Category: Retro

Bitwave Games are doing it again, giving us a healthy dose of nostalgia with the Toaplan Arcade Shoot 'Em Up Collection Vol.4 that's due to release soon. Plus a teaser of something else to come.

An action platformer first released in 1999, you play as Urban Gutter, a man taken by an evil scientist to a secret military base and changed into a cyborg against his will. The acronym in the title then is a bit odd, but your one goal is to escape and enact as bloody a revenge on the world as possible. Any hope for true catharsis here often gets lost in frustration however.

EA just surprised launched the Command & Conquer The Ultimate Collection on Steam in a big bundle, along with a few other classic titles.

The news of the Yuzu team agreeing to pay Nintendo $2.4 million in damages and immediately shut down all operations sent shock waves through the emulation landscape. EmuDeck will now also be removing Yuzu and Citra.

I stated before that neither of the contemporary HeXen ports, Linux Hexen and its fork HHexen, supported MIDI music playback through the /dev/sequencer device, but hiding on the venerable SunSITE network I found the only online trace of another early HeXen source port released in December 1999 by Russian programmer Stanislav Nesterov.

Want an easy way to get The Force Engine on Linux to play Star Wars: Dark Forces (and eventually Outlaws too)? Well, now it's available on Flathub.

Free Stars: The Ur-Quan Masters, which is an open source version of the classic Star Control 2, has managed to get a Steam release from Pistol Shrimp Games.

Toaplan Arcade Shoot ‘Em Up Collection Vol.3 from Bitwave Games / Toaplan is another 4-pack of classic games, and a nice clear example of how to bring retro games the right way to modern platforms.

The modern cross-platform Diablo game engine devilutionX has a new release available, and although small it does have some important fixes.

Blaze Entertainment's latest Evercade-compatible device makes for an excellent entry to licensed emulation on Linux.

GB Studio is a free and open source cross-platform game engine, that allows you to make fully-features games for the classic Nintendo Game Boy.

When I first got the original Linux port of Doom working it was done to satisfy my curiosity. This being Doom though I soon found myself drawn in, but there were some oddities I encountered. This also made me inclined to try playing all of Heretic and HeXen, a feat I had never managed up to that point. Would I encounter any more issues with these early source ports?

AdventureQuest 8-Bit: Dungeons & DoomKnights is a really properly retro adventure, funded on Kickstarter for the NES back in 2019 it now has a fancy PC release too.

Taito and M2 have been bringing some updated shoot 'em up classics to Steam with lots of enhancements, and players seem to love them. Now titles like G-Darius HD should work great on the Steam Deck.

Even more classics are getting a new life on PC with the Toaplan Arcade Shoot 'Em Up Collection Vol. 3 announced for release on February 1st along with Linux and Steam Deck support just like the previous collections.

With Steamboat Willie now being in the public domain, no doubt we're about to see a lot more of it. One of the first is Victorian Clambake's game The Caribbean Sail which added Steamboat Willie as a playable character.

Jazz Jackrabbit 2 is a much loved classic that continues to live on thanks to the Jazz² Resurrection project, with a new release that went live recently bringing Flatpak support.

Another really impressive project that just got a big final release is The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall game engine remake Daggerfall Unity which has hit the 1.0 meaning it's now complete!

Just before the end of 2023 the ScummVM team released ScummVM 2.8.0 bringing with it support for running various new games along with improvements to other already supported classics.

The team is pleased to present the new version of the fheroes2 engine - 1.0.11 after a month of hard work. As in any other release, we made many changes and are happy to share the news with you.