Sometimes after a long day at work, going home and realizing you and your partner actually ate all the leftovers can be soul crushing. Maybe one of you had a bad day and want something good to eat because of it. Or maybe you’ve been putting off going to the store and you really don’t want to make a meal with what you have on-hand.

Whatever the reason is — there’s going to be times where going out to eat for non-extravagant reasons just feels like the only option. I’m not here to deny that satisfaction, but I do want to develop a means of thinking about the real cost of pulling up your food app instead of pulling out your cutting board.

So how do you identify a good baseline meal to compare all the others to? I think sustainable meals look like this:
- healthy enough to eat most nights,
- should be affordable to make,
- shouldn’t take too much effort to prep.

For my taste, a good stirfry with chicken and vegetables plus some white rice is that baseline meal. It’s cheap, quick to make and my partner and I never mind eating them.

Home Cooking Tier (my stir fry) (1:1)

• 2lb of chicken breasts — $6

• an equal amount of mixed veggies - $3

• seasonings + white rice — $1 (that’s a highball estimate)

We get four meals when we make this — that’s $10 for a dinner and a lunch for each of us. Thus my baseline is $2.50 a meal.

To keep it clean, let’s say there’s 30 days in a month. Everyday needs a full lunch and dinner. For breakfasts, we often will nibble on a left over container, so let’s say breakfasts equal half a meal. By this logic, we’re looking at 75 meals a month that need accounting for.

75 x $2.50 is $187.5… let’s just call this $200. That’s no snacks, no trips out — just a months worth of eating under the most ideal circumstance.

Now let’s look at my credit card statement for this month. 20 meals purchased, $200 spent. Wow, that’s my whole budget spent in almost a quarter of the time! How did this happen…

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The Ultra-Cheap Fast Food Tier (2.5:1)

• McDonald’s — $75 spend across 12 trips

Unfortunately, the McDonald’s in our town far out-performs other fast food places in terms of speed, price and reliability. Because of this, they’ve become our go to spot — especially when we both share a day off and want to start our morning with a nice breakfast.

$75 across 12 meals averages to be about $6.25 a visit. That’s more than double what we spend at home, a two and a half to one ratio, in fact. Honestly, I don’t think this is a terrible price to pay. You could spend more on a meal at home simply by buying beef instead of chicken!

The frequency in which we visit is more of the problem. If we cut our trips by a third — say, we only said yes when we want breakfasts, not when we’re too lazy to cook — our fun little moments would feel more special while also cracking down on cooking at home. It’s a win-win that’d save about $50 per month!

Gourmet Fast Food Tier (aka Fast Casual Dining, 6:1)

• Raising Cane’s — $26*

• Panda Express — $28*

*paying for two people’s meals

We only ate at these places once this whole month and while they hit the spot in a damn-fine manner, I’m realizing now that just those 2 meals were more than a 1/4th of the entire month’s food budget. Those were great chicken strips but jesus christ…

Meals like this really ought to be slotted into the ‘entertainment’ budget. We’re not eating here because we need sustenance, we’re enjoying a moment in time. The problem with putting a $26 meal for two in the entertainment category is that the cost could fund a lot more than 30-min’s of entertainment.

Immediate things that come to mind you could buy instead:

1. Two movie ticket // you’ll get thrice the duration of entertainment and walk away with a story to talk about!

2. Half the cost of a decent board game // if you play it twice, you broke even. Every round after that is free!

3. Two copies of an indie co-op game // when I bought Phasmophobia for $10, I didn’t image I’d get 100+ hours out of it. Relatively speaking, buying Phasmo versus eating at Cain’s is a 200:1 value differential.

The ‘Just Learn to Cook…’ Tier (7:1)

• Local Asian buffet — $34*

• Local Mexican restaurant — $37*

*paying for two people’s meals

Food can be an experience, but the crappy restaurants just ain’t cutting it, chief.

You know the place — the restaurants everyone wants to go to but you only say yes because you want to be social. Welp, I’m here to tell you you don’t need to patronize these places if they aren’t giving you that real fine-dining experience you want. So many restaurants exist these days because people who work in boring cities working boring jobs just want a little entertainment. They’re like casual drinking but for middle-aged people. They’re fun in the moment, then when you’re done you think ‘dear god, why did I put so much time into that…’

If places like this intrigue you, go learn to cook — I swear to god, it’s that simple. If you start by spending seven times more than your most basic home cooked meal and slowly work that number down, you’ll be saving money in the long run.

This category is like the one above except you’re trading off the ‘ready in 5 minutes’ convenience for having a server that you never really want to bother (but you should still tip them at least 20%.)

So how much could I be saving?

We already know that a perfect month is $200. Realistically though, you’re going to be spending a lot more because of snacks, drinks, one off items. This doesn’t even touch how much money cutting out drinking can save. But that’s okay, I’d say give yourself a 150% wiggle room. Let yourself spend $300 a month on food — say yes to the luxury items at the store a little more often if it means you’ll be staving off even a single meal out to eat. After you’ve had your moments of learning, try to dial it back.

But let’s get to the final math problem — 75 meals minus the 20 I went out to eat, that’s 55 meals. 55 x $2.50 ~= $140. Add the $200 from going out & our new total is $340 a month. If your number is anything like mine, just remember we already have the frame work in place to save at least $140 a month just from food! Imagine baseline food cost decreased - the savings would be even larger!

My goal for writing this was just to figure out where my money was going. Now that I’ve got it pretty visualized, I think I’m going to start buying that steak a little more often and eating that bean and bacon soup a little more often, too!

About a week ago, the modder Alex McHugh released the v1.0 initial public release of their Skate 3 recompilation project. To many people’s surprised, it seemed to work out of the box with zero hiccups! Alex kept pushing on the project and at the time of writing, they’re up to v1.03 - boasting support for Windows, Mac and Linux, plus all the game’s DLC is working!

Jov’s Gaming Lounge has a really good tutorial showing off how to install the game plus how they use the open-source games manager Lutris to organize their library.

It kind of feels like magic seeing Xbox 360 games recompiled already. I remember maybe a year ago the Xenia teams stating they’ve got their second game with Perfect compatibility - Perfect Dark Zero. Then earlier this year ReXGlue had their initial launch, ushering in a new means of letting fans fix up the code of their favorite games in C++ and start the porting process.

If you’re just looking for some quality Skate 3 content, you can’t go wrong watching all of HelixSnake’s compilations of them finding new ways to break the game and film some truly hilarious moment!

You can find Alex McHugh’s Skate 3 PC Port on their Github located here! https://github.com/mchughalex/skate3recomp

You can find the project on the creator’s itch.io page here: https://nictuber.itch.io/paper-mario-star-nova.

If you can’t get enough of Star Nova, NicTuber has released another shorter mod called Paper Mario: Mystical Missions while working on the main project. Mystical Missions was made for the Water Jam Contest for one of the Paper Mario modding Discords. It even was featured in the F3 2025 showcase!

This mod and others like it were made possible thanks to the Star Rod rom editor, a toolset that lets you customize just about every element of the base game. The creator, z64a, has been maintaining it for over 10 years, making it one of the longest running tools I’ve seen in the N64 romhacking community. I love tools like this. They practically turn whatever game they’re made for into a creation platform versus a coding project!

