped shape all three. Across his career, he moved from creating artwork to organising production and then writing and designing the stories players would uncover for themselves. Ince spent eleven years at Revolution Software, moving from artist to producer to writer and designer. His work on… 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

ES-DE 3.4.1 is a substantial update to the popular multi-platform emulation frontend, expanding Android system support, adding experimental Linux AArch64 support, improving multi-user compatibility and adding a long list of new emulator configurations across Android, Linux, macOS and Windows. Android users searching for the ES-DE 3.4.1 APK or EmulationStation APK 3.4.1 should note that ES-DE's Android release is distributed through the project's official Android channels rather than Google Play. If you are… Read more

Remember the days of yore, when Double Fine made great games instead of blowing budgets on their latest vanity projects? When Jack Black was more interested in entertaining us than lecturing us? These days, Black and Double Fine's Tim Schafer look like twin gray-bearded hobos arguing over which one smells worse. But the 2000s were simpler times. Back when somebody could pitch a video game that looked like an Iron Maiden album… Read more

When people remember the original PlayStation, they usually remember polygons. Tekken. Ridge Racer. Resident Evil. Tomb Raider. The entire industry was racing toward 3D, and suddenly traditional 2D games were starting to look like something from the past. And then there was Rayman. Released in 1995, the original Rayman completely ignored the rush toward polygons and instead delivered one of the most beautiful hand-drawn platformers of the entire generation. Bright colors. Huge… Read more

Some games take a while to explain. Crazy Taxi is not one of them. You drive a taxi. You pick up passengers. You drive as fast and as recklessly as humanly possible. And somehow, more than twenty-five years later, it's still ridiculously fun. Originally released in arcades before making its way to the Sega Dreamcast, Crazy Taxi is one of those games that perfectly represents Sega during that era. Fast. Loud. Colorful.… Read more

During the 16-bit era, Disney games gave Sega owners several memorable platformers. World of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck belongs beside Castle of Illusion, QuackShot, and Aladdin as an example of a licensed game with care behind it. Developed and published by Sega, it builds an adventure around a magic show gone wrong: Mickey and Donald discover a mysterious box, climb inside, and find themselves trapped in a fantastical world.… Read more

The Sega CD is often remembered for full-motion video, but Shining Force CD shows how much stronger its traditional games could be. This tactical RPG rebuilds two Game Gear adventures and adds content made for the CD release. Sega’s official game overview identifies it as a remake of two handheld installments. The result is a generous, battle-focused Shining Force package. Its defining change is the removal of most traditional exploration—a choice that… Read more

What if Super Mario Kart got the sequel we always dreamed of on the SNES? Horizons delivers 20 new tracks, new music, and pure nostalgia. From grassy plains to abandoned mines, Super Mario Kart – Horizons takes the SNES classic to new places. It feels like Mario Kart 2.0… and you can play it today! Super Mario Kart – Horizons: The Romhack That Feels Like a True Sequel. Watch the video or… 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

I've played plenty of Pokémon over the years, but the original games are still my favorites. Maybe it's nostalgia, maybe it's the simplicity, or maybe there's just something special about those first adventures through Kanto. Whatever the reason, none of the newer generations have quite replaced them for me. But that doesn't mean I can't appreciate how far the series has come! On 12 October 2013, Pokémon X and Y launched for… Read more

You remember the mascots, the blockbuster sequels, and the games every friend seemed to own. But the nineties also left behind toxic-slime scientists, clay adventurers, transforming police machines, and a tiny hero from the world of Lemmings. This countdown revisits twenty games that deserve another look. “No one remembers” is our affectionate exaggeration: these games still have fans, and some have devoted followings. Our picks favor distinctive ideas, memorable presentation, and adventures… Read more

Before Epona carried Link across Hyrule, Nintendo had talked about giving Mario a horse in Super Mario 64. Picture that for a moment: the plumber, the cap, the overalls, and a horse waiting outside Peach’s castle. Yoshi would have had questions. It never happened. But Yoshiaki Koizumi hadn’t lost interest in the idea, and when he worked on Ocarina of Time, he was determined to make horse riding happen there. Mario went… Read more

Sometimes I don't want a deep story, complicated mechanics, elaborate character progression, or moral choices that will come back to haunt me twenty hours later. Sometimes I just want to grab the biggest gun I can find and start blastin'! And that's exactly why I've always had a soft spot for Serious Sam. On 11 October 2005, Serious Sam II arrived on PC and Xbox, delivering another ridiculous helping of oversized weapons,… Read more