Welcome to Retro Game News! The latest retro video gaming news channel on the internet. Come here to help yourself stay up to date with the latest developments in the exciting and happening world of retro video gaming. The hobby of retro video gaming and game collecting has evolved very quickly from a past time perceived to be only for “mum’s basement nerds” to now being virtually mainstream with exciting new projects and developments from people all over the world enhancing the modern retro gaming experience. It truly is an awesome time where technology has become so powerful that even motivated hobbyists have access to the knowledge, skills and resources to be able to make some amazing things happen on 20+ year old gaming machines.
The rate at which developments are happening for nearly all the old video and computer gaming systems is really staggering which makes it difficult to keep up with the constant flow of news from around the world. The purpose of this website is to keep retro gamers informed of new developments including but limited to new hardware, new “homebrew” games and software, new game translations and hacks, community project collaborations, discoveries about gaming history, prototype games and hardware and official first party (Nintendo, Sony, Sega, etc) retro game releases and news.
The FXPAK PRO is an innovative product released years ago for the Super NES that allows game ROM to be loaded onto an SD card that is inserted into a slot on the top of the cartridge. Nearly all games can be played on a real SNES including MSU-1 sound enhanced games.
So I would like to heartily welcome all visitors to the website and we hope to see you return time and time again to get your fix of retro video and computer gaming news. It is of course impossible for one man to be able to know every single bit of retro gaming news that is going on around the world – there is just way too much going on these days! Therefore this website’s blog section will focus primarily on one of the most popular and arguably the best old gaming of all time – the Super Nintendo Entertainment System a.k.a the SNES or Super NES. It is a legendary system which gets a lot of well deserved attention and has a long and rich history and culture making it a near bottomless well of discovery and invention. That fact together with the fact that virtually every single retro video gamer alive has heard of the Super NES and that it also has a lively ROM hacking / translating scene makes it the perfect console for this website to focus on.
If you want to know about my life history with video games than continue reading
...
I was born in the mid 1980’s and ever since then at home I have always been in close proximity to a video gaming system. The first video gaming system my dad bought was an Atari 2600 Jr. which was always on at my house when I was a baby crawling around. In fact my dad was playing Atari when he was meant to be keeping an eye on me! It wasn’t long before I picked up a controller and started interacting the moving blocky pixels on the TV screen. I became fascinated and mesmerized with the games we had for the machine. They have aged terribly by today’s standard and I would probably not enjoy them now had I not played them during my childhood. I still think we had the best games available for the system, but I find it difficult to get into games that other people say are the best for the system due to nostalgia.
One of my early Super Nintendo memories was playing Shadowrun. A classic cyberpunk action RPG, still unrivaled to this day.
Anyway I continued to grow up gaming and next I experienced the Sega SC-3000, Sega Master System and Sega Mega Drive while visiting a friends house in “reception” (the grade before 1st grade in school). Having been used to Atari 2600 graphics I was completely blown away by this experience and these old memories have firmly cemented themselves in my mind. After several times visiting that friend he changed schools and I then met my best friend all throughout primary school who had a NES and Commodore 64 at the time. Not long later the SNES was launched and my mum pre-ordered the Super Mario World pack in version of the Super Nintendo. My life long love affair with the Super Nintendo begun and hasn’t stopped 30 years later. Very early on my parents were convinced by our next door neighbor, a massive tech-head and video gamer, to invest in a copier system for the console. I remember the night that my dad came home with the amazing UFO Copier Pro 8 System and a collection of about 200 floppy disks labelled and pre-loaded with a vast array of SNES games.
Over the next couple years nearly all my indoor free time was used discovering all the games in our collection. At the time one game kept me occupied for weeks, so there was enough in that starting collection for endless amounts of fun on its own. However my video gaming experience kept growing as my best friend also got a copier system with a different vast collection of games on floppy disks. I started reading the Australian NMS (Nintendo Magazine System) and would play and familiarize myself with the NES, Commodore 64, Sega Genesis and Sega CD at my best friends house. My brother who was 2 years younger than me also was a gamer and together we played games all the time. The neighbour tech-head also had two sons that were my age and my brothers age and we visited them constantly. He spent a lot of money on tech and had a giant rear projection TV (the latest technology at the time) and surround sound system. He had enough money to buy the Panasonic 3DO when it came out in Australia (or was imported) around 94-95 and we were lucky enough to play “real life” movie style games on the giant TV. We were able to experience the Sega Saturn and later on the Sony Playstation when it came out first at his house too.
This game has a special place in my heart as I spent entire nights staying up and playing this game with my Dad.
In high school I remember getting a small 34cm Sharp TV for my bedroom along with a Sony Playstation and me and my brother would walk to the local video game store to ogle and once in a while purchase new Sony Playstation games with our hard saved pocket money. Early on in the Playstation’s life there wasn’t a whole lot of games but I remember buying Tekken, Road Rash and Space Hulk. When the Playstation’s killer app Final Fantasy VII arrived it was the start of a rocket being launched and soon the system was flooded with a vast array of excellent games. Not long later the Nintendo 64 was launched and me and my best friend both received it at launch for a cool $400 and extra for the game. We got Super Mario 64 at first and later I got Wave Race while my brother got Pilotwings 64. So we had all the launch titles and the next few months was spent competing with my best friend to see who could get all 120 stars first. After this things get a bit fuzzy gaming-wise as in the later half of high school my interest in video gaming subsided a fair bit. Not long after high school finished I studied at a local college and then started working and thus began the video game collecting part of my life.
In the beginning I was fascinated with the Philips CD-i and I spent a lot of my spare money importing games from Europe for the CD-i. It was expensive and I eventually traded most of CD-i stuff to a friend to modify my Sony Playstation 2, I was way too generous and lost basically all of my CD-i stuff to him for just a simple chip mod. He didn’t accept cash as payment only games as a trade. I also got interested in collecting for Sega Master System and Sega SC-3000 for a while but too have lost a lot of inventory when I had money troubles and liquidated a massive portion of my collection.
My current SNES collection shelf, quality over quantity! The unlabeled black box is a FXPAKPRO cartridge and the Star Ocean repro box contains a loose USA cartridge – New Horizons. The copy of F-Zero is brand new and sealed and I also have a loose Test Cartridge
I currently have only a very small (but rare and valuable) collection of SNES games as well as odd games for a random selection of systems. My collection got decimated and I’m now left with a only a shadow of what I used to have. I forgot to include how PC / DOS gaming fit into my life as it influenced me from a very young age but the story was long enough without adding that to it. My PC / DOS collection was never affected so it’s currently my biggest collection. That’s my video gaming and collecting history in a nutshell, that’s as compressed as I can make it so it didn’t turn into a 300 page novel. I’m now nearly having to start collecting again after nearly losing everything. And gaming prices are through the roof so it will be a long time until my game collection get’s restored.
Having said all that I have no shortage of games to play as I’m currently the owner of a powerful PC that can emulate nearly any system and a Sony Playstation 3 that has been jail-broken as modded with many Sony games from the first 3 Playstation’s as well as having Retro Arch installed to emulate other gaming systems on the PS3. Additionally I have a Super Famicom (Japanese Super NES) with an FXPAKPRO flash cartridge so I’m able to play the entire library of SNES games on real hardware and also the MSU-1 sound chip game hacks which are an excellent quality addition to the SNES.
