Advance Wars and its sequel, by a country mile. Someone recommended it to me about 20 years ago. Since I didn’t have a GBA, I downloaded a relatively early emulator that barely ran on my PC at the time. It had some sound glitches and performance issues, but otherwise, it worked just fine. I was initially put off by the anime presentation (since I associated it with kids shows back then, I had no love for anime - be kind, I hadn’t seen a single Studio Ghibli film yet) and it didn’t look particularly great blown up on a 17" CRT either, but the outstanding gameplay and fun campaign quickly pulled me in. Who knew war could be this lighthearted and at the same time so devilishly hard? Within ten minutes, I was hooked and it quickly became one of my favorite strategy games of all times, right up there with the likes of Age of Empires II (and the incredibly obscure Blue Empire II - I doubt there’s anyone here who has even heard of it).

Since then I have revisited AW every few years. It was one of my most-played games on my first Android smartphone (2010) and once again, the emulator barely ran on the device. Oh, and that phone didn’t have multitouch yet, which however wasn’t an issue with a turn-based game. A couple of years later, I bought a PSP, relatively late into its lifecycle - and instead of using it for PSP games, it became an emulation machine, by which I mean that I primarily played two games on it: Advance Wars and, for some reason, Activision Tennis for the Atari 2600/VCS from the lovingly made Activision Hits collection. One of the best tennis games of all time, even though it’s what feels like two dozen pixels in total, including animations.

Soon after, I discovered Advance Wars By Web, which is an unauthorized browser-based online multiplayer clone of the entire Advance Wars series that is still around. I have no idea how they have managed to survive Nintendo’s wrath. There are no animations nor sounds, which did put me off though. My old account is still alive, so I might get back to it though.

I finally bought something resembling an actual GBA as my Xmas present to myself, the rather nice Anbernic RG35XXSP emulation console, which is an affordable and completely open copy of the Advance SP - based on an ARM CPU and running Linux. If anyone else is looking for a decent replacement/supplement to their original GBA SP or just a neat little emulation system that fits into a (men’s) pants pocket, one can do much worse, especially given how remarkably good IPS screen, buttons and battery life are. Guess which game I’ve been playing on this device the most? Good guess, but no, it’s a port of 2048, which feels awesome with physical buttons, but Advance Wars will probably take its rightful crown back soon. The one downside of this system I’ve discovered so far is that annoyingly, ROM hacks rarely work, no matter the emulator.

After this needlessly long text on my boring emulation journey with AW, you might be wondering what other Game Boy games managed to pull me in? Barely anything. I’ve tried a few, but none of them got me hooked, with the sole exception of what only called the official demake of Max Payne for the GBA, which is shockingly competent. Who knew that the iconic third person shooter actually works as an isometric title on the GBA of all systems? It’s not some cheap knock-off that has the same title as the big PC and console title, like so many other mobile games over the years, but a truly faithful replica of the PC classic that actually feels like Max Payne, down to the most minute details. Even level design and comic book cutscenes are mostly preserved - with voice acting! The isometric presentation does sometimes result in invisible enemies shooting at you, but that’s pretty much the worst I can say about this title. Here’s a video of it in action.

As for the rest, I was excited for Golden Sun after all of the praise it’s been getting over the years, but so far, the annoying to navigate introduction managed to scare me away every single time - and it’s close to doing the same this time again. Someone please tell me to hang on. I think I tried Metroid: Zero Mission ages ago, but it didn’t click, just like every other Metroid and every other metroidvania, with the sole exception of VVVVVV (PC, but open source), which remains the best metroidvania in my humble opinion, in large part because instead of collecting items that unlock previously inaccessible areas, it’s the player getting better at playing the title that achieves the same thing. I’ve never seen any other game doing it this well. Not a Game Boy title though, so I’ll stop gushing about it.

I randomly tried out Super Mario Land for the original Game Boy yesterday, primarily to toy around with shaders that simulate the handheld’s terrible screen - and surprisingly, I really enjoyed it for a few levels. This is an excellent 2D Mario that feels absolutely perfect to play, despite the limited hardware it was originally developed for. What’s weird is that I don’t actually like 2D Mario games, but this one has somehow managed to endear itself to me. I’ve also played a few minutes of a ROM hack that colorizes Pokémon Red, which is neat, and randomly tried out Baldur’s Gate Dark Alliance for the GBA. This probably forgotten RPG (I’ve only ever heard people talk about the totally different PS2 version, which was a technical marvel) oozes atmosphere, but I can’t tell for how long I’ll play it yet.

Starfield is good. It’s not the next Skyrim, it’s not the greatest RPG ever made, but it does more than enough things right to be worthwhile. It’s fine to not like a good game, by the way - but this doesn’t make it terrible.

Which games would that be?

Keep in mind that Sega isn’t just a developer, but also a publisher. They are relatively big in the strategy genre, for example, as publishers of the Company of Heroes, Dawn of War, Total War, Valkyria Chronicles and Endless Space series. They are also PlatinumGames’ publisher, own Atlus, etc. pp.

