Tag Archives: Modern Retro

Modern games, made to look retro.

Castlevania ReVamped, PC

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.

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Bruce Lee: Return of Fury, Commodore 64

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.

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Bruce Lee II, Commodore 64

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).

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Vradark’s Revenge, ZX Spectrum Next

The sequel to Vradark’s Sphere on the ZX Spectrum, Vradark’s Revenge is another fantasy-based Roguelike from the same development team, SaNchez, only this time it has been created specifically for the ZX Spectrum Next, which is an enhanced, modern ZX Spectrum remake/variant that first came out in 2017.

Vradark’s Revenge was initially released in 2022 and an emulated version, that runs in Windows, was later released on Steam in 2023 through publisher “Drunk Fly Oy” (which is a bizarre company name if ever there was one).

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Vradark’s Sphere, ZX Spectrum

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.

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Aliens: Neoplasma, ZX Spectrum

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).

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Donkey Kong [X2016], Commodore 64

This homebrew version of Donkey Kong was created by “Oxyron” for the Commodore 64 and was released at the “X2016 C64 Party” in The Netherlands in 2016, and it’s really rather excellent. Arguably even better than the officially-licensed C64 conversion by Ocean that was released in 1986.

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Castlevania: Spectral Interlude, ZX Spectrum

Castlevania: Spectral Interlude is a free-to-download homebrew Castlevania game for the ZX Spectrum, developed and published by Rewind (a Russian indie team) in 2015. The game is playable on 128K Spectrums only and is available digitally for Spectrum +3s as a disk-based game, and also as a TAP file. A limited number of physical copies were also produced for sale.

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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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Colt Canyon, PC

Colt Canyon is a single-player Wild West-based pixel art ‘twin stick’-style shooter developed by German company Retrific and published by Headup in 2020. You play a cowboy who must save his kidnapped partner from ruthless bandits. In fact: you can play as a variety of different characters – if you unlock them first.

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