Hardcore Gaming 101

Top 47K - Quest 64 (and Queen's Blade: Spiral Chaos!)

Bubsy 4D

The universe is full of many weird and wonderful things, such as Bubsy the Bobcat coming back for a second time. After the largely piddling pair of The Woolies Strike Back and Paws on Fire! in the late 2010s, Atari SA acquired the rights to Bubsy in 2023 and immediately sought to do something more serious with him. This started with 2025’s Purrfect Collection, which gathered all of his original games complete with a mind-boggling amount of bonus material that showed a greater reverence for the character. However, it would soon be followed by a surprise announcement of a new 3D platformer, created by Fabraz of Demon Turf/Demon Tides fame! It’s easy to assume this would be a quick reskin of the developer’s best known work like Bubsy’s previous comeback attempts, laced with cynical ironic jokes about Bubsy’s infamy. But Bubsy 4D manages to do its own thing, resulting in a solid (if perhaps too short and easy) adventure that manages to be charmingly funny and one of Bubsy’s better games.

Veritas Tales: Witch of the Dark Castle

Have you ever played a gamebook? Perhaps a ‘Choose your own adventure’? If you have, which ones? Have you tried Fighting Fantasy, or GrailQuest perchance?  If you have, then you will be in familiar territory. Released internationally in 2026, written, illustrated and primarily developed by VanillaWare alumni Yoshio Nishimura; his take on the digital gamebook is Veritas Tales: Witch of the Dark Castle.

Top 47K - The Final Fantasy Legend (SaGa) (and Half-Life 2: Episode One & Two!)

Triangle Strategy

Originally released in 2022 for the Nintendo Switch and later expanded to additional platforms, Triangle Strategy represents the culmination of producer Tomoyo Asano’s long career in RPGs, alongside co-developer Artdink under Square Enix. It is also one of the early titles of the HD-2D artstyle: a blend of pixel-art characters, dynamic lighting, and cinematic camera work set within fully realized 3D environments. The aesthetic deliberately evokes the 16-bit era of JRPGs, especially a title like Final Fantasy VI.

Star Fox Guard

Released simultaneously with Star Fox Zero (and in some territories, bundled together with it), Star Fox Guard is a unique tower defense game starring Slippy Toad and his uncle Grippy, who runs a mining business. Taking place after the defeat of Andross, your job as a security commander is to defend these bases from a horde of invading robots.

Star Fox Zero

After the release of Star Fox Assault and Star Fox Command in the mid-00s, the franchise went dark for awhile, leading to an enhanced port of Star Fox 64 in 2011 for the 3DS. A brand new title, Star Fox Zero for the Wii U,  wouldn’t arrive until nearly a decade later. While the game was conceptualized by Nintendo, much of the actual work was performed by PlatinumGames, they of Vanquish and Bayonetta fame. This company was chosen thanks to their chops with 3D action games. The “zero” in the title is an allusion to the fact that the game is sort of a reboot, but the fact that it uses the kanji in the logo can also be interpreted as a reference to the Mitsubishi A6M Zero aircraft flown by the Japanese in World War II, meaning it has some association with fighter airplanes.

Star Fox Command

A good year after Star Fox: Assault, Nintendo followed up with a portable entry, Star Fox Command. The back of the box indicates that it’s a return to the franchise’s roots, which is partially true. The game was co-developed by Q-Games, the company run by Dylan Cuthbert, one of the programmers from the SNES original. Otherwise, this is a pretty stark departure from the series’ norms, with almost nothing resembling its predecessors. In essence, this is basically a follow-up to Star Fox 2, which at that point wasn’t officially released and was only known to fans who used emulators to play the leaked beta.

Top 47K - The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky SC (and Top Banana!)

Star Fox: Assault

About two years after Star Fox Adventures, the GameCube got a “real” Star Fox entry, subtitled Assault. Around this time, Nintendo was occasionally working on their properties with third party developers, like when they hired Sega to create F-Zero GX. Star Fox: Assault was initially meant to be developed by the Ace Combat team at Namco, which proved to be an exciting concept. It must’ve run into some type of development issues, though, because ultimately the responsibility was handed off to the team that created the Klonoa games. The result is a game that isn’t completely terrible, but also not really what anyone wanted.

