Category Archives: Modern Retro

Modern games, made to look retro.

Beef Drop, Atari 8-Bit

Beef Drop is a homebrew BurgerTime clone programmed by the late Ken Siders and released through AtariAge in 2005. As far as home ports of Data East‘s classic arcade game go, it’s arguably one of the most authentic.

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Snowdown, Commodore 64

Snowdown is a one or two-player Christmas-themed action game that was written by Badger Punch Games and first released for the Commodore 64 in 2020.

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Eye of the Beholder, Commodore 64

This amazing Commodore 64 port of the 1991 Amiga/MS-DOS RPG classic, Eye of the Beholder, was released on 21st November 2022 and is one of the best homebrew remakes I think I’ve ever played. It was written by “Jack Asser“, with the help of a number of other talented individuals, and comes as a CRT (cartridge) file for quick-loading.

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Ion Fury, PC

Ion Fury is a cyberpunk-themed first-person shooter, developed by Voidpoint and published by 3D Realms in 2019. It is a prequel to the 2016 game, Bombshell.

Ion Fury runs on a modified version of Ken Silverman‘s Build Engine and is the first original commercial game to use the Build Engine in twenty years.

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The Dark, ZX Spectrum

The Dark is a rare first-person shooter on the humble ZX Spectrum, written by Russian coder Oleg Origin. It was originally released under the title of Quake in 1997, and was then re-worked and re-released by the original author as The Dark in 2016.

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The Empire Strikes Back, Commodore 64

This brilliant Commodore 64 homebrew remake of Parker Brothersclassic Atari 2600 game first came out in 2022 and it features superb music, great graphics and fun gameplay that mirrors the original 1982 game, but with a few extras to make it a bit more palatable to a modern audience.

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Amid Evil, PC

Amid Evil is a first-person, single-player fantasy shooter/action game developed by Indefatigable and published by New Blood Interactive in 2019. The game started life as an unfinished Doom mod in 1997 and later grew into Amid Evil when co-creators and childhood friends Leon Zawada and Simon Rance formed their own company, with Amid Evil being their first project.

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Hammerwatch, PC

Hammerwatch is a brilliant single or multi-player fantasy action game with tiny characters fighting off hoards of killer monsters. It features beautiful pixel graphics, atmospheric lighting effects, RPG elements, and seriously challenging gameplay. It was created by Swedish developer Crackshell and first published in 2013. Hammerwatch is available for Windows, Linux, OS X, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and XBox One.

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Pier Solar and the Great Architects, Megadrive/Genesis

Pier Solar and the Great Architects is a famous homebrew Role-Playing Game released in 2010. It was developed by a team called WaterMelon and was initially released on cartridge exclusively for the Sega Megadrive.

Since then, though, it has been ported to a number of different platforms, including HD remakes for Dreamcast, PlayStation 3 & 4, Wii U, PC, XBox One, and Android.

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Serious Sam’s Bogus Detour, PC

Serious Sam’s Bogus Detour is exactly what the title of this game implies… a curveball in the Serious Sam series.

Developed by Swedish team Crackshell – in association with original Serious Sam developer, Croteam – and published in 2017 by Devolver Digital, this is an overhead shooter with pixel-based, retro-style graphics. And it is bloody brilliant! Better even than the Serious Sam games it is based upon.

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