Castlevania: Rondo of the Night is a ROM hack of the PlayStation classic, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, and it was first released in June 2024. The aim of the hack is to change the gameplay, so that the player can do quicker and more athletic moves, and to surprise the player with a seemingly never-ending string of good ideas.
Continue reading Castlevania: Rondo of the Night, PlayStation
Castlevania ReVamped is a homebrew remake of the original Castlevania, for Windows and Linux, by Lv.4 Games. It was initially released in March of 2024 and was inspired by the developer’s love of the Castlevania series (“it’s something I have wanted to do for many years,” he says, and “it took about four/five months to create“).
The game was made in Game Maker Studio 2 and is based on the first NES Castlevania, and Akumajō Dracula on the X68000 (and the remake in Castlevania Chronicles), and in it you play as the iconic Simon Belmont, with his trusty “Vampire Killer” whip.
Released in 2019 by Megastyle, Bruce Lee: Return of Fury is another great homebrew fan tribute sequel to Ron J. Fortier and Kelly Day‘s classic action platformer, Bruce Lee.
I’ve already covered the PC version of Bruno R. Marcos‘ marvellous homebrew sequel, Bruce Lee II, on this site, but unfortunately the game download has been unavailable for some time. I was surprised and delighted, therefore, to discover that Bruce Lee II had been ported to the Commodore 64 by Jonas Hulten, and remains available to download and play to this day (at the time of writing, at least).
Moon Patrol Redux is a homebrew hack/remake of the Atari 5200 port of Moon Patrol – originally released in 1983, with this ‘Redux‘ version coming out in 2019 via Playsoft.
Geoff Crammond‘s classic Stunt Car Racer was converted to Atari 8-bit systems by homebrew coders Fandal and Irgendwer in 2018. And it is an excellent port that plays identically to the C64 version it is based upon.
Vradark’s Sphere is a Roguelike fantasy role-playing game that was created by Aleksander Udotov, for 128K Spectrums, and first released in 2018. To me it is the epitome of what I would call “Modern Retro” (ie. a modern game, made to look old or be played on old hardware), and it looks and plays fantastically well.
Aliens: Neoplasma is a homebrew ZX Spectrum game that was released by a Russian dev team called “SaNchez” in 2019. The game is for Spectrum 128K models only and is a run-and-gun shooter with platforming elements. It’s available in English, Russian and Spanish (each language is a separate download).
Kirby’s Pinball Land DX is brilliant ROM hack by “kkzero” that was first released in January 2022. What it does is modify the code of the original Game Boy game to make it playable on the Game Boy Color, in full colour. Which is pretty amazing.
This hack – and kkzero‘s other great Kirby hack, Kirby’s Dream Land 2 DX – turn what were once monochrome games into a riot of colour, and they seriously revitalise these great classics into games that are worth playing (or re-playing) again now.
Released by Picaro Games in 2018, Fart Escape is a humorous, free to download and play homebrew title that is a variation on the Angry Birds style of gameplay, except that you control a guy who propels himself into the air using only the power of his own ‘trouser trumpets’.
The King of Grabs 