In recent years, the world of video game modifications, or “modding,” has exploded significantly. Nowadays, you can modify components, consoles, controllers, and memory cards! Whether it’s changing out the shell of your controller to that perfect shade of cherry blossom pink or giving your Nintendo Gamecube Bluetooth connectivity, there’s a mod for you. Not every mod is complex or requires a specialized skillset (looking at you soldering, ). In this article, I want to show you a few easy mods I’ve done while giving you the tools you need to try at home.

One big reason why people mod their video game components is something I’ll call “modern nostalgia.” One of the first mods I made brought my classic NES Dogbone controller into modern times by cutting the cord. The NES DIY kit from 8Bitdo simply swaps out the control board inside the controller for a new one, giving those OG controllers Bluetooth connectivity. Plug in a Retro Receiver, and now you’re playing with power, wireless power!

Re-shelling, swapping buttons, and adding LED lights go a long way to make your components yours. There has been a growing trend in customization and individuality in gaming in recent years, and the best part is that these mods are user-friendly. I’ve modded several controllers for the Switch and PlayStation 5 using a variety of shells, buttons, and LED light strips. ExtremeRate is my go-to company for these kinds of kits because they give you all the tools you need and a spare set of screws. These kits are perfect for a #SundayFunday.

Now that I’ve highlighted two compelling reasons why modding can be enjoyable. Let’s combine them to create something remarkable. The GameBoy Advance (GBA) holds a special place in my heart as one of my favorite portable consoles from childhood. We all know the struggle of playing in dimly lit rooms and constantly replacing AA batteries. So, I brought this classic console into modern times with a new screen and USB-C charging and made it my own with a custom shell, buttons, and stickers.

On the surface, this series of mods might seem daunting. Fortunately, the Retro Game Repair Shop’s got our back with a plentiful selection of backlit screens, modern charging solutions, shells, and buttons. These days, backlit IPS screens are user-friendly, require minimal soldering, and are already laminated (i.e., you won’t need to attach the LCD to the glass screen). Additionally, installing a USB-C charging pack will make AA batteries a thing of the past. This mod rekindled my desire to play GBA games again and even go out and buy some games I had never played growing up.

Modding your favorite components doesn’t have to be intimidating. Whether you’re aiming for modern compatibility, matching your style, or just for fun, modding can be very rewarding. As you gain experience and confidence, you’ll be ready to tackle more complex projects. I invite you to try some of the tools discussed in this article to help you start your modding journey. If you do, I’d love to hear about it in the comments below!

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As spotted by Gaming Bible, a gamer named KrisReed recently took to Reddit to share a picture of their grandmother’s video game collection. However, it appears their late relative apparently didn’t know how to overwrite existing game files, so amassed an impressive collection of 26 Wario Land 4 carts.

Reed shared the picture on r/gaming with the caption “My grandmother’s game collection. We’re not sure if she knew how to overwrite existing game files” and it quickly caught the attention of other gamers online, with some people doubting the story, while some were simply fascinated with the connotations of how someone could be so dedicated as to acquire so many copies of the same game.

Asked outright why their grandmother had so many copies of Wario Land 4 in the replies, they responded:

“No idea. She also left a number of tutorials from online websites printed on paper as well as messages for her grandchildren (me) explaining the games. I love her very much and this [memento] was very bittersweet. Maybe it was Wario’s love for garlic.”

In addition to Wario Land 4, the picture Reed posted also appears to show 13 copies of Mario Pinball Land (or Super Mario Ball as it’s called in Europe and Japan) and 19 Game Boy Advance SPs. Sadly the rest of the games toward the top of the photo are a bit too blurred to make out, though we did give it a good old try.

*Article from “Time Extension”*

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Whether Groot’s Game Boy will come to play a larger part in the MCU’s Phase 5 and the upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 remains to be seen.