The recommended emulator to play Star Nova is Parallel Launcher which can be ran standalone or through RetroArch. According to the devs, it’s, “faster and more accurate than Project64 [and] comes with all graphics plugins built in so you don't need to manually install and update them.”

Hagg, a member of the server, posted this screenshot a little after release. An hour to 100% a level is pretty good, in my eyes! That tells me there’s quite a bit worth doing and seeing. The team went on to ask Hagg if they had completed [spoilers redacted] which is how I learned the hard way there might be more to do than visit the one level — love to see it. 😉😉😉

You can download the .xdelta patch for Riverside Ruins here! Only compatible with a vanilla, US ROM of Banjo-Kazooie.

Last night marked new beginning — Maafia, the content creator who put Smash 64 back on the map for me, hosted his first Netplay tourney for Smash Remix — the community driven mod that’s already tripled the roster of the vanilla game and added seemingly endless amounts of new stages and custom content.

What makes this significant is how rollback has made competing viable from international distances! Instead of once a year flying to Peru for Inkafest or meeting up in the states for Supernova, everyone can compete like they were in the same room year around. Last night at Maafia Monthlies, the western world experienced that joy for the first tournament hosted by an actual N64 competitor!

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Maaf was able to bring in an impressive 150+ entrants to his online event, and surprisingly he was only seeded 22! The returning champ of Cashbox #27 (the Hbox Rollback tournament) made a return — Lowww, a New York player ranked 10th for Smash 64 in 2025. They were along side Hooded, JeyKeyAr (pronounces JKR) and Janco for winners side top 8. Losers side saw, KrisKringle, Holzberd, Moosh_Da_Moosh and of course Fray, who’s the Creative Director behind the entire remix project!

Lots of impressive and unprecedented moments came from the whole tournament but especially in Top 8, which I’ve got timestamped in the embedded video below.

Not sure when the next one will be. If this ‘last Sunday of the month’ schedule is what they stick with then possible check Maafia’s socials closer to June 28th, 2026.

For several factors, people think of these as the ‘bad’ gaming handhelds compared to everything else available. However, I was optimistic that after a handful of incremental upgrades, this device could prove to be one of the most cost effective means of getting into PC gaming. A docked Z1E-chipset used like standard PC can play Elden Ring all day and have it look better than the PS4/Xbox One version. That alone is a potent proposition, but if we can fix it’s problems in handheld mode — oh baby, this thing can be competitive with handhelds on the market that cost literally four times for similar performance (thank you, tech oligarchs.)

Note: This is not a tutorial, just a collection of things to think about.

Straight out the *used* box

Setting up a Windows handheld is just gobs of institutional knowledge you’ll need to have previously acquired or else you’re locked into whatever ecosystem the hardware manufacture provides. Armoury Crate, the ‘front-end’ Asus created for managing your game libraries and hardware stuff isn’t the worst front-end on the planet, but I personally prefer less sponsored content, more personalized space.

So after the Windows install, the first thing I did was uninstall the Asus software to make room for G-Helper, a much lighter, open-source equivalent for drivers and hardware management. This software lets you customize TDP (or power draw,) FPS limits, screen refresh rate, LEDs, button mappings — you name it!

By default, G-Helper replaces the right ROG button (under Start) with a dedicated pop-up menu for all its features. I experimented with making the left ROG button (under Select) all sorts of things, but the function I’ve settled on is Win+Tab — a way to move between menus quickly. You can also have it launch software by pointing it at the executable, or pretty much anything else you can think of.

Keyboard inputs need to be translated into Hex values for G-Helper to recognize them. Here are three you might want to use:

• Win + Tab (fancy app switcher) = 0x5B 0x09

• Alt + Tab (original app switcher) = 0x12 0x09

• Alt + F4 (force close app) = 0x12 0x73

I also ran a couple debloat tools — WinSetView which returns File Explorer to it’s Pre-11 state, and Win11Debloat which attempts to remove as much telemetry and unnecessary functions from the operating system it can without breaking things.

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Time for a new battery!

G-Helper also makes battery health reports WAY easier to see, which is how I learned my device was only holding 75% of the charge it was built for.

According to Retro Game Corps’ testing, the 40Wh battery this device ships with grants about 1hr for AAA stuff and 3hr for lightweight emulation. That’s… abysmal. Since mine’s only 3/4th of that, Vampire Crawler’s drove a stake through my device after just 2hrs of playtime.

Researching options turned up two routes: I could buy the fancy JSAUX kit with a 65Wh battery and custom backplate for about $120 (before tax and shipping) or get DIY with a $40 74Wh ASUS battery and a home made heatsink! Take a guess at which I picked.

You’ll find people online saying the heatsink is an optional step. I disagree — here’s why.

I’ve linked an incredible video below that not only provides tested data for these claims, but also goes through the materials needed and construction process of building your own heatsink. It was genuinely a ton of fun and one of the reasons I feel more connected to this handheld!

Oh yes, it’s Playnite!

After these two big changes, it was time to finally get my desired gaming experience in order. Steam Big Picture mode is phenomenal for all things Steam, but I don’t like using the Add Local Games to Library feature to bring in other Libraries. Instead I use an open-source utility called Playnite!

Playnite has a bit of a learning curve, but only because it’s such a powerful tool. It has plugins to seamlessly incorporate your libraries (like Epic, GOG, Xbox, even Steam), connects games to artwork and metadata repositories so you can add beauty and detail. It integrates with emulators, meaning you can launch games directly from Playnite after integrating it with RPCS3, Eden or whatever else you’re emulating. It even has it's own big picture mode with lots of themes and customizable elements!

I love Playnite, but the tinkerer in me is curious about switching off of it in favor of Handheld Companion, another open-source Armoury Crate alternative that manages your libraries too. Some folks online think it’s the gold standard if you prefer simplicity. If you want things to be even easier, replacing your Windows install with Bazzite, a flavor of Linux that basically turns your device into a Steamdeck. Some report better battery life and performance running Bazzite but after installing my improved battery, I don’t worry about either metric one bit.

Fixing the ergonomics

At this point, the device’s internals are up to a great standard, but holding the device isn’t perfect. Looser grips do just fine, but I found that even short-sessions with a tight grip leave my hands feeling achy.

After searching online, I found enough praise for the Skull & Co. grip to pick one up. Came with a matching case too, all for a little over $30! Simply slide the grip around the device and now you’ve got two nice big bumps to grip. They aren’t slanted so they’re not as comfy as a controller — more like a Steamdeck, if anything. Still, it’s a tremendous improvement over the stiff, angled and shallow grips when using the ROG Ally without a case, so I’m convinced this is worth leaving on. It also solves my need for case!

After seeing this white device in a black grip, I was reminded of how Retro Game Corps’ uses skins on his devices to dramatically change their look and presentation. I’ve never been a big fan of skins, they’ve always seemed tacky. His, however, brought some raw color to the device, more of an abstract look. I searched for ones like his and sure enough, PlayVital sells a few nice ones at a price I could stomach spending.

Post-installation, I instantly fell in love! I think it breathes new life when looking at it. I’ve been seeing the ROG Ally with the plain while look in in thumbnails and posts for three years now. Sort of like building my heatsink, it’s now officially personalized.

