Retro

Still a 90’s kid at heart? Wish it was still 1985? Rather play Frogger than Assassin’s Creed? GameSpew’s Retro section is for you!

Here we celebrate everything yesteryear: the best games of days gone by, re-releases of the classics, and pretty much anything to do with the golden age of video games.

How Have Japanese Arcades Survived?

Duncan Robertson13 April 2017

I was recently lucky enough to visit Tokyo for the first time. As someone who's been playing video games their entire life, and plans to one day make a livin...

The 10 Worst Things About Retro Gaming

Chris Mc28 February 2017

The early days of gaming weren't as glorious as they're reputed to have been. Come with me as I take you on a tour of ten things that made this age such a minefield.

Top 10 MS-DOS Games That You Really Should Play

Saul Muscat21 February 2017

Microsoft’s first operating system MS-DOS was released in 1981, and between then until support for the OS ceased in 2000, thousands upon thousands of game were released.

‘Retroblox’ System Teases Multi-Console Emulation, Kickstarter in April

Chris Mc9 February 2017

With a Kickstarter launching in April, Retroblox promises to deliver multi-system emulation that makes use of original cartridges, CDs and peripherals.

Power Blade’s Bizarre Localisation Legacy

Tristan Jurkovich7 February 2017

I recently stumbled on a NES game called Power Blade at a local retro game shop. It's a pretty cool game – but its history is what makes it so interesting.

20 Years With My First RPG: A Final Fantasy VII Retrospective

Tristan Jurkovich19 January 2017

This month marks Final Fantasy VII's 20th anniversary. Feel old yet? Originally debuting in Japan on 31st January 1997 for PlayStation 1, it later followed in ...

A Brief History on Double Dragon’s Confusing 30-Year Legacy

Tristan Jurkovich6 January 2017

Double Dragon is one of the forefathers of the beat’em up genre. While it started in arcades, most gamers are probably more familiar with the NES port. No matte...

Games That Changed Our Lives #35: Simcopter

Saul Muscat5 January 2017

Though loads of kids at my school were into video games, nobody except my friend Adam and I had ever heard of Simcopter. In the playground we both laughed and j...

Happy 24th Birthday, Streets of Rage 2!

Richard Seagrave20 December 2016

It makes you feel old, doesn’t it, knowing that a game that you played in your youth is now 24 years old? In the case of SEGA’s Streets of Rage 2, it feels like...

Jak and Daxter: Naughty Dog’s First Foray into Dramatic Storytelling

Tristan Jurkovich12 December 2016

At PSX this past weekend, three out of four of Naughty Dog’s biggest properties were showcased. The company is making a standalone expansion to Uncharted 4, ent...

Fighting Evil by Moonlight, Winning Love by Daylight: Persona 20th Anniversary

Tristan Jurkovich1 December 2016

November marked Persona's 20th anniversary in the U.S. The legacy of its succession of sequels and origins are as bizarre as the plots in these titles. So sit b...

Games That Changed Our Lives #34: TimeSplitters: Future Perfect

Aaron Potter17 November 2016

The games of today simply don’t feature enough time travel. There, I said it. Maybe it’s a theme just that little bit too retro for modern game devs to pull off...

Shining Light on Nintendo’s Forgotten RPG Series Golden Sun

Tristan Jurkovich10 November 2016

Despite Nintendo’s long list of properties and genre explorations, they have very few RPGs under their belt. One of them, Golden Sun, hasn’t been given its due,...

Looking Back Over 25 Years of the Mana Series: The RPG Tree of Life

Tristan Jurkovich4 November 2016

This month marks the 25th Anniversary of the Mana series, which began on weird terms. The first game launched for the Game Boy in the U.S. sometime in November ...

Games That Changed Our Lives #33: Final Fantasy IX

Brandon Langrock22 September 2016

I recall that, for one of my early birthdays, I told my mother that I wanted to rent the original PlayStation console from the local video game rental store. Th...

Games That Changed Our Live #32: Heretic II

Joseph Sale8 September 2016

In 1998 Raven Software released what would be a genre-defining, revolutionary title, one that virtually no one has heard of nowadays except hardcore fanatics an...

Games That Changed Our Lives #31: Fable II

Sarah Doherty1 September 2016

Being a teenage girl at an all-girls school isn't as easy as one may think. Life revolves around the latest teen gossip, the reading material mainly consisted o...

Games That Changed Our Lives #30: The Sims

Kim Snaith18 August 2016

We'd had Sim City and countless other management sims that saw us take control of colonies, towns and cities, but actually controlling the people in those towns...

Games That Changed Our Lives #29: Pokémon Red & Blue

David Brooks11 August 2016

The mid-Nineties saw a huge leap in the video-gaming industry as 3D games and the consoles to play them on became available. This put the likes of the Sony Play...

Thousands of Amiga Games Now Available For Free In Your Browser

Kim Snaith10 August 2016

Have you ever heard of Archive.org, or the Internet Wayback Machine? Well, you've been missing out. A service that's been running for years, the Internet Archiv...