Cartridge Collective

Cartridge Collective — classic games still worth playing.

PC Engine · TurboGrafx-16 · 1992

Hudson Reclaimed Its Series in Six Months Soldier Blade

After farming out two PC Engine sequels to Kaneko and Now Production, Hudson built the third Star Soldier itself — in six months, on a halved HuCard, and made the apex of the line.
Also featured
Hudson Reclaimed Its Series in Six Months · Soldier Blade

Classic games still worth playing.

Long-form criticism of older games that hold up today — no nostalgia required.

Features

The long read.

Feature Volume Afterword

Konami's Late 1993 Was Already Three Studios

Volume I caught Konami in the four years its cabinet voice was the brand. The seam to Volume II was already on the studio's desk by late 1993 — three doors, one house style.

1993 → 1994 3 min read

Feature Volume Foreword

Konami's Cabinet Voice Set the 16-Bit Era

For four years, Konami's arcade voice was sixteen-bit. The four-player cabinet brawler peaked. The SNES cartridge became a cabinet object. In a back corridor, the studio was already on optical media.

1990 → 1993 4 min read

Feature Year Spotlight

The Year a Broken Hand Made a Genre

The arcade peaked, the bedroom computer arrived, and a third-party publisher accidentally seeded its own undoing. 1982 was not the year before the crash. It was the last year a game could still be one hand's idea.

1982 11 min read

Feature Preservation

Eighteen Months Without the N64's Source Code

Decompilation took six years to put Ocarina of Time on PC. A new technique put Majora's Mask there in months — then crossed three console generations and pulled Nintendo's lawyers in behind it.

1996–2026 11 min read

Feature Year Spotlight

The Year the PC Wrote Back

The Super Famicom launched on the 21st of November 1990 to recrown a grammar Nintendo had been building since 1985. In the same twelve months, the PC invented six things the console could not compute.

1990 13 min read

Feature Year Spotlight

The Year the Arcade Cabinet Started Losing

Street Fighter II held the arcade in a chokehold for sixteen months in 1991. In the same twelve months, seven home-console games wrote the grammar we still play by. The medium moved rooms.

1991 12 min read

Feature Preservation

The Newsroom Inside a Preservation Studio

Digital Eclipse spent its first two decades as a contract emulation shop. It took a corporate death, a revival, and two ex-journalists arriving in sequence to turn it into gaming's first editor-led studio.

1992–2024 9 min read

Feature Preservation

Sega Spent Twenty-Four Years Learning to Preserve Itself

Sega spent twenty-four years learning the difference between remaking its past and preserving it. The lesson landed only when the company handed the work to outsiders who loved the originals more.

1996–2020 11 min read

The deeper archive

From the back catalogue

Full Archive · 99

Assault Suits Valken

Konami's Mech Drama Reached the West Halved

Each hit stops the world for two frames; between them the mech strides under its own mass — weight no SNES peer matched.

Super Famicom · SNES · Switch

Ico

The Single Button That Holds Ico Together

One button, one grip, one exit — Ueda's 2001 argument for video games as a medium, still unmatched in how much it trusts the player.

PS2

Contra III: The Alien Wars

The Konami Cartridge That Forked Treasure

A fresh threat every three screens: Contra III never lets a modern player settle into pattern, and every minute rewards a different reflex.

Super Famicom · SNES

Sonic the Hedgehog CD

The Sonic Naka Didn't Make

The only mainline Sonic where the format is the idea — disc-storage time travel, Toei animation because the CD had room.

Mega CD · Sega CD

Sunset Riders

The Western Konami Priced by the Shot

Konami's four-player Western cabinet — eight wanted posters, one English aristocrat, and a dollar-bounty score system still sharper than most arcade design since.

Arcade · SNES · Mega Drive

Violent Storm

Konami's Last Brawler, Locked to MAME

A train conductor swings an electric ticket-punch while a sampled choir shouts BREAK OUT — Konami's final brawler, scored by the composer about to leave for Square.

Arcade

Shadow of the Colossus

Sixteen Colossi and One Bargain

One question, sixteen answers, a bargain that gets more uncomfortable every time — still the clearest case study in what video games can strip away.

PlayStation 2

Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap

Five Bodies in One Continuous Hero

Five physics models stitched into one continuous hero — the transformation system asks who you are right now, still the cleanest version of the question.

Master System · PC Engine · Switch

Guardian Heroes

The Brawler That Let You Switch Sides

A branching 2D brawler with 40 endings, buried for years on a dying console — the backcompat port finally gives the fighting system its audience.