Seeking a convenient docked mode

Up until now, everything I did while ‘docked’ was done using a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard plus an Android tablet running SuperDisplay (to act as a stand-alone monitor). A device as capable as the Ally deserves an easy-to-slip-into docked mode, so I started researching USB-C docks.

My partner had the go-to JSAUX dock for their Steamdeck lying, so I tried it out and no dice — the Ally grip makes it too thick to fit inside the dock comfortably. So I impulse purchased a dock intended for Mac at Best Buy, the Targus Hyperdrive Flex 5. It was cheap, very portable and granted a USB-C input (for fast data transfer without pulling the PD.) Picked it up, started using it and wam bam — it worked great! Plugged it into a TV then realized I could use the same cheap prop-anything-up stand I was using for the Android tablet but for the ROG Ally to give it that nice, Switch-like cabinet presence.

TV mode was great, but I wanted a more convenient means of hooking this up at my desk, like my gaming computer is. At first, I was considering going the KVM route — if you happen to have one, that the best option for sure! But since my monitor has both HDMI and DP inputs, I run one cable to my desktop the other to the dock. I’ve got my mouse/keyboard/headphones plugged into a travel USB hub already so I simply move that from my desktop to the dock and can how manage the Ally as conveniently as my main rig!

Done and dusted

We’ve now got a ROG Ally with a better software experience, a great battery, great ergonomics and a wonderful docked experience. My sticks aren’t perfect but I think I’ll save them for another day — it’s time to stop tinkering and actually play some games!

Let’s say you’re a game dev living in the US. You get a job working remote and it pays $100K a year. That’s an incredible gig if your city has low cost of living, pretty mid if it doesn’t. After yearly licensing fees, hardware upgrades and benefits packages, the company is going to spend an extra $20k to keep you working. That’s about $120K a year or $10K a month for your ‘burn rate’.

Your team is 6 other people similar in skill as you and things are expected to take 3 years to launch and you’re guaranteed 6 months to polish/present DLC — that’s 42 months of production cost. Each month is $60K times 42… not bad! Just over $2.5M if all goes according to plan! Not including marketing and taxes, of course. You can probably raise that yourself, right?

If that’s an indie project, let’s move into the AA space. Imagine relocating to a bigger city to join a 50-person development team offering $150K annually and great benefits. Over an anticipated four-year timeline, you’ll be building an support a live service (3 years to make it, 1 to support it — we’ll draft new contracts after that.) At an individual monthly burn rate of $15K, the team costs $750K a month or $9M a year, totaling $36M. Congrats, you might have just made Fall Guys!

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Here we go, the big leagues just asked you to join! You’ll earn $200K a year to live in an overpopulated city with a decent commute, working alongside 300 of the brightest minds around. At an individual monthly burn rate of $20K, this massive team costs $6M a month, or $72M a year. Though they estimated a four-year timeline, it has already taken five; let’s call it six years of total production. That is a staggering $432M just to get data on a disk to publish—and that is not even factoring in long-term support or DLC!

In his video, Jason talks about how in some cases these numbers are still low-ball guesses because cost of living in these major cities makes for expensive employees.

What I think is most fascinating is that a smaller game might generate a couple million — which could be tremendous seed money for your next project if you’re a solo dev, or a part of a small team of bedroom coders/artists.

As for the big budgets stuff, we started seeing 6-digit budgets being common in the AAA space around the Xbox 360 era. Famously, 2009’s Modern Warfare 2 by Infinity Ward/Activision cost about $50M to make and another $200M to market! I heard Tim Cain say in one of his videos something like, ‘Whether you like it or not, the correlation between how much a game spend on marketing versus how much revenue it returns line up all too well!’

Unless you strictly want to clear rooms, Kvark quickly wears thin. Without puzzles to break up the pacing or unique set pieces to anchor the maps, the gameplay loop feels incredibly flat—and pressing 'F' on useless environmental objects doesn't fix that.

On paper, a shooter that keeps its foot on the gas sounds ideal, but Kvark proves that non-stop action can eventually backfire. Sometime’s it’s three enemies in a room, other times it’s four. Then you turn another hallways and boom—exact same trolly problem. The game never really switches this up, in fact it doesn’t really like to switch anything up. A door is always locked and you always need to find a way to unlock. That’s the golden rule here and won’t ever be challenged across this three episode campaign.

What’s missing are the essential palette cleansers that define the genre’s greats. In classic shooters from yesteryear, simple puzzles, navigation challenges, or quiet moments of exploration aren’t just filler—they are structural design choices meant to give the player a micro-reset. Kvark uses exploring ‘wrong turns’ to gain ammo, health and these little chunks of a radioactive substance that lets you unlock perks. as these moments. At the end of each level, you’ll be informed of all the secret areas you missed and to the opposite of my surprise, the spot under the stairs was almost always one of those secrets.

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On the skill tree upgrades, to be honest they felt a little unnecessary. Most of them have an imperceptable impact on gameplay like +5% damage dealt or +10hp. These things are meaningless in a with as many ammo/health pickups as this. One perk gave you a 1% chance of an enemy exploding after being shot. I burned through probably a a couple thousand rounds of ammo after purchasing this one and never once was I certain that the perk caused any gibbing. Imagine shooting at three enemies at the same time and one of them happens to die a little quickly—that’s the whoopdie-do moment of this perk in action.

I did really enjoy the level design in this one. All the maps have a good ebb and flow to them were you don’t need to question if you’re backtracking or not, nor do you have to wonder if you missed anything. They all have a decent mix of verticality as well, which adds a bit of depth as to how fights can play out. As for platform, our main character has the most minuscule jump I think I’ve ever seen in a boomer shooter, and the fact that every you can jump on almost requires a crouch jump is… well, it’s kind of funny reading Steam reviews that compain about this. I don’t have a problem with crouch jumping but some people certainly thing it’s the worst thing you can do with your thumb and pinky.

We don’t have enough games that ask you to run through an underground complex and packed with visually interesting set dressing, they ultimately feel more like combat playgrounds than real, cohesive places. The layout is clearly built around combat geometry—designed to give you and the enemies space to maneuver—rather than immersing you in a world with a distinct structural identity. Because the environments don’t do much to tell a story or ground you in a specific reality, the various hubs and hallways quickly begin to bleed together into one continuous, blurry corridor.

I still think this game was lacking in any striking set pieces games like this are known for. The most you’ll experience is a couple timed explosives where the game becomes a wave shooter. No giant green tentacle monsters coming out of the floor, no over powered enemies blocking progression. Each episode does end in a boss fight but I only enjoyed one of the three because of its creativity. Not to spoil it, but it kind of reminds me of Motorslice. Every one of them is a classic dump and dodge—fire everything you’ve got while dodging attacks. Pretty generic stuff.

Ultimately, the game falls into the trap of prioritizing quantity over genuine curation. I get the feeling the devs did a ‘make as we go’ maneuver with release, as they used the Early Access model to publish episodically. It’s a shame because the final episode is clearly the most varied and realized. It’s also shown off a lot in the games marketing which I’d argue skewed what I thought this game was going to be when I bought it.

Still, it’s a pretty enjoyable experience if you just want to turn your brain off and blast through a giant complex. I’m a little burned at how much of this game takes place in the same underground looking areas, but I guess in the future I’ll just refer to these under performing titles as Kvark-likes.

