Why Retro-Style Games Still Matter Today

[MDGeistsfavMC5song]

We had a rich kid in our hometown who had a big house, a big screen TV as large as a tank, and a Neo Geo home console. Everyone wanted to be his friend. I always wanted to collect those big juicy cartridges. I was and am a cartridge snob, I love and appreciate a weighty cool looking cartridge. Shame America got stuck with those boxy SNES carts. they learned though, those N64 carts were slick!

I never knew anyone who had one until waaay later... just the arcades.. but yeah seeing those giant cartridges made me swoon too.. Neo Alec from Basement Brothers has a good way of describing the Neo Geo as an "aspirational system".... for real the SFC cartridges do look better than the SNES ones, same as the system itself.. dont know much about Japanese N64 carts..

 

[VideoKojima1]

for real.. and it still gets a huge number of games for it.. even compared to the SFC/ SNES which eventually outsold it.. people love to make games for the Mega Drive/ Genesis.. I love both to death, (my first console was a Master System after my older brother got a NES, then he got a job and got Genesis, and years later I got a SNES, so these are my jam in a way) but I also absolutely adore the Sega Saturn, PSX, and PSP but especially Sega Saturn in particular.. I wish it got more modern love.. but I guess they dont want to spend the money on disc based systems since they are so easy to pirate compared to cartridge games.. maybe not really, especially with all the tech now, but Ive heard that's why newer retro game devs making games for the Neo Geo dont like making Neo Geo CD until they absolutely have to for piracy reasons..

I think you get a lot less jumping ship from one generation to the next like you do this day and age. For the longest time we kept our old consoles and got into stuff like the PS1 and N64 a little bit later in the life cycle. I could only play Sega games and SNES games on those consoles. There was no backwards compatibility or anything (with perhaps the exception of the Saturn but that didn't sell to well). With that, the market still was sizable enough to keep games coming out for them well into the next generation. I love the small homebrew devs that come out with newer games for those systems too. 17 Genesis games came out in 2025. That is insane to me.