Sega Saturn

Chuckie Egg

Made in a Bedroom, Built to Argue

A sixteen-year-old's 1983 Spectrum platformer that still runs faster, fairer, and smarter than most of what the genre has made in forty years.

ZX Spectrum

Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver

The Sequel Designed for a Different Game

A PS1 action-adventure shipped without its ending and with Shakespearean spite — the 2024 remaster finally lets its coherence reach new players.

PlayStation

Garou: Mark of the Wolves

The Future SNK Lost

A timed defensive system that pays you back in health, with rollback on Steam finally giving Garou the crowd pressure it was built to withstand.

Neo Geo · Dreamcast · Steam · PS4

Metal Slug 3

Seven Hundred Megabits of Hand-Drawn War

Seven hundred megabits of hand-drawn war — SNK emptying the last drawers of 2D, on arcade-accurate ports with online co-op.

Neo Geo MVS / AES

Gradius III: From Legend to Myth

The Konami Goodbye That Became SNES Gradius

Vic Viper drops into ricocheting cells — Gradius III's Edit Mode lets you carry the loadout the previous two games refused to combine.

Arcade · Super Famicom · SNES

Ninja Five-O

The GBA Action Game Sold Under a Borrowed Name

The GBA's finest action platformer spent two decades a $300 rarity — now £12 on Steam, and the grappling hook lands exactly where you aim it.

Game Boy Advance

Neo Turf Masters

Nazca Turned Golf Into Arcade Survival Tests

A sports game with the nerve of an action game — instant controls, harsh terrain, and rounds short enough to make one more attempt irresistible.

Neo Geo MVS / AES · Switch · PS4 · Xbox · PC

Grim Fandango

Chandler in the Land of the Dead

An Aztec-afterlife film-noir adventure with no peers — Schafer's script, McConnell's big-band score, a world no modern budget would greenlight.

PC

LocoRoco · LocoRoco 2

Ico's Designer Drew a Singing Blob, Twice

An Ico level designer pointed that school's wordless grace at joy — tilt-and-roll physics, songs sung in a made-up language, and nothing of its kind since.

PSP · PS4 · PS5

OutRun

The Open Road and Nothing to Prove

Not a racing game — Suzuki's 1986 driving fantasy about speed and branching choice, still making most later racers feel fussy and narrow.

Arcade

Streets of Rage 2

The Designer Sega Forgot to Credit Properly

Ten people, under a year, the genre's high-water mark — Koshiro's club-floor score and two-player CRT violence still sell the whole form.

Sega Mega Drive

Asteroids

The Five Buttons That Refused a Joystick

Asteroids gives a modern player one perfect arcade grammar: five buttons, no joystick, bright vector lines, and a ship whose every burst of thrust is both escape plan and future problem.

Arcade

Donkey Kong

The Arcade Game Built on a Single Ladder

The 1994 Game Boy puzzle-platformer that invented half of Mario 64's vocabulary in four-screen miniatures — still the genre in its tightest, clearest form.

Game Boy

Parodius Da! ~Shinwa kara Owarai e~

The Konami Parody That Out-Voted Gradius III

A cat-faced battleship that mews when shot — and a bell-cycle scoring grammar Konami's serious shmups never tried, under the joke.

Arcade · Super Famicom · PC Engine · Famicom · Game Boy · X68000

I, Robot

The First 3D Arcade Game, and Its Hidden Sketchpad

Twenty-two cubist playfields with per-frame randomness and a player-controlled camera — a 1984 design language nobody else was speaking, still readable as a lost indie.

Arcade

SNK vs. Capcom: The Match of the Millennium

When SNK and Capcom Finally Shook Hands

A pocket-sized SNK-vs-Capcom handshake co-written by Street Fighter's original author — the best crossover the series ever produced, now on Switch.

Neo Geo Pocket Color · Switch · PC

The Last Blade 2

Elegy for the Neo Geo's Last Swordsmen

A samurai fighter that mourned the Neo Geo while still on it — now on Steam with rollback, the elegy finally has its crowd.

Neo Geo · Dreamcast · Arcade

System Shock

The Villain They Shipped Without a Voice

Nothing else plays with this much hostile memory.

DOS · Windows

Suikoden

Konami's 108-Person Revolution Fits in a Pocket

A political RPG that respects your evening: fast battles, short chapters, visible headquarters growth, and a cast large enough to feel national without making the player carry an encyclopedia.

Multiple

Ōkami

A Sun Goddess Paints Clover's Farewell

A sun goddess painting the world back to life — Clover's farewell still feels like nothing else, crisp now on a mouse.

