There's a diagnostic suite of software for game consoles which tests input lag and screen tearing on your display. This suite first popped up for consoles released at the turn of the century (Dreamcast, specifically), but someone has made a version of this toolkit for... the ColecoVision....
Time Extension recently posted this excellent interview with Cameron Sheppard and Mike Merren, formerly of Crawfish Studios, about its ambitious Game Boy Advance port of Street Fighter Alpha 3, and how it significantly contributed to the downfall of the company. Numerous delays to the game led to Crawfish losing the royalties it...
Some people are the masters of their instruments. For Rush's Neal Peart, it was the drums, for Slash, it was the guitar. For John Champeau, it's the Atari 2600. He's coaxed games out of this system that just shouldn't be possible, whether it's a port of Galaga that's better than the Atari 7800 version, or a conversion of Wizard...
Guru Logi Champ for the Game Boy Advance was the last game designed by Compile before the company's untimely bankruptcy. This refreshingly unique puzzle title was a Japanese exclusive, but Western players can finally get a taste of its block-tossing, screen-spinning action in Carleton Handley's Spinning Image, for the Commodore...
Enraged by Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony refusing to sell their consoles in Russia, Vladimir Putin climbed up an onion shaped tower while clutching a damsel in one arm, and said "I shall make my OWN game console! With blackjack, and hookers, and not at all suspicious deaths of my critics!"...
A few days ago, a warning flashed on my Xbox Series. "The Jeff Minter Story now rated MA-18!" I was thinking to myself, "What fresh hell do we have here? Did they find naked llamas in the game? Or a hidden game, like Hot Coffee in Grand Theft Auto? Eww, them's some gross implications there."...
The classic puzzle game Chip's Challenge, which made its debut on the Atari Lynx thirty-five years ago (oy vey), has now resurfaced on the Nintendo Switch. For those curious, this is the Lynx game running on an emulator, as opposed to the PC version, which has a higher resolution and a wider view of the playfield, but unsettling...
Remember the Data Frog SF2000? It's a re-donkulously cheap handheld game system sold on Chinese mail order outlets like AliExpress and Temu. You can get one of these for as little as twenty dollars, not a bad deal when you consider there's just enough power packed into one of these systems to play Capcom arcade games and a hefty...
Here's a Christmas curveball for you. Galix's GGPie uses the Game Gear TV Tuner and a Raspberry Pi Zero to turn your Game Gear into a most-in-one game console. The problem is that while the Raspberry Pi has more than enough power to emulate everything up to the original Playstation, the Game Gear has a severe button deficit, so...
Good news for fans of obscure side-scrolling shooters! Rabio Lepus (which I remember in arcades as "Rabbit Punch") is now half off its original price on the Nintendo Switch, bringing the total down to $3.99. This was one of developer Video System's first games, starring two rabbit droids blasting and punching their way through...
Alas, the long-running Electronic Entertainment Expo, a convention created especially for the video game industry, is no more. Started in 1995, E3 gave publishers and developers a chance to show off their latest releases and works in progress, without fear of being eclipsed by the more general purpose technology featured at the...
Good news for owners of Atari 50, the anniversary collection released by Atari and Digital Eclipse (now part of Atari) earlier this year. Multiple DLC packs are planned for the game, with the first of these debuting next week....
Coming soon to a Nintendo Switch or PS4 near you, whether you like it or not! It's the Taito arcade title Tokio, a decidedly lackluster shoot 'em up from 1986. Tokio plays like a halfway point between Capcom's 1942 and Nichibutsu's Terra Cresta, with your biplane flying over the Japanese cityscape, blasting formations of stealth...
Here's a Cohost post I made paying tribute to McDonald's Treasureland Adventure. It's the kind of game that could only exist in 1993, back when McDonald's wasn't ashamed to be tacky and weird, and when Treasure was hungry enough for work that they'd take on a nutty project like this. It's not the best Treasure title on the Sega...
If you were a little shaver during the Genesis years who was disappointed that they couldn't squeeze Earthquake's Texas-sized tushie into its port of Samurai Shodown, take heart! A team of South American programmers lead by Gabriel Pyron have done the impossible, putting The Incredible Hulk and a full-sized Juggernaut from...
It's been a fun sixteen years, but due to internal strife within The Escapist, Ben Croshaw (known professionally as "Yahtzee") has left the company, leaving the future of his YouTube series Zero Punctuation in question. Wherever Yahtzee goes, he won't (or can't?) take the Zero Punctuation brand with him, and it's unlikely that...
Digital Eclipse, one of the pioneers of retro gaming emulation on home game consoles, is now the property of Atari. Under the leadership of current CEO Wade Rosen, Atari has been buying anything and everything that could conceivably be related to Atari, including Berzerk creators Stern, Accolade, the publisher that gave the...
Visco, a small but ambitious game developer from the 1990s, has been trying to establish itself in the 21st century with everything from new games (Andro Dunos II) to an arcade cabinet filled with their older ones (the Visco Mini Arcade Bartop, manufactured by Unico)....
Good news for fans of the SF2000, the el cheapo handheld game device sold by AliExpress and other Chinese retail sites. YouTube user S1eepy reports that hobbyist programmer Adcockm has brought over twenty new emulators to the system. What this means is that in the near future, you could be playing the software libraries of over...
The always reliable Damien McFerran from Time Extension reports that Retro-Bit is set to release the Saturn Pro controller, a sequel of sorts to the original Sega Saturn joypad. That pad was absolutely fantastic for 2D games of all stripes, and especially versus fighting games, but the Saturn Pro pad adds two (tiny) analog...
It's an inauspicious anniversary, but the N-Gage is not as awful as its reputation would suggest. It was wrong-headed in its design, with an over-encumbered button layout and a tiny vertically oriented screen, but it could push polygons in a way no other handheld of the time could, particularly the Game Boy Advance....
Honestly, it was a little puzzling that the game didn't ship with these controls in the first place... the Dual Shock had been around for a few years, and the Playstation 2 came with these dual analog controllers by default. But hey, better twenty three years late than never, right? Special thanks to VanLaser for this much...