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One of the coolest pieces of homebrew software I know about is MouseInjectorDolphinDuck. It lets you boot up an emulator, launch a first-person game and like magic, your mouse controls the camera. It makes loads of games feel like native PC releases — a blessing to anyone who struggles to play older titles because of their controls, especially First-Person Shooters.

Add on more game to the support list — Megaman Legends 1 & 2! You wouldn’t know it by reading the compatibility charts, as they aren’t mentioned, but both games have a working profile! I haven’t tried Tron Bonne yet, but I’ll update when I do.

The camera doesn’t snap 1:1 with mouse movements, often floating a little further than you intend for it to go. Still, it took me 20min to get used to this and with a game where you can get away with imprecision, it genuinely wasn’t an issue. I’m guessing this is why Garungorp, the modder who added Duckstation support as well as many other systems, didn’t mention it.

If you want to know how my controls were setup, I’d recommend this list:

Dpad = WASD (movement)
Cross = space (jump)
Circle = F (interact, could do E instead)
Square = left mouse click (fire blaster arm)
Triangle = right mouse click (fire special arm)
L1/L2/R1 = don’t bind
R2 = E (lock-on/free-look, used almost never)
Start = Tab (menu)
Select = Caps Lock (map, could do M instead)

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After playing through the first game like this — I’m officially a Megaman Legends fan! Genuinely a 10/10 game. Will return someday to see all the side-quests through to their finish!!

If you’re looking for the best Co-op games for Rollback, I’ve written about my favorites here!
12 Co-op Games for the N64 to Play using Rollback

Banjo-Tooie

The bear and bird duo on a revenge mission to stop a Grunty and her sisters from sucking the life force out of their entire Isle ‘o Hags. Through out the singleplayer campaign, you’ll be playing LOADS of mini-games—some in the vein of Mario Party, others are full on first-person missions. Believe it or not, the folks at Rare turned all these Mini-Games into a unique multiplayer experience! Play them one-on-one, or face off to see who can get first to a certain number of points. My favorites are all the FPS death matches (yep, that’s a real thing!)

Mario Golf

This is my favorite entry in the Mario Golf franchise, mostly because it hides a surprisingly brutal game engine underneath all that cheerful Mushroom Kingdom paint. It’s noticeably jankier and way harder than any of the sequels—there are no casual assists here, so if you misjudge the wind or botch your timing on the swing meter by a single pixel, your ball is flying straight into a hazard. But that’s exactly why it rules; fighting through the harsh physics gives every clean drive and clutch putt a genuine, high-stakes “you earned it” feeling that the newer, safer games completely lost. Plus, the sheer amount of content packed into the cartridge is insane, pairing a massive roster of characters and sprawling fantasy courses with a ton of specialized modes—like precision-heavy Ring Shots, speed runs, and a fully realized Mini-Golf mode that turns a slow-paced sports sim into a cutthroat arcade fight.

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Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 is arguably the most accessible of the classic entries, striking a perfect balance before the series got bloated with overly complex mechanics. It gives you almost everything you need for modern high-scoring runs, only missing the caveman/revert combo extensions that came later, meaning you still have to rely on raw spatial awareness and strict momentum conservation to keep your multiplier alive. Getting to dive into its massive urban sandboxes with a friend is rad as hell, turning those classic map checklists into highly coordinated runs. Instead of just skating side-by-side, it completely recontextualizes the park layout through the cutthroat “Graffiti” mode, where landing a high-scoring combo on a piece of geometry claims it for your color and steals it from your opponent’s score pool, triggering a high-mobility territory war where you are actively rushing to snipe high-value structural assets right out from under each other.

The World Is Not Enough

The World Is Not Enough is criminally underrated, and honestly, I prefer it over GoldenEye 007 because its linear missions are a perfect fit for a tight, cinematic Bond game. The visual upgrade is instantly noticeable, too, pushing the hardware way further with sharper models and much smoother performance. Where it really shines, though, is the multiplayer arena design. Instead of just recycling campaign hallways, these maps feel like actual competitive arenas built with distinct verticality, sniper perches, and tight choke points that force constant friction. Best of all, the customization suite lets you fill out matches with aggressive AI bots—which I genuinely thought were called “All Bots” as a kid—allowing you and a friend to team up and wage absolute resource-denial wars against a full squad of digital enemies.

Xena: Warrior Princess: The Talisman of Fate

Xena: Warrior Princess: The Talisman of Fate is an absolute blast, mostly because it leans into how wonderfully goofy it is and plays like a classic, slightly unhinged fighting game. It has absolutely nothing to do with the main story of the show, but it’s great seeing the whole cast thrown together in an arcade ladder. While learning combos is admittedly a nightmare—the game does a terrible job of actually teaching you its mechanics—embracing it for what it is makes it incredible; it’s flagrantly just "SoulCalibur for the N64," and that’s a beautiful thing. It even has its own version of Dan Hibiki from Street Fighter with Joxer, who is delightfully terrible and hilarious to play.

Beetle Adventure Racing!

Beetle Adventure Racing! features surprisingly competent racing mechanics, and it’s easily at its absolute best when played in Manual mode. Unlike the floaty drift-physics of the Cruis'n series or standard kart racers, this engine does a decent job of replicating the actual weight, suspension, and physical feedback of a real vehicle—even if you're throwing a tiny, colorful Volkswagen Beetle around the bends. Tackling the massive, sprawling tracks with a friend becomes a masterclass in path optimization, as the courses function more like open-ended driving sandboxes stuffed with breakable shortcuts, hidden tunnels, and massive jumps. The spatial friction peaks if you hop into the "Beetle Battle" arena mode, which ditches the traditional starting grids for a cutthroat vehicular combat free-for-all where you have to hunt down colored ladybugs and sabotage each other with rockets and proximity mines before racing for the exit.

Pokémon Stadium 2

Pokémon Stadium 2 is legendary for its mini-games, but if you and a friend actually know the series, the main turn-based battling mode is where the real game is at. It aligns strictly with Generation 2—bringing in the full roster of 251 creatures from Gold, Silver, and Crystal—and introduces the core mechanical shakeups of that era like held items and distinct typing splits. If someone is completely new to the franchise, jumping straight into the deep end here might feel a little strange as they try to rapidly memorize complex type advantages and status effects on the fly, but it is absolutely a hurdle worth clearing for the sheer depth of the competitive mind games.

Snowboard Kids 2

Snowboard Kids 2 is an absolute gem, and while the actual racing physics might not be my favorite on the system, the overall vibe is entirely unmatched. The game plays like a vibrant Saturday morning cartoon come to life, packed with a super colorful art style, an incredibly catchy soundtrack, and an eclectic roster of characters that completely sets it apart from any traditional sports or racing game out there. What really makes it special is the pure imagination found in its sprawling, thematic tracks—you aren’t just carving up generic snowy mountains; instead, you and a friend are navigating wildly creative sandboxes that have you snowboarding through a sunny tropical beach, a haunted house, and even an underwater castle. It completely leans into that playful, chaotic energy, turning every downhill run into a frantic battle of item management and spectacular, stylized tricks.