Time Extension put it best in the following tweet featuring the gift giving clip

Give someone you love the perfect gift this Christmas pic.twitter.com/1uSRrNmbr3

— Time Extension (@timeextension64) November 25, 2022

Information gathered from Nintendo Life

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Did you ever wonder what would have happened if it was developed for the Game Boy Color instead?Thanks to Ryan Marcham (@Diablohead on Twitter), we’re now able to play an interesting “what if” that reimagines Circle of the Moon as a Game Boy Color game.

Playing as a newly sprite-d version of Nathan Graves, you’ll be able to make your way through this area, killing bats, skeletons, and bone pillars, while collecting hearts, potions, and daggers from the ground. It also features a terrific reinterpretation of the original Catacombs theme, courtesy of Malcolm Broon.

You can play the game now in your browser or download a Game Boy Color ROM from itch.io.

Article provided by “Time Extension”

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The NES version is a high grade Tetris style game that doesn’t just feature great animation, but top quality detail and classic enjoyment that many of us have loved since the era of the original. As for the gameplay for those of you who want to know more about the original game From Below. In the main mode you must Battle the Kraken by clearing lines across the onslaught of attacking Kraken Tentacles, the Tentacles push more blocks onto the screen every few seconds, forcing to act quickly, and strategize on an every changing board. In the classic version however, it features no new gimicks or crazy changes, but does feature hard drops, lock delay and much much more!

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The game is a 2D action/platformer.

The player controls an archer: he can throw arrows, jump and interact with npc and other in-game actors.

The lore: 2049: “Lunar Approach” YearThis is how it all starts. The moon approaches the Earth, bringing new changes to all of life. The order imposed by humans has been reversed. Wild animals have developed intelligence: firstly, they disarmed all human weapons, then imposed their order following Mother Nature’s pure laws. The situation is now unbalanced against humans but you have now discovered the ability to call the five elements when flying your arrows! The wild animals are not the only ones that have been affected by the lunar approach. NOW it’s on YOU.

The experience of the gameplay is based on classic 90s challenges:
– learn non-procedurally-created paths;
– use different weapons according to the obstacle/enemy you are facing;
– fight Common enemies (like snakes, spiders and crows);
– fight Boss enemies (like Black Wolf, Alligator and .. Ibex!);
– explore corridors, rooms and pits to look for secret rooms;
– succeed on bonus stages to collect some cool items;
… and fly !!

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At about nine years old, I decided it was my destiny to join their ranks. In successive years, I dressed up as a professional wrestler for Halloween (World Championship Wrestling’s Sting one year, and the World Wrestling Federation’s mysterious Papa Shango the next). I watched WWF Superstars and collected WWF (and to a lesser extent WCW) trading cards and action figures. My friends and I held wrestling matches in the front yard, arguing over who got to be the Ultimate Warrior. We had tag team battles. I made up my own wrestling persona, complete with signature moves. I even went to a WWF event, where I got to see wrestling icons like the Undertaker and Jake the Snake Roberts in action.

When the game WWF Superstars came out for the Nintendo Game Boy in 1991, it became one of my prized possessions. In it, you chose from one of five wrestlers (Hogan, Savage, Dibiase, Mr. Perfect, or the Ultimate Warrior) and then battle the other four to earn the title of World Heavyweight Champion. You could set bouts to be best of one or three falls, and then choose whether or not you wanted matches to have a time limit.

As a fan of the sport (God help you if you tried to tell me it was fake) it had just about everything that I could have wanted. Each match started out with a cut scene of the wrestlers taunting each other. In addition to your basic kick and punch moves, you could hammer your opponents with moves like the piledriver, suplex, and clothesline. You could even throw your opponent out of the ring. After each match, Vince McMahon offered a bit of commentary. If you managed to become World Heavyweight Champion you received the slightly underwhelming reward of a close up portrait of your wrestler.