PS2 · PC

Axelay

Konami's SNES Shooter That Weaponised Damage

Axelay makes damage tactical instead of merely punitive: each hit strips one weapon from your loadout, forcing a modern player to improvise with a ship that keeps changing under pressure.

Super Famicom · SNES

Final Fight

Street Fighter II's Forgotten First Draft

The arcade beat-'em-up Capcom cannibalised to build Street Fighter II — the complete three-character original is a co-op bundle away, still setting the rhythm.

Arcade · Switch · Steam

Shantae

Four Megabytes, Half a Genie, Dead Platform

A GBC platformer that out-animates most of the Advance's launch year — a transformation-dance metroidvania with sharper hit boxes and warmer world-building than its contemporaries.

Game Boy Color

The Simpsons Arcade Game

The Konami Cabinet Without a Cartridge

All four Simpsons on screen regardless of player count — and the Japanese ROM that quietly rebalanced what the West played as a quarter-vacuum.

Arcade

Tekken 3

The Painted Backdrop That Beat Virtua Fighter

The sidestep gave 3D fighting a third axis on hardware that couldn't really afford it — Tekken 3's cadence still lands before nostalgia can excuse it.

Arcade · PlayStation

Sin and Punishment

The English Cartridge Nobody Was Meant to Hear

A rail shooter where Treasure's asymmetric control scheme turns the N64 pad into a twin-stick instrument years before the convention existed — still ahead of it.

Nintendo 64 · Wii · Wii U · Switch

Deus Ex

Deus Ex Didn't Predict the Future — It Described It

An immersive sim about power lying in public — its freedoms still feel partial and expensive in a way blockbusters have forgotten how to risk.

PC

Robotron: 2084

The Williams Panic Room With Two Joysticks

The twin-stick control is only the doorway — Robotron is a pure crisis of priorities, rescue and survive on one screen that never idles.

Arcade

Policenauts

The Last Konami Adventure Kojima Wrote Alone

A shooting range that holds your gun back until the villain has earned your rage — the Kojima auteur method calibrated in public, before MGS.

PlayStation · Sega Saturn

Pocky & Rocky

A Shooter Built on Shinto Purification

A 1992 SNES shooter where deflection beats the bomb — Natsume's Shinto-logic combat, sharper and stranger than anything in the bullet-heaven lineage.

SNES

Little Samson

The NES Platformer With Four Bodies

A late-NES action platformer whose central design — four heroes, four health bars, one freely switchable squad — still feels strangely unresolved.

NES

Xexex

The Konami Shooter Konami Couldn't Bring Home

The Flintlock launches its orb and the tentacles unfurl mid-flight, blocking bullets the orb itself never touches — Konami's answer to R-Type's Force, alive.

Arcade · Switch · PS4 · PS5

Galaxian

The Aliens That Learned to Break Formation

A dive-bomber peels out of formation trailing fire — the first arcade game where enemies acted instead of marched, and the clearest demonstration of why.

Arcade

Samurai Shodown II

The Rage Gauge Started as Office Sarcasm

A 1994 fighter still unlike anything the genre has made since — one-hit strikes, a joke-turned-rage-gauge, and a wabi-sabi hush where arcades should shout.

Neo Geo · Arcade · Switch · PS4 · PC

Psychonauts

The Platformer That Misheard Its Own Pitch

A 2005 platformer that saw mental-health comedy coming — its wild, compassionate weirdness only got sharper as the genre played it safe.

Multiple

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis

The Indy Sequel Built From Plato Dialogues

Three branching paths through one Atlantis, an iMuse score that listens to your feet, and a script that argues with Plato — the only Indy sequel that earns its myth.

PC · Amiga · Mac · GOG · Steam

Popils

The Game Boy Puzzler Schools Now Teach From

A 1991 puzzle-platformer by the creator of Bubble Bobble — a hundred hand-tuned rooms and a built-in level editor that already read as MTJ's design curriculum.

Game Gear

Mighty Final Fight

The Famicom Cart That Outdid the SNES Port

Chibi was the disguise that made the room — three characters, original level design, a Double Dragon XP curve: the arcade Final Fight on a Nintendo.

NES · Famicom

Mole Mania

Miyamoto's Game Buried Under a Louder Year

A 1996 Miyamoto puzzle game that slipped out the week the N64 launched — a fan DX patch finally gives it the colour it was denied.

Game Boy

Rayman

The Hand-Drawn Platformer That Refused to Go 3D

Every frame hand-painted at 60Hz — Rayman's difficulty is composed rather than inherited, and Digital Eclipse's anniversary edition finally lets the originals sit side by side.

