Retro Gaming Weekly News #0031

Welcome to this week’s retro gaming news roundup. The year is 1986, you are in Japan and this week a game is going to be released which will change gaming forever. You fire up the game, and one of the first things you read is “It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this.” What game is it?

News

Cocaine Bear is the big film release of 2023 and might of just missed the Oscar nominations for this year HOWEVER – the good folk have made an 8-bit game to celebrate the launch and you can play it for free. Link

The Named Cassette Museum in Tokyo is reuniting gamers with their original Famicom cassettes, and other old game cartridges, which had their names, addresses, and additional identifying information written on them [Yahoo]. Link

There is a new game to film release on the horizon! This time, Tetris [YouTube]. Link

Super Nintendo World in Hollywood is open! If you want to know more you can read this from SFGate. Link

Some boffins (I love that word) have created MarioGPT, which is a Mario Bros world generator using GPT-2 [TechXplore]. Link

Limited Run Games wanted to resurrect Cool Spot – Dr Pepper said “no” [Twitter]. Link

To celebrate the 30th Anniversary of StarFox, one of the lead programmers has done a 40-minute play-through [YouTube]. Link

Features

In 1993, The Flash had his own video game on the Sega Master System that tried to replicate his speed in a precise puzzle game rather than emulating Sonic the Hedgehog, and although it received good reviews for its music and level design, it was overshadowed by the console’s lack of popularity in America and never re-released or ported to other consoles [CBR]. Link

Dualshockers have a feature on the life and death of “lives” in video games. Link

SlashGear takes a look at the most bizarre N64 accessories of all time. Link

Nintendo Life looks back at the Nintendo console with the best lineup of first-party games. Link

Lists / Rankings

Destructoid gives you their take on the top 15 games for the SNES. Link

Game news 24 takes a look at the 5 rarest games in the world. Link

Yahoo gets in on the ranking game and gives you their top 20 video game characters from the 90s. Link

And GameRant, who are much more accustomed to giving their rankings – gives you the 10 best Retro Games from the ’90s. Link

In the niche list of the week, The Gamer take a look at the 10 best WarioWare references to other games. Link

Dualshockers gives you their take on the 10 best Sega Franchises. Link

That’s all folks. This week’s game was The Legend of Zelda for the NES, released 37 years ago this week in Japan. Check out our TikTok channel where we are creating our very own list of the top 20 SNES games ever!