The game was developed by Rare, a British video game developer, and published by Acclaim Entertainment. David Wise composed the music, which included each wrestler’s signature song. Wise would later go on to compose music for games like the Donkey Kong Country series, working for Rare until 2009, when he set out on his own as a freelance composer. His most recent contribution to the world of video games came when he supplied the soundtrack to the 2017 title Yooka-Laylee for Playtonic.  

It was a simple game that was easy to master. After a little practice, you could pretty much guarantee yourself a championship title with each playthrough. If you were like me, you then decided to trying beating the game with each character. In retrospect, it probably would have been more effective, perhaps like diversifying your bets in a game at ξενα καζινο, to have a wider range of wrestlers to choose from, making total gameplay last longer and providing a more difficult journey to the championship belt. Still, at nine years old, this never occurred to me. All I knew was that it let me participate in the world of professional wrestling, prepping for the day when I would take my rightful place in the ring.

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Another classic of the Disney Afternoon, Darkwing Duck premiered on the Disney channel in 1991, before going into weekday syndication and becoming a part of ABC’s Saturday morning cartoons. It featured Drake Mallard (a clever reference to The Shadow’s alter ego Kent Allard), whose alter ego was masked crime fighter Darkwing Duck. In hero form, Darkwing defended the city of St. Canard from the forces of evil. He was assisted in his work by daughter Gosalyn and his friend Launchpad McQuack (who also featured in DuckTales). He faced off against various villains, characters like Megavolt, Quackerjack, and members of F.O.W.L. (the Fiendish Organization for World Larceny).

In the Darkwing Duck video game, created by Capcom and released in June of 1992, F.O.W.L. serve as the primary antagonists, though they have hired a number of Darkwing’s greatest enemies to help their nefarious cause. Quackerjack, Wolfduck, The Liquidator, Moliarty, Megavolt, and Bushroot serve as the bosses for the first six levels of the game. The game’s final battle was against Steelbeak, F.O.W.L.’s primary agent.

Like the DuckTales and Chip n’ Dale: Rescue Ranger video games, Darkwing Duck was a platformer. As Darkwing, players were equipped with a gas gun to defeat enemies, collecting various types of weaponized gas as the game progressed. Darkwing could also defend himself from certain attacks by using his cape as a shield.

Side characters from the cartoon appear throughout the game. Gosalyn helps Darkwing collect items in the game’s first bonus round, J. Gander Hooter (the head of S.H.U.S.H., the super secret spy agency that opposes F.O.W.L.) is featured at the beginning of the game when he describes Darkwing’s mission and at the end when he congratulate him on his success. Launchpad Mcquack appears before each level, providing Darkwing with helpful information.

The game was developed by slightly altering the engine behind the Mega Man 5 game. Players familiar with the Mega Man series will note several similarities, such as selecting your weapon (or gas type) from a subscreen, and the fact that the character drops from the sky at the beginning of each level. A slightly stripped down version of the game was released for the Gameboy system a year after the original NES version was released.

Like the cartoon, the video game embraced and was rooted in pulp and comic book cliches. It’s what made the characters and stories so brilliant. Players (or viewers, as the case me be) could laugh at the genre tropes, even as they enjoyed the action.

Now, let’s get dangerous…

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In the late 80s and early 90s, the Disney Afternoon moved into the world of video games. The first show to make the transition was DuckTales by Capcom. It was released in 1989 and was created by many of the same people responsible for the Mega Man games, including producer Tokuro Fukiwara, programmer Nobuyuki Matsushima and artists Keiji Inafuna and Naoya Tomita.

The game was a simple platformer. Players controlled Uncle Scrooge on his quest around the world (and outer space) to collect treasure. The miserly duck used his cane as his primary weapon and tool. He could attack enemies with it, break things with it, and even bounce on it. As Scrooge, the player travelled to the Amazon, the Himalayas, Africa, Transylvania and even the Moon. There was not a specific level order that players had to follow. Instead, they could pick where they wanted to go. Each level had a boss fight, with series favorites Flintheart Glomgold and Magica DeSpell serving as the obstacles between Scrooge and the final treasure. The game’s ending varied depending things like how much money players had collected.

