You can just download it and play: https://x.com/chris_wallura/status/2114434152988868621

Or Itch: https://christophwallura.itch.io/legends-of-commerce

No ai. It's only 190 Mb. I'm the developer.

It's a remake of the old classics - if you played Sid Meier's Pirates or Port Royale you will feel right at home. No Naval combat as of yet (it's planned) But you can trade and create trade routes, prices are dynamic based on supply and demand. The worlds are random - using climatology science for more believable results.

We have modernism and also post-modernism that are tied to a specific range of dates. I'm wondering if people feel the same way for "retro"

Recently made a close friend with similar tastes in my uni dnd group and I remembered I have retroarch. Anyone knows fun 2 player retro games we can try? Fantasy and rpg games especially. Thank you!

I've been reading through Finnish developer Lasse Öörni's development notes for Steel Ranger 2, his enormous new Commodore 64 action adventure. Which is pretty damn niche, since who runs a C64 these days (I know I don't, but I find it all interesting regardless!)

He's spent over four years making it, handling almost everything himself, from the programming and graphics to the music. The finished game has over 800 screens to explore and a 45-minute soundtrack, all running on hardware from 1982.

I put together a super little article about the game, the technical challenges Lasse encountered along the way, and how wonderful it is that people are still making games of this scale for the C64 in 2026. This isn't on my usual site, just my curiosity with NeoCities which I've been enjoying the last couple weeks or so.

I guess this article is for just a handful of folk, but no better space than retro gaming to share it!

Yes, you can dodge, parry and riposte now.

Click here for more info, .ips patch and a video

Some of the ports we're seeing in the retro handheld community lately have been great, and I love seeing developers push these little devices beyond what they were ever intended to do. But I've definitely noticed what feels like a growing amount of 'port-slop', with new projects appearing seemingly every few hours, many of them feeling more like quick experiments than anything particularly worthwhile.

I'm not against the experimentation at all, but I do wonder if we're reaching a point where quantity is starting to overshadow quality. Anyway, I put together a short opinion piece about it, just my own thoughts on something I've been noticing lately, especially here with my favorite old system: the PSP.

Almost four decades after Wizball arrived on the ZX Spectrum, one developer has set about giving it the version it perhaps always deserved, with a little help from someone who worked on the original.

This isn't even an article-article, and if you've been following my posts at all you'll see it isn't for my site. This is just a bit of a ramble on a fun (yet super niche!) topic for my newly semi-formed NeoCities page I've been tinkering with.

If you're old enough for the ZX Spectrum, then you might find it vaguely amusing :)

I've been filling out my emulator collection and thought I'd poke my head into the world of Sega consoles, which I have no experience with.

What classic Master System/Genesis/32x/Game Gear/Sega CD games should I try? I'm more of an RPG guy, but I'll play a good retro platformer or whatever.

What I've found so far from my own research (mostly Genesis):

• Altered Beast

• Beyond Oasis

• Castlevania Bloodlines

• Comix Zone

• Crusader of Centy

• Death and Return of Superman (I just really liked this comics arc)

• Earthworm Jim 1+2

• Gauntlet 4

• Golden Axe 1+2

• Landstalker

• Might and Magic - Gates to Another World (I think this is MM2?)

• OutRun and OutRun 2019

• Phantasy Star 1-4

• Shadowrun

• Shining Force 1+2

• ToeJam and Earl

• Ys - The Vanished Omens

What I have no interest in:

• Sonic

• Fighting games

• Sports games

EDIT: I'll definitely take note of any Saturn/Dreamcast recommendations too, but my plan is to start with the older consoles and work my way up.

I've been looking into a lovely little preservation project involving EverQuest Online Adventures, the PlayStation 2 MMORPG that shut down way back in 2012.

Developer Ahmad Hassan (B-Ted) has been working on something called EQAI: an effort to bring the game's original 2003 character models back into its later Frontiers version. It turns out this is way more complicated than simply swapping a few files, involving all sorts of reverse engineering of the PS2's graphics and memory systems.

It's still a work in progress, but I find something really appealing about people putting this much time and effort into preserving the little details of online worlds that disappeared years ago. So I've written a short piece about the project and the wider community working to keep this forgotten corner of gaming history alive :)

Remember Z, the original from 1996, not Steel Soldiers? The RTS where time was the only resource: no mining, no base building, just flags, territory and factories that build faster the more ground you hold. It turned 30 this year, so I rebuilt it in 3D in Unity with several of the classic levels. Version 1.1 just came out with a jungle level, a flying shuttle and Alan and Brad as a hero squad.

It's free and open source (code GPL-3.0, assets CC BY-NC-SA), nothing is sold, and it's not affiliated with Rebellion or The Bitmap Brothers.

https://github.com/playopenz/OpenZ

Would love to hear from anyone who played the original. What did you love or hate about it?

Really sad to hear that BioWare is closing its doors after 31 years. I can't say it's entirely surprising given how difficult the last decade has been for the studio, but it's still a shame to see another enormously influential name disappear from the industry. This was the developer behind Neverwinter Nights, Knights of the Old Republic, Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect 2, among so many others. What an incredible run of games they had :(

I've written a little piece looking back at BioWare's history, some of my favorite games from their glory days, and how depressing it's becoming to see so many studios shutting down. Whatever you think of BioWare's more recent output, I think gaming is a little poorer without them.

Clearly the news has been covered and re-covered, so this is just a brief look over their work.

Back in the day, I would power off my hardware. My computer would tell me when it was safe to power off, my Genesis and PS1 you pressed the power button and that was it.

But when I got my PS2, turning it off wasn't just turning it off. The power button didn't turn anything off, it just reset the system. So I always hit the power switch on the back.

It wouldn't be for a while before we learned we can turn it off and back on faster by pressing and holding the power button. Rather than killing the system. And newer systems like the PS3 didn't like it at all when they were powered off completely.

Well here's my Retroid Pocket Duo review! Retroid, the company, has released their higher-end Android-running retro handheld. AMOLED displays in a dual-screen form factor which can handle emulating Nintendo DS and 3DS games, and some more above that.

As part of it, I've been chatting with the developers behind Eden, Eden Duo, SeedlessDS and Cocoon about their work, the challenges of dual-screen gaming on Android, and where they see things going from here. I've incorporated their perspectives throughout the review, alongside my usual hands-on testing and thoughts about the hardware itself.

I've also spent plenty of time testing everything from Nintendo DS and 3DS through to PSP, GameCube, PS2, Switch and PC gaming, seeing where the Duo does well and where the limitations start becoming apparent. There are some fun things I found when reviewing, and a few things I'd still change. Above all, though, Retroid has once again managed to make a handheld that feels nicely playful (something I love about their handhelds), and 'Nintendo-like', and I've had an absolute blast reviewing it.

As ever, this is a written article (and a very long one at that!), so if you're a fan of older gaming-style sites and features that aren't videos, this might be your kind of read. Hope some of you enjoy this!

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/58318406

Extremely useful for games that only run in full screen. There are many tweaks you can apply to them, such as hooking XInput or mapping a X360 controller to specific keys, force screen size and several other things

A few years back I was fortunate enough to be a part of a rescue mission that took a group of arcade collectors to France to remove multiple arcade cabinets from a run down building. If you missed …