Wavelength review — 8/10. The unlockable 'cabinet mode' with CRT shader and slightly-off speakers is the most accurate arcade nostalgia I've ever heard.

Grimwood Estate owes everything to fixed-camera-era horror and has the good taste to admit it — there's a toggle for tank controls. I used it the whole game. 8/10.

Starfall Tactics hotseat mode! HOTSEAT! One machine, four players, pass the keyboard. Some of us have been waiting 20 years for this to come back. 8/10.

Terraform Inc is this generation's answer to the god-game era — and its disaster cascade system is pure classic-sim chaos energy. 7/10, one more turn.

Neon Circuit — 9/10. This is what arcade racers felt like in the coin-op era, rebuilt with modern netcode. The attract mode alone is a love letter.

Preservation corner: Chrono Breakers ships with its own frame-data viewer and input display. Twenty years ago we bootlegged this with capture cards. Progress.

Played Ashen Vale in retro-inspired 'ledger mode' (no quest markers, hand-drawn map). This is how the genre played in 1998 and it absolutely holds up.

Hollow Depths bonfire design traced back through 40 years of checkpoint philosophy — wrote a history piece. The genre didn't invent difficulty, it rediscovered consequence.

Petal & Root's pixel art is doing things with 3-tone palettes that shouldn't be possible. A technical breakdown of the era techniques it revives, on the site.

Duskrunner and the roguelike lineage: a direct line runs from 80s dungeon crawlers to this. The devs know it — the secret floor is a 1:1 tribute. 8/10.