From the Vault columnist. Grew up feeding quarters to the Ms. Pac-Man machine at his uncle's pizza place; still owns his childhood SNES and every Nintendo Power he ever begged his mother for. Writes the retrospectives and the hidden-gem hunts.
On 1 February 2017, the SEGA Channel Retro stream settled in for a co-operative session with two pieces of software that no publisher had commissioned, no shop would ever sell, and thousands of player
Sequels announced on Christmas Day should not be trusted to arrive quickly, and Freedom Planet 2 kept that bargain: announced on 25 December 2015, it spent years in the forge. But in the last days of
In January 2017, Sega did something its fans had wanted for years and rarely dared to expect: it put its music on Spotify, in bulk. Nearly twenty classic soundtracks arrived on the service at the end
In January 2017, Sonic fans noticed something small and terrifying: subscriptions to the Archie Sonic comic had quietly vanished from the publisher’s online store, and the Sonic title slated for Free
Lemming880’s little green coin hunter returned in 2017 with Boxx 3, a bright Backbone-built platformer of coins, switches, bosses and one very familiar robot — and a series that is still growing today.
Metroid Rogue Dawn is the prequel Nintendo never made — so three fans made it themselves, out of the original 1986 game’s own code. Released on 14 January 2017, Rogue Dawn is a complete new Metroid ad
On January 13, 2017, Nintendo presented the Switch to the world in full, and buried in the day’s flood of announcements was the one retro fans had been hoping for: the Sonic Mania Nintendo Switch vers
Of all the fan projects the Sonic community has produced, the Sonic 06 Unity remake may be the most perverse act of love: rebuilding, in a modern engine, the most infamous game in the series’ history.
There is no official PC version of Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) — the game fans just call Sonic ’06. There has never been one. Sega released it for Xbox 360 in November 2006, delisted it in 2010, and lef
Most new Commodore 64 games in the modern scene are labours of love sold in modest numbers to the faithful. Then there is Sam’s Journey, a C64 platformer so big and so polished that its developer’s ow