The game was first released for the NES and later moved to the Gameboy. It achieved a high degree of commercial and critical success (the later being particularly notable for a video game using licensed characters). It regularly makes lists of the best games ever created for the NES. It even spawned a re-make, the 2013 title DuckTales: Remastered, which featured upgraded graphics and new areas.

DuckTales wasn’t a groundbreaking game, but it was a ton of fun to play. It was an exciting chance for a kid like me, all jacked up on sugary cereal, Pop Tarts, and Fruit Roll Ups, to dive into one of his favorite worlds and be a part of the adventure.

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By and large, we human-types like things in linear fashion.  We binge watch our shows by season and by episode, we like our phone books alphabetized and when it comes to experiencing our video games from years ago, we sort of expect a natural progression there too.

This point is especially pertinent when it comes to the actions of Nintendo; who have recently discovered gold in the form of the retro market thanks to their plug & play NES and SNES Classic Editions Minis.

When the original 8-bit NES Classic Edition came out in 2016, the world was awash with rumors of Nintendo following suit with a similar self-contained package using titles from their 16-bit Super Nintendo library.  What began as simple speculation came to be when in 2017 North America received the SNES Classic Edition Mini.

Natural progression tells us that won’t be the last we see of Nintendo’s Classic Editions but where they go from here brings up some very interesting discussions.  The net, it seems, wants to believe very badly that the N64 will be the next system to get the Classic Edition plug & play treatment.  So much so that box art mock ups are all over with a little searching, Youtubers are claiming to have deciphered the list of games it will include (if these predictions are true, we’re only looking at 19 games this time around).

Search the term N64 Mini in Youtube and be prepared for information overload.  Posters here claim that the hardware confirmation from Nintendo has leaked, that they have the official trailers, screen caps, gameplay footage and on and on.  Of course truthfully Nintendo has released absolutely nothing about their next Classic Edition effort; or for that matter that there will even be another.  It stands to reason that they will: They have been selling out on entire production runs of these retro game machines the world over and stirring up a ridiculously inflated secondary market (scalpers) in the process.  Demand has outpaced supply not once but twice in recent years.  They would be foolish indeed to leave the segment untapped after two successful entries.

But whether or not the N64 is to be the next target on their list isn’t so cut and dry.  Perhaps it is so at a passing glance; after all, the progression of home hardware from Nintendo went NES, SNES, N64 right?  Not so fast!  Discounting all of the mobile efforts by the big N (which includes several Gameboy iterations), the next semi home console after the SNES would be the Virtual Boy.  You do remember the Virtual Boy, don’t you?  A bizarre bipod-like contraption that had its player gaze into a pair of stereoscopic goggles while holding an M-shaped controller?

The year was 1995 and while the rest of the world was amped on Sony’s Playstation and Sega’s Saturn, Nintendo was still a solid year away from releasing what would become the N64.  To tide its consumer base over, the Virtual Boy hit shelves with claims of an interactive 3D gaming experience like no other before it.  Well, they did manage to provide an experience all its own but perhaps due to factors Nintendo would rather not talk about.

The whole project had its plug pulled in less than a year and closed up shop with a library of merely 22 games.  In addition to displaying only in monochrome (red and black, no less), complaints began pouring in from users of headaches, eyestrain, motion sickness and so on.  All told, Nintendo would manage to move only 800,000 systems worldwide and never even bothered releasing the failed experiment to Europe.

Now if you’re thinking why in the world would Nintendo bother releasing so failed a piece of hardware as a modern plug and play retro unit, you’d have a good point.  But do keep in mind that a majority of the complaints surrounding the system stemmed from two key factors:  1) The dual LED display that was viewed as if through binoculars made people sick.  2) The red and black color scheme was horrendous in a time-frame when full color 3D graphics were making their way to consoles.  Both of these concerns could be remedied simply and cheaply in made-for-TV emulation.  And since under a million units ever saw the light of day in the entire world, Nintendo is essentially sitting on 22 very rare games that few have ever experienced (and there were a few good ones in there like Wario Land).

