It's amazing how much retro gaming has been used to sell games. The first part is articles written about nostalgia.
VG: Classics
Mech RTS games
Best Rare Games. This list includes games like Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy. It's multiple pages and I have archived all of them.
Tetris Sequel for Gameboy found
Elder Scrolls turns 30, and PC Gamer celebrates
Grandia Collection coming out
Yuji Naka learned to port and make games by porting Ghouls and Ghosts to the MegaDrive. This gave him the skill to program Sonic.
The 32x Castlevania that became Symphony of the Night
How the PS2 totally beat everyone else. It's a short read. It's also wrong.
10 Sega Classics on the Switch
A look back at European magazines talking about consoles
A look at Shigeru Miyamoto’s thoughts on game design 17 years ago.
Trip Hawkins talks about how he nearly got various companies united against Sony in the 90’s.
The best games for MegaDrive by year
Every game in the videogame hall of fame
_C: Konami
Top 10 Konami characters. I wish there was a Goemon collection with translations for the Japanese only games.
Best Konami games
Castlevania Bloodlines is 30 years old
10 Konami arcade games
The classics are told with a bit of nostalgia. Look at how the PlayStation is given a narrative of dominance. They did sell more consoles, but no where near the amount claimed. But this is the narrative, and it must be told this way.
But it gets deeper as you realize that this nostalgia is big money. Museums are being made to tell stories about videogames.
_C: Museums
The Strong Museum has 12 candidates for their hall of fame this year. Games like Myst, Tony Hawk Pro Skater, and Metroid are up for the vote.
Nintendo museum is delayed
There is an entire industry selling games and products for classic gaming.
VG: Classic Indies
Grind is a Doom FPS style game for Amiga
Earthion is being released on modern consoles, PC, and MegaDrive. A SHMUP that pushes the console to its limits.
Super Mario if the CD Drive was real
Castlevania Revamped is a PC edition of the game with various upgrades.
Super Metroid port to MegaDrive is called Space Hunter
Virtual Reality from the N64
A ROM hack of Light Crusader gives the player a double jump.
Otogorisou has been translated to English. It's a Famicom visual novel game by chunsoft.
A Sega fan game maker is making his own game.
Breath of Thunder is coming out for several consoles including Virtual Boy
A rogue squadron style star wars game for the Dreamcast
An NES edition of SEGA Bass Fishing
Hard Knight and Haragon are new games for the Commodore 64
Toaplan games are heading to Steam. Truxton 2!
Sunsoft shows off games on Switch
CI: Classic Ports
You can now watch movies from the Atari 2600
Demons of Asteborg was made for the MegaDrive. It's being ported to the GBA and Neo Geo
Surprise Attack, the Konami arcade game, is being released to Switch and PS4
Check out that videos on Atari. I saw a similar set up for the TI99 a few years ago and was blown away. The guy showing it owned a retro computing store, and knew tons of people making ports and physical parts for old computers.
It's really hard to differentiate fan made fun stuff from people doing it professionally. For example, the company that made a game is releasing an open source version of it.
_CI: Freestars from Star Control
Star Control II is being released for free with a new name
Here is a Tweet about it.
Then we have a fan making ports of games, and then his own game which may or may not be sold.
_CI: FPS Dungeon for MegaDrive
Guy who created the Final Fight Mega Drive edition is making an FP RPG for the console
We have footage now
There are companies like Atari and Nightdive studios which only make modern ports for games.
_CI: Atari
Interview with the CEO of Atari. He wants to under promise and over deliver
Talk about Atari buying Nightdive and Digital Eclipse and how it's worked out
_CI: Nightdive
An interview with Nightdive studios and their CI port work
Dark Forces Remaster!
Nightdive studios publicly asks to port No One Lives Forever
I really want that port of No One Lives Forever. I had the demo, but never bought it. So a modern port would be great.
Physical stuff like toys, and computer remakes blur the lines just as quickly as the software side.
_CI: Physical bits
Commodore 64 keyboard revamp
Virtual On is getting a pedometer
What do you do with your mini console? Play it on a mini monitor!
How to modernize your console collection in a really convoluted way
You can now add a second screen to your steam deck. DS games will be much easier to emulate.
A look at the Atari 400 Mini
Altered Beast gets a toy line
That's a fan based company making toys for sale. The Atari 400 mini is especially cool to me because a friend is really into it. I got him a full sized XL once through my retro convention connections. He lost his 400 in a fire and still missed it.
If I taught videogame history I would include a class where students had to make games for old school consoles. Sure they start at QBASIC but Assembly, C, and C++ would be taught along with using level editors and stuff like SCRUMM. Let them slowly build up to the modern engine to see and understand the history.
There is so much Classic Indie work being done that it would be easy to set up and begin working.
That's cool. I did one in college on computer architecture, we had to design a dumbed down 8-bit computer from transistors. I'd done a ton of programming in my life by then, and that was still really interesting.
Good ol' Verilog.
We had to write a program using our CPU's ISA that generated the Fibonacci Sequence once we had our hardware simulation working. Only a few people actually completed everything in that class.
I can't remember what exactly we used but we did have to do a bunch of different programs for it. There weren't that many op-codes it didn't have to do a ton. I took the class in the summer because I knew the professor, a white guy that could teach well. I think at one point I took every class he offered as electives. There were only like 8 of us in the class and I got paired up with a real oddity, it was a 14 year old kid that was taking random college stuff in the summer. I think the professor paired me up with him since he knew me from other classes and that I'd treat the kid okay. Kid was smart and actually wanted to learn so it was a win for me really. We finished everything in the class, and I spent way more time working on that than I'd expected. I went in wanting some easy hours.
Was definitely one of my favorite classes in college. Advanced computer architecture was also great. Learning about things like out-of-order execution and data forwarding was fascinating.
I remember doing something in PicoBlaze assembly for one of those classes and thinking it was the greatest thing ever when I could make something 1 clock cycle faster by using a different instruction.
Now all I think is variants of "let's do this in Python (wasting billions/trillions of clock cycles) so I can get it done quicker and go on to doing something else."