Extreme-G 2

Extreme-G 2 is an absolute blast of a futuristic racer, functioning at an incredibly fast pace that leaves zero room for error. The whole aesthetic—with its hyper-stylized neon visuals and frantic, pounding breakbeats—instantly reminds me of a late-90s The Prodigy music video. You could definitely argue that F-Zero X is the technically superior racer in this specific high-speed gravity genre, but everyone already knows about that game, and I never actually played it anyway. Instead, this title carves out its own distinct identity by giving you and a friend massive, winding roller-coaster tracks to blast through at supersonic speeds, adding a ton of chaotic friction with an aggressive arsenal of homing missiles, rear-firing mines, and shields that turns a standard speed run into a brutal, high-mobility war of attrition.

Golden Nugget 64

Golden Nugget 64 is a fascinating relic, especially since traditional casino simulators aren’t really made like this anymore. That said, the massive success of modern hits like Balatro proves that people still absolutely love the aesthetic and tension of card games. Sitting down to play something like this with my partner has actually been way more fun than you’d expect. It obviously doesn’t have the flashy animations or complex pieces of other multiplayer games on the system, but that’s exactly the appeal—the timeless table-game vibe and mechanical simplicity give you plenty of breathing room. It’s the perfect low-stakes sandbox to just relax, shoot the breeze, and talk about life while you try to take down the house together.

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10 Great Versus-Multiplayer Games to Play on N64 Rollback

1. Goemon’s Great Adventure (aka Mystic Ninja 2)

Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon completely skips any bloated overworld filler and just locks you into tight, side-scrolling stages packed with bizarre Japanese folklore monsters and brutal arcade difficulty. Playing this in splitscreen introduces a ton of hilarious friction because you and a friend are trapped on the exact same screen, meaning if one of you falls behind, the camera will straight-up drag you to your death. The game doubles down on this cooperative chaos with some genuinely wild mechanics—you can actually hop right onto your partner’s back to let them carry you through tough platforming rooms, or frantically toss a baton back and forth to swap who is steering the cockpit during those massive, first-person giant robot boss battles.

2. Diddy Kong Racing (using the JOINTVENTURE cheat)

Diddy Kong Racing is so much more than a standard arcade racer, turning the entire genre into a massive adventure game packed with hidden collectibles, boss fights, and three entirely separate vehicle styles—karts for land, high-drift hovercrafts for water, and free-flying planes for the sky. Punching in the legendary “JOINTVENTURE” cheat code unlocks the full campaign for two players, creating a genius division of labor where you can work together to conquer the overworld. Since only one of you actually needs to secure first place to unlock the next challenge, you can completely break the game’s routing—allowing one player to lock down the optimal racing line to guarantee a win while the partner purposefully veers off into branching paths to hunt down hidden balloons and secrets.

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3. Sin & Punishment

Sin and Punishment is a spectacular, high-octane rail shooter set in a dystopian future where a genetically engineered food source mutates into a ravenous alien threat called Ruffians. The actual gameplay feels like an aggressive, infantry-focused Star Fox 64 on steroids, forcing you to navigate your character’s actual physical body through dense, screen-filling bullet hell scenarios. Because trying to dodge incoming fire and aim at the exact same time can completely short-circuit your brain, the brilliant two-player co-op mode splits the controls entirely: one player assumes total responsibility for movement and dodge rolls, while the second pilot strictly handles the aiming crosshair to clear the screen. This shared-brain setup completely shifts the dynamic into an intense test of real-time communication, turning chaotic alien waves into a hilarious, high-stakes test of how well you and a friend can stay in sync.

4. Perfect Dark

Perfect Dark is an absolute masterpiece, and it basically ruined other shooters for me as a kid because of how insanely ahead of its time it was. Instead of just letting you mindlessly sprint down corridors blasting everything that moves, the missions actually force you to think—you’re dropping into a dense cyberpunk atmosphere where you have to juggle stealth, specialized gadgets, and a massive arsenal of weapons that all have ridiculous secondary firing modes (like a laptop that folds up into an autonomous gun turret).

The splitscreen stuff is completely legendary. You get the standard co-op campaign, but the real star of the show is “Counter-Op” mode. It is beautifully toxic: one player tries to finish the actual story mission while the second player actively spawns into the bodies of random enemy guards across the map, weaponizing the facility’s security systems to hunt their friend down. On top of that, the multiplayer let you stack matches with highly customizable AI “simulants”—ranging from pacifists to absolute terminators—turning a casual couch session into a chaotic, full-scale battlefield where you can customize enemy behaviors down to the pixel.

5. Gauntlet Legends

Gauntlet Legends is the ultimate arcade hack-and-slash, and honestly, it’s responsible for eating an embarrassing amount of my allowance as a kid. I used to dump endless quarters into the arcade cabinet, famously making it all the way to the final world before running completely out of money. Finding out this thing actually got a home console port blew my absolute mind. It instantly became a game I constantly rented from the local video store, but it came with a brutal catch: back then, you needed an N64 Controller Pak to actually save your data. Since I didn’t own one, every single weekend rental turned into a frantic, non-stop marathon to see how far my friends and I could get before we inevitably had to shut the console off and lose everything.

The whole game is built entirely for chaotic couch co-op, locking everyone onto a single shared screen so you’re forced to stick together. You choose from those classic fantasy archetypes—like the Warrior, Valkyrie, Wizard, or Elf—and try to balance your abilities to survive the endless waves of monsters. But the real magic is the beautiful, toxic greed it feeds into. You’re supposed to be working as a team, but the second a piece of gold, a potion, or a rare food drop hits the floor, all teamwork goes out the window as you frantically race your buddies to steal the loot right out from under them.

6. Duke Nukem 3D

Duke Nukem 3D on the N64 is easily one of my favorite versions to go back to. It actually strips out a lot of the edgy themes that were in the original PC release—but honestly, all of that stripper-room stuff feels so corny today anyway that you really aren’t missing out on anything unless you’re thirteen years old.

Instead, what makes this version so great is that you can play the entire ridiculous campaign side-by-side with a buddy in splitscreen. It completely changes the vibe of the game; instead of a tense, lonely survival crawl, it turns into a chaotic, buddy-cop demolition derby where the two of you are just tearing through city streets and blowing up alien pigs together. And if you get tired of working as a team, you can instantly flip the script, drop into the multiplayer mode, and use those exact same highly interactive city maps to blow each other up with pipe bombs and shrink rays. It’s just pure, low-stakes arcade chaos on a shared couch.

7. Rampage (World Tour and Universal Tour)

I had a buddy tell me they once beat the entire campaign of Rampage with a friend in a single night while tripping on acid, and honestly, that story completely recontextualizes the whole game for me. Because on the surface, you’re just some beefy ass dudes smashing things up. But when you think about it... wait, we are literally giant, mutated monsters terrorizing entire populations! It is simultaneously the coolest thing ever and also kind of gut-wrenching if you actually pause to imagine the sheer cosmic horror and ruined lives you’re inflicting on these poor citizens—right before you punch a massive skyscraper into dust in five seconds flat.

The game completely skips any complex mechanics and just hands you a pure, brainless arcade sandbox. You and a friend drop onto a flat side-scrolling screen and just go to town: you punch buildings until they crumble, swat annoying military helicopters out of the sky, and literally eat screaming people off the street to keep your health up. It’s just a high-energy, totally stress-free smash-fest where the only goal is to see how fast you and a buddy can level a city block. It’s the ultimate game to just turn your brain completely off and watch the world burn on a Friday night.