PlayStation · Jaguar · Saturn · DOS

Trip World

The 1992 Platformer That Refused to Punish

A 1992 Game Boy platformer that refused to punish — Ueda's quiet argument against collision damage and completionism, now remastered with its 1993 colour pass.

Game Boy

Castlevania: Bloodlines

The Castlevania That Left the Castle

A whip in one hand, a spear in the other, six stages from a Romanian ruin to Versailles — Konami's Castlevania left the castle and got faster.

Mega Drive / Genesis

Super Mario All-Stars

Nintendo's First Real Argument for Remakes

It lets a modern player feel four foundational platformers as designed objects rather than homework, with save files and generous presentation clarifying the craft without sanding away the bite.

Super Famicom · SNES · Switch

Real Bout Fatal Fury 2: The Newcomers

Two Planes, One Button, No Fluff

SNK's sharpest pre-Garou fighter turns sidestepping into a readable duel, and the Steam release gives its line-sway pressure rollback, lobbies, hitbox display, and opponents who can finally keep up.

Neo Geo · Steam · Switch · GOG

Terranigma

The SNES RPG Where You Play the God

An action RPG where you play the god and live with the cost — Quintet's finest 16-bit work, never officially released in North America.

SNES PAL / Super Famicom

G.I. Joe

The Cobra Cabinet That Never Left Arcades

Roadblock running into a Cobra fortress that grows toward the camera — a sprite-scaling rail shooter Konami couldn't port, still arcade-only thirty years on.

Arcade

Beyond Good & Evil

The Journalist, the Camera, and the Resistance

An action-adventure where Jade's camera is the weapon — Ancel's warm, compromised world still reads more adult than most games built since.

PlayStation 2

Salamander 2

The Salamander That Konami Left in Japan

Mariko Tokida's serpent-toothed Biter ambushes the Vic Viper in pre-rendered colour — Konami's most accessible Salamander, finally restored worldwide by M2 in 2025.

Arcade · PS5 · Switch · Xbox · Steam

Ganbare Goemon 2

The Masterpiece Konami Wouldn't Translate

Konami's 16-bit confidence completely unchecked — a bunny invasion, a head-cold giant robot, and wordplay that only survives in the fan English patch.

Super Famicom

Sonic the Hedgehog

A Composer Built Europe's First Sonic Game

A quieter Sonic built by Yuzo Koshiro's studio for the Master System — a case for architecture over velocity the franchise never built again.

Master System

The Neverhood

Three Tons of Clay, One Lonely World

Three tons of clay, one thumb-printed world — ScummVM finally runs it cleanly on modern Windows, and nothing else looks or feels anything like it.

PC

Batman Returns

The Konami Brawler Born on the Cartridge

Pin two clowns, smash their heads together, walk on.

Super Famicom · SNES

Gimmick!

Sunsoft Built a Famicom Toy From Physics

One bright star makes every jump, fight, and secret route a small physics problem.

Famicom · NES · PC · Switch

Dynamite Headdy

Treasure's Puppet and the Collapsing Theatre

Treasure's collapsing-theatre platformer — every stage refuses to hold still, and the Japanese ROM is still the version to play.

Mega Drive / Genesis

The Curse of Monkey Island

The Last SCUMM Adventure, and the Finest

The point-and-click peak — hand-drawn frame by frame, scored with iMUSE, the form at its most polished three decades after the market stopped listening.

PC · GOG · Steam

Rhythm Tengoku

How Tsunku Made Nintendo Play Without Looking

A rhythm game built on the thesis that the ear keeps better time than the eye — Tsunku's pop record scores higher with your eyes closed.

Game Boy Advance

Space Invaders

The Cabinet Taito Sidelined for Blue Shark

Wave four onwards the four-note loop tightens to a sprint, the last two columns close on the barriers faster than the first eight, and difficulty stops being a sequence of levels and becomes a continuous accelerating function.

Arcade

Jetpac

An Entire Arcade Squeezed Into Sixteen Kilobytes

Sixteen kilobytes of perfect arcade grammar — Ultimate understood play so well the 1983 ZX Spectrum original still feels correct on any screen.

ZX Spectrum

Jet Set Radio

Graffiti, Skating, and the Same Act of Refusal

Twenty-five years on, almost nothing has matched its coupling of motion and refusal — cel-shaded skating that still reads forward, not back.

Dreamcast

Snatcher

Konami's PC-Engine Snatcher Was the Real One

A two-tier detective loop — Look then Investigate — carrying a cinematic opening that lands cold, plus an Act 3 Kojima called a digital comic.

