new games for old hardware that are actually good

Syzygy

The ones I posted. If you’re thinking I can’t be recommending that many at once, you’re underestimating how many bad ones I didn’t mention.

◉◉maru

I would say those are the good ones! I don’t know the Mega Man hacks but I assume those are the pick of an infinite litter.

Your mileage may vary on Mr. Splash but it was one of the first games of that kind so it has a better reputation through precedence than it probably deserves today.

Obviously there is also the port of Pac-Man CE which we discussed elsewhere. Prior to Pac-Man, Namco has had the habit to release official romhacks of Famista (available through a download code) as an early buyer promotional item for the new episodes released on 3DS and now Switch. You can see Super Famista Retro 2020 in this PV around 3m10s :

As the name implies, this one takes from the Super Famicom version (Super Famista) but the rosters and teams are from the 2020 season. The 3DS games had similar Famicom versions with contemporary rosters. I cannot guarantee they are true Famicom and Super Famicom games but it sure seems so. I think the FC games have aged poorly but the SFC series fare a bit better so this new one might comply as a successful “new old game”.

Syzygy

◉◉maru Reminds me of the continuing unofficial updates to Tecmo Bowl.

I agree Mr. Splash has that reputation but the plug was my own. I like simple competitive games.

robinhoodie

Sturmwind for Dreamcast is VERY good. It only just recently came out on Switch though.

robinhoodie

Mr. Splash is pretty fun for what it is. On the simple but great side, I actually love Zooming Secretary as an extension of the single screen black box style NES games like Wrecking Crew etc.

robinhoodie

Also, since it is on sale today there is the Wii port of Shakedown Hawaii, though I am very curious to see how it actually runs on the Wii. I have enjoyed it on Vita though.

◉◉maru

In a similar fashion, the excellent Völgarr the Viking was downported to the Dreamcast in 2015. However, I don’t know if these examples fit what @exodus is looking for.

http://www.seganerds.com/2015/09/27/volgarr-the-viking-ported-to-dreamcast/

golok

Xeno Crisis is unreasonably good

ttzop

Has anyone ever played Pier Solar? I’ve always been curious about that one.

Fishie

Krautbusters

exodus

Pier Solar is okay, but it’s very oldschool in some unfortunate ways.

it came from a forum originally, and has individual forum member references all throughout the story
there are some “clever” puzzles like while you’re on a platform you have to hit an invisible button on the back of a pillar in order to proceed (that’s when I stopped playing heh)

on the other hand it looks nice and it’s cool that you’ll get a CD soundtrack if you put the disc in, and a chip soundtrack if you don’t??

members of that team went on to never finish paprium… I still want that game to exist but I think all the haters talking about how long it took to finish have sort of killed any dev interest in finishing it.

robinhoodie

exodus Since the thread got bumped I will say that Pier Solar’s soundtrack is very good. I totally tricked me into buying the Dreamcast version. Which came relatively on time, so that’s why I order Paprium. I am preparing to commiserate about it here in this thread. But who knows! It’s kind of… exciting?

Rudie

exodus this feels like a weird take on what happened considering they had a “launch party” and said the game was done and ready to ship and then dissappeared for two years until this email.

p3ters

haven’t put too much time into it coz it was real tough the time I did play it, but Battle Kid was real good! I should probably fire it up again soon! Haven’t touched the sequel yet tho.

I really want that Project Blue game but the Kickstarter is over. I hope there are physical copies available once the game actually comes out.

◉◉maru

Deadus seems like a pretty good RPG. Available here.

Chopemon

I just tried Deadeus. First mentioned here by ◉◉maru back in 2020.

I tried it on a flashcart and after some digging online, it seems it has a save game problem on flashcarts so I’m restarting it on an emulator.

You have three days to investigate a nightmare about some kind of god being coming to devour a town of people. You hangout in the town talking to people, reading books and collecting flowers to find out what is going on. I’ve only done the first day before discovering that the save game disappeared so I don’t know how the full thing is but it seems pretty charming so far. Good hangout in a space game.

I’m grabbing that Resi 1 demake to play this evening as well.

hellomrkearns

remains to be seen if its good or not, but Twitter is going wild now that Paprium is actually sending out pre-orders.
http://www.paprium.com/

TracyDMcGrath

I’ll second Micro Mages and Xeno Crisis. Darn fun games those two

isfet

been thinking i may want to pick up a Genesis copy of Xeno Crisis. i’ve never really gotten into the homebrew scene insofar as actually owning copies, but it seems like there’s some stuff out there that is actually worth it.

treefroggy

I enjoy playing this game.

Geoff

There is a really curious subset of these, games for old hardware that are not being released on that hardware.

Namco has really good modern ports of Gaplus and Pac-Man: Championship Edition for NES for some of their game collections. M2 did a Sega Tetris port for Sega Genesis which they put on the Sega Genesis Mini.

I think maybe the Fantasy Zone II: The Tears of Opa-Opa up-port to System 16 released on PS2 might have been the first of these.
GG Aleste 3: Last Messiah for Game Gear released as part of the Aleste Collection and on the included Game Gear Micro in the special edition, is an interesting recent example.

Now that I think about it, I guess all of these so far seem to be coming from M2 and Namco, unless I’m overlooking some.