8. Battletanx (and it’s sequel, Global Assault)

BattleTanx looks like just another generic tank game on the surface, but the story is absolutely unhinged. In short: a virus instantly kills 99% of the women on the planet, so the collapsing governments round up the survivors and lock them away in sterile labs. Naturally, heavily armed male gangs immediately form to break them out, deifying them as “QueenLords” to rule over their wasteland turf. The main character’s wife happens to be one of the women taken, and since the guy literally just wants his marriage back, he hops into a massive tank to go rescue her. That is genuinely the entire plot.

The actual gameplay completely matches that crazy B-movie energy. You and a buddy get dropped into completely destructible versions of a ruined New York or San Francisco, and you just blow up everything in sight. You’re trading heavy explosive shells, dropping automated gun turrets on street corners, and literally firing guided nuclear missiles across the screen that turn entire city blocks into smoking craters. It’s fast, chaotic, and just pure arcade fun on a shared couch.

9. Hexen

Hexen is such a cool N64 port because it’s basically Doom re-skinned as a dark fantasy game, letting you and a buddy choose between a Warrior, a Cleric, or a Mage to completely shake up how you play. One of you can swing a massive axe on the front lines while the other stands back casting lightning spells, which you'll desperately need because the level design completely swaps out Doom’s straightforward halls for massive, interconnected hub worlds filled with cryptic puzzles. It takes serious communication on a shared couch because you'll literally have to hunt down a hidden switch on one map just to open a giant iron gate on an entirely separate level, turning your standard splitscreen shooter into a moody, punishing dungeon crawl where you're constantly mapping out pathways together and covering each other’s backs from hordes of centaurs.

10. Starcraft 64

StarCraft 64 is an absolute mad-science experiment of a console port, and trying to manage a massive real-time strategy economy on a standard controller is a brutal, finger-cramping hurdle when the game was so clearly built for a mouse. But wrestling with the clunky shortcut menus is totally worth it just to play the exclusive splitscreen co-op mode, where you and a buddy get to control the exact same faction side-by-side on a single TV screen. It sets up an awesome division of labor where one of you can focus entirely on base building, supply lines, and resource management while the other micro-manages frantic Zerg rushes or drops troops directly into enemy territory. It completely flips a notoriously stressful PC click-fest into a hilarious, chaotic team effort where you’re constantly shouting at each other across the couch to build more supply depots.

11. Armorines: Project S.W.A.R.M.

Armorines: Project S.W.A.R.M. was made by Acclaim Studios Austin—the exact same team behind N64 heavy-hitters like Turok—and you can instantly feel that sci-fi shooter DNA the second you pick up the controller. It’s definitely a flawed game that doesn’t quite hit those legendary Turok heights thanks to some clunky platforming and aggressive fog, but it carries a ton of late-90s charm if you just want to shoot giant insects. Heavily inspired by the vibe of Starship Troopers, the game drops you and a buddy into high-tech exosuits to wage a frantic, first-person war against endless waves of extraterrestrial bugs. The splitscreen co-op completely saves the experience, turning a somewhat repetitive campaign into a fun, low-stakes arcade blast where you’re constantly covering each other’s backs and watching alien bugs explode into colorful goo across a shared screen.

12. Vigilante 8 (and it’s sequel, 2nd Offense)

Vigilante 8 dropped right when the vehicular combat genre was at its absolute peak, and while it was on multiple systems, the N64 version is easily the best one to go back to. It completely captures that late-90s alternative energy, letting you and a friend choose from a roster of eccentric, fully voiced drivers—like renegade truckers and disco-obsessed vigilantes—and drop them into massive, fully destructible 1970s sandboxes. The actual gameplay is incredibly satisfying because you’re not just racing; you’re drifting around ruined oil refineries and desert canyons while managing wild weapon pickups like homing missiles and mortar shells. Plus, you can input fighting-game-style button combos to unleash devastating hidden special attacks, which turns standard splitscreen couch deathmatches into a chaotic, high-octane war of attrition where you’re constantly blowing up the environment just to trap your buddy.

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10 Great Versus-Multiplayer Games to Play on N64 Rollback

1. Smash Remix

The first Smash 64 ROM hack I ever played simply added a timer to stock battles and let you play on Final Destination. At the time, that felt like peak gaming—what more could you possibly want? Little did I know, the answer to that question would eventually be over 20 brand-new characters, pages upon pages of new stages, and mechanics from modern Smash titles fully back-ported and made completely togglable.

Even if you aren’t interested in getting sweaty or competitive and just want to experience all the new content, so much of this game feels incredibly fresh. The roster leans heavily into the N64 era with amazing deep cuts, featuring characters like Marina from Mischief Makers, Goemon from Mystic Ninja, and Crash Bandicoot. If you want modern air dodging or Super Smash Bros. Ultimate-style ledge trumping, you can turn it on. If you want to play on Spiral Mountain from Banjo-Kazooie but prefer the balanced layout of Battlefield, every single stage has alternate layouts optimized for competitive play.

Honestly, I kind of think N64 Rollback netcode was built specifically for Smash Remix, and the rest of the system’s library just reaped the benefits. The Remix community immediately gained the most from it, given that it’s primarily a 1v1 game when played competitively, and their scene was hurting the most for a stable online experience (with the possible exception of Project M). If you’re interested in diving into that scene, I’d highly recommend hopping into some local matches with a buddy or joining the Smash Remix Discord to find people to practice and learn with!

2. Mario Kart 64: Amped Up

The Mario Kart scene has always boasted a pretty robust modding community, but historically on the N64, you’d need about seven different patched ROMs just to stay entertained for an hour—with each one only offering a handful of changes. On top of that, quality was completely all over the place; some mods targeted real console hardware while others were built specifically for emulators. It all culminated in a very disjointed experience for the player.

Then came the Amped Up series by mod author Litronom. It’s a massive, iterative project that brings entirely new tracks, fresh racers, and plenty of unique gameplay modes to the table. While Amped Up 3 is the latest major release, the author also drops excellent seasonal updates that provide Halloween and Christmas-themed character and course redesigns. They’ve even figured out how to make true 3D racer models work within the Mario Kart 64 engine, making the entire Amped Up series feel like a genuine, official sequel to the original game.

If you finish that and still find yourself craving more Mario Kart 64 content, I highly recommend checking out OverKart 64. It packs 24 brand-new tracks, all brilliantly riffing on classic Mario Kart concepts or other beloved Nintendo properties. It’s absolutely worth a look if you just can’t get enough of this engine!

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3. Super Mario 64: Splitscreen

Famous for being a game you could play either once or ten thousand times, Super Mario 64 has always been one of the ultimate single-player experiences on the system. However, thanks to Kaze “King of the Konsole” Emanuar’s split-screen mod, you and a buddy can now explore Peach’s Castle together. You can take things slow at the pace of Koopa the Quick, or sweat it out like speedrunners trying to absolute crush a 16-star run in 14:35!

Compared to some of the massive overhauls on this list, it might not be the fanciest hack mechanically, but sometimes you just want to experience something you already love with a friend. I recently played through Majora’s Mask 3D with my partner side by side the whole time, and it was an absolute blast—though it made me realize what a shame it is that you can’t just share the same game world. This mod actually lets you do that. You can split up objectives, pool your efforts, and always see each other’s perspective on the shared screen.