PC Engine Super CD-ROM² · Sega CD

Rocket Knight Adventures

Konami Hid Contra Inside a Marsupial Suit

Rocket Knight Adventures turns mascot speed into Contra pressure: short stages, ricochet dashes, hard boss reads, and sudden shmup detours that make every few minutes feel newly engineered.

Mega Drive · Genesis

The Secret of Monkey Island

You Fight Like a Dairy Farmer!

You wander Melee Island collecting insults like inventory — Gilbert's "Why Adventure Games Suck" manifesto rebuilt as a comedy where curiosity never costs a save.

PC / Amiga

Perfect Dark

Rare's Impossible Spy Game Overloads the N64

A console shooter built as a spy-simulation toybox — difficulty-specific objectives, gadgets, co-op, counter-op, bots.

Nintendo 64 · Xbox · Switch

Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster Busts Loose!

Buster Bunny Was Konami's Sparkster Rehearsal

A dash gauge that turns horizontal sprint into vertical climb, six episodes that never repeat a format, and a true ending hidden behind Challenge mode.

Super Famicom · SNES

TMNT IV: Turtles in Time

The Konami Cartridge That Outdid Its Cabinet

The throw verb — Y-button, foot soldier hurled toward the screen — becomes the final boss's whole logic.

Super Famicom · SNES

Kaeru no Tame ni Kane wa Naru

The Frog Prince Who Built Link's Awakening

Yoshio Sakamoto's funniest script, two transformations that turn traversal into joke setup, and Nintendo's smartest auto-battle — English only via a fan patch Nintendo never replaced.

Game Boy

Castlevania: Rondo of Blood

Where Symphony of the Night's Castle Began

Richter on the burning village's threshold over CD-Redbook Bloodlines — the first Castlevania choreographed for cinema, still the franchise's tightest seventy-five minutes.

PC Engine Super CD-ROM² · PS4

Ms. Pac-Man

The Unauthorised Hack That Outsold Its Parent

Three MIT engineers built it as an unauthorised Pac-Man hack — the ghosts go random, the mazes multiply, and it still outplays its parent.

Arcade

GG Aleste

Compile's Finest Shooter Hid on the Game Gear

Cycle the weapon, read the screen, survive — Compile's shoot 'em up design stripped to its essentials on the smallest hardware they ever shipped to.

Game Gear

Astro Boy: Omega Factor

Osamu Tezuka's Theatre Troupe, Boxed by Sega

120 Tezuka characters woven into the progression itself, not pasted on — Treasure's densest GBA work, with a Hanzawa score that beats the platform.

Game Boy Advance

Gokujō Parodius

Konami's Cabaret Answer to Street Fighter II

Eight characters with asymmetric weapons fan into a 1994 arcade built like a cabaret floor — the loudest, most generous co-op shmup of the era.

Arcade · Super Famicom · PSP · Saturn

Day of the Tentacle

A Three-Century Puzzle Box in One House

A three-century puzzle box where colonial America hands 1993 the answer — LucasArts adventure design at its most elegant, running cleanly on modern hardware.

PC

EarthBound

The Copywriter, the Cosmic Horror, and EarthBound

A 1994 RPG built from suburbia, advertising copy, and cosmic horror — still one of the strangest, funniest, most sincere games Nintendo ever shipped.

SNES

Zombies Ate My Neighbors

The Shooter Where Saving Matters More Than Killing

A shooter where killing is secondary and saving is the whole game — LucasArts built a subtraction machine that still teaches run-'n'-gun design by example.

SNES / Mega Drive

Super Castlevania IV

The Castlevania Where Simon Finally Aims

Whip arcs in eight directions, spins to deflect, hangs Simon from rings — the first Castlevania where the player, not the level, decides.

Super Famicom · SNES

Mystic Warriors: Wrath of the Ninjas

Konami's Hollywood Ninja Movie in Cabinet Form

A truck driven through its own backdrop, dogeza on a rooftop, prayer beads in a swung arc — Konami's tightest run-and-gun, finally reachable from a couch.

Arcade

Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne

The Sequel Where Bullet Time Became Grief

A shooter about surviving the thing you wanted — bullet-time turned into grief, still the cleanest third-person action feel Remedy ever shipped.

Multiple

International Superstar Soccer Deluxe

Konami Osaka's Half of Pro Evolution Soccer

Hold sprint, thread a one-touch pass, and the keeper spills a save into a six-yard scramble — football at the tempo modern simulations have animation-locked out of existence.

Super Nintendo

Mega Man 2

Overtime in Osaka, Legend in America

The cleanest action platformer the NES made — eight Robot Masters in any order, each fight unlocking the ability the next one demands.

NES