Retro Replay Retro Gaming History, Reviews & Emulation

Retro Review and Longplay: R-Type Delta – A Timeless Shmup Classic for the PlayStation 1 R-Type Delta, released in 1999 for the PlayStation 1, marked the series' explosive entry into the 32-bit era. As a venerable member of the shoot-'em-up (shmup) genre, it was tasked with carrying the weighty legacy of its arcade forebears. Now, more than two decades later, it's time to revisit this classic and see how it holds up… Read more

Sega of America to Cut 61 Jobs - QA and Localization Hit Hard, Union Responds In a move that has sent shockwaves through the gaming industry, Sega of America has announced plans to lay off 61 staff members next month. This restructuring, which significantly impacts the Quality Assurance (QA) and localization departments, is a sobering reminder of the volatile nature of the gaming business. According to the union representing the employees, this… Read more

Hold onto your rings, Sonic fans! In a whirlwind turn of events that has the internet buzzing faster than Sonic chasing down a Chaos Emerald, Hollywood's master of rubber-faced comedy, Jim Carrey, is reportedly stepping out of retirement and straight into the mad scientist shoes of Dr. Robotnik for "Sonic the Hedgehog 3". Just when we thought we'd seen the last of Carrey's iconic mustache-twirling villainy, whispers from the depths of Tinseltown… Read more

Top 10 Most Popular SEGA CD Games of All Time The SEGA CD, an ambitious add-on to the iconic SEGA Genesis, might not have been the commercial success SEGA hoped for, but it left an indelible mark on the gaming landscape with its innovative use of CD technology. Despite its relatively short lifespan, a number of games have achieved cult status and are remembered fondly by retro gaming enthusiasts. Here's a countdown… Read more

The handheld gaming scene has been dominated by Nintendo since the days of the Game & Watch, but Sony's foray into this market has left an indelible mark. The PSP is a testament to that, a device so ahead of its era that even as I pen this in 2024, it remains a beacon of handheld gaming excellence. The PS Vita, on the other hand, didn't quite hit the same high notes,… Read more

Publisher: Square Co., Ltd. Platform: PlayStation Release Date: November 20, 1997 (Japan); May 5, 1998 (North America) Genre: Shoot 'em up Introduction Einhänder, a side-scrolling shoot 'em up (shmup) released by Square during the golden era of the PlayStation, is a game that remains a cult classic among retro gaming enthusiasts. In an era dominated by RPGs and 3D platformers, Einhänder stood out as a unique offering with its cyberpunk aesthetic, a… Read more

Mega Man in the Mushroom Kingdom"Mega Man in the Mushroom Kingdom" is a ROM hack of the original "Mega Man 1" for the NES that marries the tight platforming action of Mega Man with the iconic world of Nintendo's Super Mario series. Crafted by a creator known as alexAR in 2006, this hack offers a unique blend of two beloved universes that many of us grew up with. Story and Concept The… Read more

Sylphia - A Mythical 8-Bit Shoot 'em Up That Still Delivers Fun The TurboGrafx-CD was home to some great shoot 'em ups back in the day, and Sylphia stands out as one of the more unique entries in the system's library. Developed by Compile and released in 1992, Sylphia is a vertical scroller that feels heavily inspired by the NES classic Legendary Wings, and that's a very good thing. In Sylphia, you… Read more

At 2 a.m., Spencer Nilsen, David Young, and the singers of Pastiche were sitting in a circle on the studio floor, working out lyrics and harmonies for “Sonic Boom.” Nobody was complaining about the hour. Good ideas stayed, weaker ones went, and the song that would greet North American Sonic CD players was coming together between jokes. Nilsen arrived at Sega with years of recording experience and very little experience playing games.… 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

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

Sketch Turner lands a punch, a bright yellow “Pow!!” bursts beside his fist, and the next fight waits on the other side of a comic panel. He has to climb or jump across the page to reach it. Comix Zone takes its premise seriously enough to make the gutters between the pictures part of the adventure. It is still a wonderful thing to watch. Sega's 1995 Genesis brawler has another reputation, though.… 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

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

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

The motion tracker has noticed something. You have not. There is another stretch of corridor ahead, a door you would rather not open, and just enough ammunition to make investigating seem like a decision you might regret. For a moment, Atari’s famous number has left the room. You are far too busy worrying about the Alien. When the Jaguar found the right game, it could do that. Tempest 2000 could turn an… 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

Surgeons used Super Monkey Ball 2 as a warm-up before practicing laparoscopic surgery. Yes, the one with the bananas, the transparent balls and the alarming number of places to fall off. Dr. James “Butch” Rosser helped investigate whether playing selected games could get surgeons ready for delicate training tasks. The story reached gaming news in 2013 through reports about Rosser at Florida Hospital Celebration Health. Health News Florida covered it that October,… Read more

Yoshi has a name that sounds as though it should come with a museum plaque: T. Yoshisaur Munchakoopas. That's how a 1993 Nintendo character guide introduces Mario's green friend. Suddenly, keeping it to “Yoshi” seems like a favor he was doing everyone. In Super Mario World, you don't need much of an introduction. An egg cracks open, out pops your new ride, and before long he's swallowing enemies and making an awkward… Read more