It also appears possible for creators to port the foundation of this split-screen hack into other custom Mario 64 ROM hacks, though I don’t know the exact technical ins and outs of how that works. It’s definitely worth keeping an eye on and searching around for yourself as time goes by. Given how passionate the community is, more and more cooperative projects will surely keep coming out!

4. Custom Mario Party boards made with Party Planner

Believe it or not, a web-based map editor for the Mario Party games is one of the oldest N64 modding tools I’ve come across! The workflow is straightforward: you upload a large image file, map out the paths players can take, and assign specific values to all the spaces. A lot of the best custom boards use gorgeous 3D renderings that account for perspective and verticality, perfectly matching the aesthetic of the original games. That said, you can also find plenty of interesting amateur maps alongside some genuinely clever meme boards.

If you want to dive into the community, Mario Party Legacy hosts the absolute biggest repository of custom boards available.

However, if you’d rather hop right in with a pre-made curation instead of hunting for individual files, Mario Party 3: Star Struck is a fantastic choice. Curated by Ok Impala!, Star Struck functions as a “Best Of” collection featuring six entirely distinct maps:

• Star Summit: A beautiful board based on the iconic location from Paper Mario.

• Animal Crossing: A cozy map where you get to run around a custom island.

• Paradise Isles: A faithful recreation of the board from Super Mario Party.

• Rainbow Boulevard: A vibrant stage heavily inspired by Rainbow Road.

• Towering Treetop: A clever translation of the classic Mario Party 6 level.

• TRG Land: A surprisingly high-quality meme board that is a blast to play.

5. GoldenEye X

Everyone talks about how based GoldenEye was, but it was Perfect Dark that truly perfected the FPS formula on the N64. I’m not just trying to be controversial here—mod author Wreck Seven has actually ported a massive chunk of GoldenEye directly into Perfect Dark’s engine, taking full advantage of the system’s quality-of-life upgrades. We’re talking proper reload animations, more realistic enemy behavior, a better UI, and so much more.

The multiplayer side of things is incredibly robust. It features all the classic maps from both games, plus a few brand-new arenas crafted by the mod author. The character roster is just as expansive, offering a mix of classic faces from both titles alongside original creations. You can get way more granular with the game modes and how they function, and the engine’s fantastic bot support works flawlessly here, too.

And how could I forget the co-op? Nine of the original missions have been fully updated with new areas and fresh gameplay elements. Best of all, you can bring a buddy along for the entire ride.

The project’s github can be found here: https://github.com/Jay-Day/RMG-K

Believe it or not, the developer/composer NyxTheShield was at the heart of this project! They’re no stranger to programming endeavors, having made what was basically Project M for Ultimate. While I’m certainly most interested in this project for its ability to bring a Slippi-like experience to Smash 64, everyone who plays any 64 game is going to benefit from this project as the rollback code really does, by some miracle, support the entire N64 library! I believe HLE might be the source of making this possible but don’t quote me on that.

Top level Smash 64 player Maafia released a video shortly after the projects release talking about everything this update brings with it—I’ll link it down below, highly recommend watching it. Besides the lag reduction, another big feature is fixing desync issues. The Kaillera-based netplay seemed to not address in-game RNG elements and would cause frequent desync. I guess the Gekkonet code (the backbone of N64 Rollback) goes out of its way to fix this!

At the time of writing, rollback only works on direct connect sessions, meaning there isn’t any matchmaking just yet—meaning you’ll need to send your friends a code to join your game. However, a revision to the matchmaking interface has made it so you can broadcast an ‘open game’ to anyone to anyone using the service, so like what Melee had back in the Anther’s Ladder days. Every client will also have a customizable player ID code—just like Slippi has. You can even ‘favorite’ player you come across so if they’re broadcasting their game, they’ll appear at the top of the list! It’s oldschool, yes. But it’s a HUGE leap compared to what we had before!

If you’d like to learn more about the history of rollback netcode plus how it works, I’ve written a piece here!

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In the world of online gaming, this has unfortunately been the norm for quite some time. Here in the US, I have about 20ms before my machine is talking to faster infrastructure. That means if I’m playing a game online with my next door neighbor, we’ve got 40ms of lag between us plus whatever the server generates. Not every game uses delay-based netcode—but for the action-heavy ones where things need to feel instantaneous, I’d rather just carry my setup down the street!

Smart minds have been knowing about this issue—one of the earliest developers to crack the code and simulate lagless interaction was John Carmack, the lead programmer at id Software (and one of the Masters of Doom.)

Server Authority and Prediction

For PC gamers in 1996, Quake was the most important title to release. Designed around fully 3D environments and fast-paced rocket fire, it’s campaign was considered a masterpiece. When taking the game online however, it was nearly unplayable over a standard dial-up connection. Recognizing that that world’s internet infrastructure would not improve fast enough, John Carmack re-engineered Quake’s multiplayer by introducing QuakeWorld—a host of dedicated servers running his latest invention—Client-Side Prediction and Server Reconciliation.

Instead of using delay to get two networked copies of a game running in sync, each game assumes its always in sync, showing the player their own actions the moment they input them and having the server guess at what their opponent is doing next.

This predictive model is a lot more basic than you might imagine. Here’s how it works:

If you guessed Still holding forward, you’d be thinking like Carmack’s predictive model. The game has no reason to believe you’ll be doing anything in the future that you weren’t already doing a moment ago.

Suppose the guess is wrong and the delay doesn’t know this for 50ms, or ~3 frames. Simple—it changes what the players sees to be 3 frames deep on that action’s animation (like firing a weapon) and tells the game logic to overwrite itself with this updated occurrence. To make this jump in visuals less perceptible, your game interpolates (a fancy word for ‘smooths out’) the tiny bit of audio/visual queues you might have missed. From most players perspective, this change is imperceptible.

This paradigm worked exceptionally well for first-person shooters because human movement in a 3D space is continuous and highly predictable. However, it had a major caveat: players were always looking at a slight past representation of their opponents. This is where ideas like leading your shots comes from—like Yancy told Fry, ‘you wanna fire at where they’re going to be, not where they are.’

Fighting Games & the Genesis of GGPO

Arcades where the original source of multiplayer for fighting games. Consoles had arcade-quality ports as early as the 90s with titles like Street Fighter 2—but without online support, you still had to go to the arcades to get quality practice. Then came Xbox Live and the possibility of competing at home like you would in the arcades became a real vision. Unfortunately, many of the leading fighting game developers from the home console era weren’t interested in providing this prediction netcode to their games. Thus any players trying to go online with their skills had to learn how to play around the lag.

In 2006, Capcom released a Street Fighter 2 port on Xbox Live Marketplace. It used the same ol’ delay as the other titles and fans were met with an unplayable experience. Variable latency constantly altered the timing of combos, turning a game of sharp reflexes into a sluggish guessing game.

Tony Cannon, a programmer and co-founder of the Evolution Championship Series (EVO), recognized that fighting games required a completely different approach to prediction. Unlike a shooter, a fighting game client cannot simply interpolate an opponent’s position or guess their trajectory. Every frame of an animation has unique hitboxes, iFrames, and collision states. Cannon’s solution was a peer-to-peer predictive architecture called GGPO (Good Game Peace Out), introduced in late 2006, which laid the foundation for Rollback as we know it today.

