Retro

In the world of game music, Nobuo Uematsu is almost a legend in his own right. The melodic foundation he laid for Final Fantasy IV has influenced an entire generation’s imagination of RPG music. But few people know that this master was also “frontally knocked down” by another composer at a certain moment, and even ran back to the office to “overturn” all the music!

Virtual Boy has always lived a contradictory life. It is one of the weirdest, shortest-lived, and most mythologized consoles in Nintendo history. Cassettes are difficult to find, the price is outrageous, the hardware is aging, and the eyes are uncomfortable. As a result, many players can only choose to use emulators to “cloud experience”. Now, this situation is finally about to change! RetroOnyx has opened the third batch of pre-orders for MrCART. This is a full-featured menu-based flash card designed for Virtual Boy native hardware, allowing this 3D console to have the experience of “selecting games like a modern console” for the first time!

While the entire industry is talking about handheld PCs, AI upscaling and 4K 120Hz, some people choose to go back and shoehorn a modern indie game back into the Nintendo 64 and Sega Dreamcast. The arcade-style platform game “Donut Dodo” owned by Pixel Games SARL-S is preparing for a true “retro return”. Not only the Xbox Series What’s even more cruel is that this is not a simple transplant, but a technical experiment that is almost redone from the engine level.

While everyone is talking about 4K, ray tracing and AI frame generation, some people still choose to go back and put the game on a color screen that is only a few inches in size. Recently, a new game called “Last Crown Warriors” has quietly emerged in the retro gamer circle. It is directly locked on the Game Boy and Game Boy Color platforms. It takes a mixed route of action and tactics. The source of inspiration will be mentioned to you at the beginning: Zelda and the Legend of Mana series.

When many people mention Square (later Square Enix) today, the first thing that comes to mind is Final Fantasy, JRPG, epic soundtracks and other luxurious narrative works. But if you take the time back to 1983 to 1986, that company is actually more like a group of geeky studios making “computer text adventure games”: they started as the computer game department of Den-Yu-Sha. In the early days, they made works such as the text adventure “The Death Trap” on the NEC PC-8801, and then started to move to the NES market around 1985…

At the end of 2025, the nostalgia circle was awakened again – ModRetro finally released the M64, which is the “modern holy object” specially created for Nintendo 64 players. Before, just hearing the name, everyone thought it was some half-assed development board host; but as soon as the real machine was unveiled, with a transparent shell and FPGA, a kind of “I am not sentimental, I am orthodox” momentum directly overshadowed its counterpart Analogue 3D!

There are already a lot of “Puyo Puyo” games available on Switch, from SEGA AGES to “Puyo Puyo Champions” and even “Magic Bubble x Tetris”, but now this ancestral game may catch your attention: D4 Enterprise announced that it will bring the 1991 MSX2 original “Puyo Puyo” to the Switch eShop, allowing players to directly experience the “most original, oldest, and purest” bubble-matching pleasure!

Analogue 3D, the FPGA Nintendo 64-compatible console, has been delayed all the way from its announcement in 2023. Many people thought it was going to be difficult to deliver! Now that foreign media’s actual machine evaluation has finally been released, one thing can be confirmed: this machine is not a legend, it really exists, and its performance is quite amazing!

The GBA handheld console was known as a “masterpiece shoehorned into the home console” back then, and it could be adapted to any weird transplant. From “Crazy Taxi” to “Jet Set Radio”, players complain about the performance and admire the developers’ extreme operations every time. However, I didn’t expect that in 2025, someone would challenge an even crazier thing – to make Ridge Racer into the GBA.

With more than 150 million units sold, Nintendo’s Nintendo DS series of handheld consoles is one of the most successful handheld consoles in gaming history. From the original Big Sweet Potato in 2004, to the most popular DS Lite in 2006, to the DSi in 2008 and the DSi XL in 2009 (these two machines were actually a bit outdated when they were launched), this period was almost the golden age of Nintendo.