Star Fox Adventures

Rare was Nintendo’s golden boy studio throughout much of the Nintendo 64 era, having expanded their roster of 3D platformers with Donkey Kong 64 and the two Banjo Kazooie games. What’s more, they introduced the competitive FPS phenomenon to console players with GoldenEye. One of their later projects was Dinosaur Planet, heavily modeled after The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, starring an anthropomorphic cat duo named Sabre and Krystal and taking place on…well, a planet of dinosaurs. This game went through two major shifts before it was released, first being moved from the Nintendo 64 to the GameCube. Additionally, it was also integrated into the Star Fox franchise, changing the story and replacing the main character with Fox McCloud. (This was reportedly at the behest of Shigeru Miyamoto, who once mentioned in an interview noting the similarities between Sabre and Fox.)

Top 47K - Virtual Hydlide (and Marble Drop!)

Calcolo!

Calcolo refers to itself as “Ochimono Shooting” (“Falling Object Shooting”). The closest point of comparison is ADK’s Twinkle Star Sprites, but while that was a shoot-em-up with some puzzle elements, this is more of a puzzle game a la Puyo Puyo with some vague shoot-em-up influence.

Now Playing: The Guide to 1980s and '90s Movie Games is now available!

If you missed the preorder period from last year, our 420 page book on movie games from the 1980s and ’90s is now available for purchase on the Limited Run Games site! You can find a full list of movies/games covered here. It’s too long to paste here because there are so many. There are all of the major ones you’d think of, of course (Star Wars, The Terminator, Rambo, Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones, etc.) but we really dug into the weeds for all sorts of movies where it might surprise you and make you think “they made a game out of this?!?”

Star Fox 2

After the release of the original Star Fox, Nintendo and the Argonaut team quickly went to work on its successor, using the more advanced Super FX2 chip. Unfortunately, while the game was completed, Nintendo canceled it before entering production. Why? It was 1995 and both Sony and Sega had released the PlayStation and Saturn respectively, and apparently Nintendo felt their 3D on the SNES looked bad in comparison. Plus at the time, they wanted to focus on the upcoming Nintendo 64 (though the system didn’t end up being released for another year anyway). Star Fox 2 was essentially lost until two prototypes were leaked onto the internet, in various states of completion, giving gamers a taste of what they had been denied. In an unexpected move, Nintendo officially released the game as part of the SNES Classic microsystem in 2017 (then later as part of the Nintendo Switch Online SNES library), presenting it in a final state that had been previously unseen.

Star Fox

Due to technical limitations, video games were mostly rendered in two dimensions through the 1980s. Still, there were always attempts to make games more lifelike by creating, or at least mimicking, display in three dimensions. Most of these were done with vectors (as with the Vectrex), or using sprite scaling techniques (with Sega’s many Super Scaler arcade games like Space Harrier). While impressive, the hardware required to run these was typically relegated to the arcade or on computers, where it was mostly used in racing games or flight simulators. There were console ports of many of these titles, but they typically failed to capture the look or the flow accurately. Systems like the NES, TurboGrafx-16, and even the Genesis simply lacked the muscle. The SNES brought these effects closer to the consumer audience with its built-in Mode 7 scaling, which worked similar to the sprite manipulation found in Sega’s games. However, games were still fundamentally rendered using 2D graphics, just with assorted display tricks. The real future of 3D rested with polygons, which allowed full 3D worlds to be created. One of the most talented creators of these types of games was UK-based Argonaut Software, who developed Starglider for the Atari ST. In the early 90s, the company worked together with Nintendo to create 3D visuals for their platforms, first resulting in the Japan-only Game Boy game X. Though rendered in simple wireframes rather than full polygons, it still showed an incredible amount of programming technique. The SNES still didn’t quite have the power to run a game with polygons, though, at least not at an acceptable speed. One need only look at the port of games like Race Drivin’ for an example, which often struggled to display more than five FPS. To that end, Argonaut helped develop a chip called the Super FX. This would then be loaded onto each cartridge, providing the extra power to make polygonal visuals possible. A team of programmers from Argonaut – Dylan Cuthbert, Giles Goddard, and Krister Wombell – shacked up with Nintendo in their Japanese office to help create a new SNES title, produced by Shigeru Miyamoto and directed by Katsuya Eguchi. In spite of the advancements, only simple polygonal models could be animated. This was where the marketing and character design skills of Nintendo came in – a spaceship assembled from a few triangles didn’t have much in the way of personality, but what if they were actually piloted by a group of cute, anthropomorphic animals? By adding in a sci-fi back story, heavily inspired by Star Wars (just as Starglider was), and populating it with likeable characters, they created one of the first blockbuster 3D breakout titles – Star Fox.