Of course the biggest downside to all of this is that the Virtual Boy was essentially a 1-player only machine and a good part of the appeal of the retro plug & play experience is grabbing a friend for some couch co-op.  There had been plans to release a link accessory that would allow for chaining various Virtual Boys together for simultaneous game play but the system’s lifespan had ended so rapidly, it was never released (and thus no games developed to make use of the technology).

Now if Nintendo decided to start bringing out their true mobile games to TV hardware (and don’t think there wouldn’t be a market for such things, the Super Gameboy attachment which allowed Gameboy games to be played through the SNES on a TV proved highly successful), the options would become nearly limitless.  The original Gameboy (including the Color) sold 118.69-million units worldwide and amassed a library of 1,049 games in the process.

The Gameboy Advance sold close to 90-million units and had a library of 1,519 games.  The DS boasts 154.02-million units sold worldwide and a library of over 1,837 games.  The 3DS is coming in around 80-million sold and boasts a still-growing library.

The numbers quickly becoming too staggering to even contemplate.  All told, between the three iterations, we’re looking at well over 5,000 games.  Fortunately Nintendo has shown very little interest in crossing their mobile customer base with their home console one; well that is until the Switch came along.  But that’s clearly a subject for a more contemporary-minded journalist to tackle.

So back to the N64 Classic Edition.  Could it work?  Theoretically.  At least from a hardware perspective.  From an economic one, things begin to get fuzzy.  The type of emulation required to accurately run the larger file N64 titles is more complicated and difficult to get right.  We know Nintendo’s got the chops as proven by their Virtual Console versions of most N64 games but making that software stable enough to fuel a (likely weaker) stand-alone box is something they have yet to exhibit.

Next up is the issue of controllers.  Unlike the NES and SNES pads, the N64 introduced both more technically advanced controllers (which included an analog stick) as well as hardware (and many games) that supported 4-player simultaneous gameplay.  In terms of increased manufacturing cost alone, it’s likely Nintendo would have to go back to including just a single pack-in controller.  And hopefully much better availability of additional controllers.

The last, and certainly biggest, obstacle standing in Nintendo’s way in making a N64 Classic Edition is the simple fact that they would be competing with themselves.  How so?  Many of their popular N64 titles are still able to command a pretty decent price in the Virtual Console as well as warrant ports to their portable systems.  In other words, the N64 library may not be quite old enough to warrant packing up and selling off in an emulation package.

Sony has been slow to get on the plug & play retro console bandwagon for the simple fact that their earliest system lands squarely within the hardware generation containing the N64.  Too new, as it were, to begin banking on nostalgia to push units.  In Sony’s case specifically, they emphasized backward compatibility with each new hardware release to keep fans of the generations prior playing on their hardware; a trend Nintendo has yet to adopt.

In any event, while the concept of an N64 Classic Edition Mini is certainly an exciting one, and while it makes perhaps the most sense out of Nintendo’s progression of hardware options, it is not without some hefty drawbacks that may keep it on hiatus for several years to come.

I personally would rather Nintendo cater to the hungry retro marketplace they’ve roused by making NES and SNES Classic Editions more readily available.  If not simply by re-releasing the two systems that sold out in record fashion, then perhaps by creating various editions of the hardware with different games pre-installed on them.  Doing this would make the hardware even more appealing to collectors and completists and as an additional bonus, puts more of the system’s library back into circulation.  The license holders of the individual titles would surely love such an opportunity to cash in on properties they’ve long assumed buried and forgotten as well.  Nintendo, the consumer and the software companies themselves would all benefit from this approach.  That’s what’s known in the industry as a win/win/win.

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