This doesn’t mean they are necessarily big enough to be able to successfully pull this off, but we’ll see.

With the filter

Which one? There a dozens commonly used ones. All of these games are from the CRT era and were developed on and for CRT monitors.

Might and Magic Book One

Notice the dithering pattern on the characters in this screenshot:

https://www.mobygames.com/game/1619/might-and-magic-book-one-secret-of-the-inner-sanctum/screenshots/dos/115836/

This was only done for CRTs, since it results in blended pixels.

Heroes of Might and Magic 2

More CRT dithering everywhere, just two generations later and with more colors and fine detail - but it’s still the same technique:

https://www.mobygames.com/game/1513/heroes-of-might-and-magic-ii-the-succession-wars/screenshots/dos/634491/

Carmageddon

https://www.mobygames.com/game/367/carmageddon/screenshots/dos/887670/

Notice the color banding on the textures? CRTs blend that together, resulting in a much smoother look even with software rendering.

Elder Scrolls Arena

https://www.mobygames.com/game/803/the-elder-scrolls-arena/screenshots/dos/305893/

Our old friend Mr Dithering makes an appearance once again.

I hope I’ve made my point clear. It’s fine if you prefer the clean pixelated look of LCD displays, but it’s clear that this is not what these games were meant to look like.

A cash grab is what they did with the sloppy re-release of Chrono Trigger, which is vastly inferior to the original game on original hardware - or running a ROM Hack with bug fixes (or even just the game as it released originally) in a cycle-accurate emulator.

Remaking a game from the ground up with AAA production values is a costly and complex endeavor - and a risky one too, even with a titles as popular as Final Fantasy VII, since there is no guarantee fans will enjoy it. Almost the same kind of high risks as with any other game production of this sort of scale apply here. And while I haven’t played these remakes, their reception seems to indicate that they are anything but cynical cash grabs.

Original hardware, especially CRTs, is increasingly difficult to find and getting more expensive and less reliable by the day (both of my N64 are completely dead right now - just from sitting unused in a dry cupboard for a few years).

Love it or hate it, this is the future of retro gaming.

Up to a certain point in the early to mid 2000s, virtually all home console and PC games were designed for CRT displays. I’m not sure where you’re getting the idea from that the type of display that was used by 99% of gamers on these systems was somehow not influencing the art design and technology of games.

Clickbait would not include in the title that the secret is CRT shaders.

I’m currently toying around with ares (the only fully cycle-accurate SNES emulator) and it has a lovely selection of CRT shaders (that are also available for other emulators). Try out crt-maximus-royale (or the half-res-mode variant). At least to me, the latter looks perfect, with just the right amount of blur, distortion, bloom and scanlines - and it comes with lovely details, like the bezel reflecting the image in real time and speaker grills filling the rest of the screen.

Someone uploaded a gallery with various games to reddit that shows just how versatile this shader is:

https://old.reddit.com/r/RetroArch/comments/1ag834e/while_mega_bezels_is_great_and_all_i_think_the/

Now I’m curious what your criteria are. Do none of the shaders shown in the video appeal to you? To me at least, they look remarkably close to several types of old CRT TVs that I remember.

Thanks. I shall avoid the motion blur variant as best as I can, because that’s one of several aspects of this device I do not remember fondly.

I borrowed a friend’s Game Boy for an afternoon when I was a kid and I was so disappointed by it (primarily the screen, but also poor ergonomics and the limited nature of its games) that I lost nearly all interest in gaming for a year.

It’s been that way since at least the first Trump administration. The sanewashing continues.

Does this shader also replicate the horrific motion blur that the display of the original GameBoy suffered from?

Shadowrun (SNES)

I had never even heard of this game, but reading the description on Wikipedia, it sounds absolutely fascinating. Thanks for the recommendation, I’ll definitely give it a go!

I’m definitely counting translations! Being able to play games that would otherwise be behind a language barrier is a wonderful thing.

No worries, I should have been more clear on that. Thanks for the list!

(And bloody hell, why do people keep using Discord for this?)

Based on the description, it seems like it would make sense even to someone who hasn’t played the original game yet. Would you agree with that?

I think this tracks. Last time I checked, it had eerily similar performance at 1080p as a GTX 1080 at 1440p (same settings otherwise), at least with games that don’t need more than 4GB of VRAM, like Assassin’s Creed Origins.

I’ve done this with other games (to the Deck and to and from other devices), but that’s not something you need to worry about. Streaming a game doesn’t have a noteworthy impact on the frame rate anymore in the age of GPUs with built-in encoding circuitry. Provided you have a half-decent home network, it’s hard to distinguish it from playing directly.

Subjectively at least - and this might be rose-tinted glasses influencing my judgment - it feels like it was more common, that certain genres were almost expected to come with an accessible level/map editor. I think I spent more time with the one from Age of Empires than the actual game.