The key difference between Carmack’s model and Cannon’s model was that in a fighting game, the changes need to happen instantly. Because animations and game states are so layered and intricate, making things work required a strict division between game logic and visuals. You can’t interpolate a character into the correct position—they need to be snapped into the exact frame and moment in the game’s logic, with all the missing inputs correctly and retroactively applied.

Despite GGPO proving as early as 2007 that a match played across a continent could feel like a local arcade experience, mainstream adoption faced immense resistance for over a decade. This was particularly true among Japanese developers, who dominated the fighting game market. Living in a geographically small country with dense, low-latency fiber-optic infrastructure, developers in Japan did not feel the sting of delay-based netcode as much as the international player base.

However, the resistance was not entirely cultural; it was deeply technical. Rollback netcode can’t be dropped into an existing game, it needs complete separation between logic and visuals. If a game has thousands of unoptimized visual assets tied directly to its physics loops, attempting a rollback will cause massive performance drops, audio glitches, and visual tearing. Retrofitting a game built for delay-based infrastructure requires tearing out the foundational architecture of the software—a costly, high-risk engineering endeavor that many studios were reluctant to fund.

… then the pandemic happened.

The turning point for client-side prediction came through a combination of open-source altruism and global necessity. In October 2019, Tony Cannon made the core GGPO library open-source under the MIT license. This removed a HUGE licensing barrier, allowing indie developers and engineers worldwide to study and implement the core rollback algorithms freely.

Who would know that just a few months later, Covid would change how everyone in the world interacted—everything became online-only. The demand for robust rollback netcode shifted from a niche enthusiast talking point to a commercial necessity for multiplayer to survive.

This era witnessed extraordinary community-driven engineering feats—my favorite came in 2020. An independent developer named Jas “Fizzi” Laferriere (as well as a fantastic team of volunteer devs) introduced a custom rollback netcode infrastructure called Slippi to Super Smash Bros. Melee. When speaking publicly with Woolie Madden (a figure in the greater FGC), Fizzi revealed that majority of the work needed to implement rollback into Melee utilized existing code within the game. Melee boasted many game-changing modifiers to keep players entertained, one of which was called Lightning Mode. This modifier runs the game with a 1.25x speed, meaning the game logic needed to render more quickly than the visuals, thus providing the backbone of Rollback! Slippi proved that if a highly complex, analog-heavy game from two decades prior could be modernized, there was no longer any excuse for contemporary titles.

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Conclusion

Today, the principles of client-side prediction and rollback have achieved total victory across the landscape of competitive multiplayer games. From arcade fighting games like Street Fighter 6 and Guilty Gear Strive to physics-heavy titles like Rocket League, modern network engineering is built on the reality that the internet will never be perfectly stable.

The evolution of netcode is a testament to the power of predictive software design. By treating latency not as a barrier that forces a game to freeze, but as a statistical variable to be predicted, reconciled, and corrected in the background, engineers found a way to outrun the physical limitations of networks. Multiplayer gaming no longer requires players to wait for the world to sync; instead, our machines quietly guess the future, rewriting the past so smoothly that we never even notice the seams.

Also, I interviewed the developer SaikingS last week, go check that out too!

For starters, the combat—oh baby, the combat—is an absolute treat. It’s first-person melee, which amounts to a lot of smacking something and running away, but the constant threat of botching your timing and eating an attack means you’re always just one or two errors away from restarting an area. And this is fine! It grants the developer a lot of leeway in designing the distinct wind-ups and cool-downs of the enemies you face, as well as the unique feel of the weapons you use to strike them down.

Verho utilizes a sort of reverse stamina meter: you need to charge your attacks before they do meaningful damage. Once you release the strike, it comes out almost instantly, letting you rinse and repeat this cycle until you find a good rhythm. Fast, single-handed weapons charge in 0.5 seconds or less, leaving your off-hand free for options like shields and torches that allow for more defensive play or navigational convenience. Slower weapons take up both hands and hit noticeably harder; blocking with them is nothing compared to a real shield, but why block when you can just dance around your opponent’s threat range while charging up a few heavy strikes?

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There’s magic in this game, too—you pick up runes that let you cast various spells if your intelligence stats are high enough. Many early-game spells are straightforward projectiles, with the most useful inflicting lingering effects like Burn or Poison. Some pass through enemies entirely, while others have multiple blasts like a scattershot. By the late-game, there’s no shortage of wildly original spells. Some send ripples across the ground, damaging everything in their path, while others apply an extra layer of elemental damage to your weapon. My personal favorite summoned a floating sword to follow me around and strike any enemy I engaged. There is an immense amount of customization here for whatever kind of magic user you want to be, and I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of all the options.

Rings also play a role, though they mostly provide passive buffs to specific values you care about—health, mana, damage, defense, certain attack types, and various resistances. I didn’t find any that introduced entirely new gameplay elements (like turning me into a dragon or something), but I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re hidden away somewhere out there. Consumables serve a similar, value-targeted purpose. While you do get options like throwing knives and fire bombs, I don’t especially enjoy grinding for finite items—especially not when magic is as accessible as it is here.

Exploring the map was incredible. It reminded me of Dark Souls II the most, in the sense that there are a handful of distinct paths available right from the beginning, some leading to key items and others to entirely new regions. Every so often you’ll hit a grand scenery change where you’re clearly stepping into a new ecosystem. I loved these moments—new terrain, new enemies, and the potential for new gear. Midway through, I started getting a distinct Metroid Prime vibe. You know that specific feeling when you push through a grueling, difficult segment and are suddenly greeted with a massive, expansive new zone to explore?

Speaking of environments and enemies—the art direction this game utilizes is just gorgeous. You can tell the artists were comfortable working in this clearly hand-made polygonal look. The animations, the textures, and the sheer layout of the levels are soaked in this “early 3D was rad as hell” ethos, making everything from ponds and bridges to fountains and caves completely readable without needing the satin veil of nostalgia to excuse how it looks. It’s so... punk? Like the developers are shouting, ‘I don’t care what you think of my ideas, I just NEED to get them out into the world!’

Okay, think I want to pause here. Check out my video where I show off how to get the Karath Tablet!

There is a specific genre of 3D platformer that takes players to much darker, more dangerous locales than the Mushroom Kingdom. They remind me of those brilliant sections in Half-Life 2 where it feels like you’re breaking out of the map, only to spot a barnacle hanging just ahead and realize the entire thing was a beautifully curated set piece. I first discovered this subgenre through Lorn’s Lure, and reading developer interviews eventually led me to NaissanceE. Then White Knuckle came out (which I still haven’t played), and it hit me: there’s a whole world of these atmospheric games out there, even if I don’t quite know what to call them.

Idols of Ash fits this description perfectly, and in a fantastic way. In fact, it introduces a mechanic to the genre that I haven’t seen executed meaningfully before. Move over, Breath of the Wild glider—here, we’ve got a hook and a rope that allow us to descend cliffs in a deeply unnerving manner.

The premise is simple: you must make your way to the bottom of a cave in hopes of... finding someone (go play the game if you want to know more, it’s only $3). Periodically during your descent, you’ll come across urns that “breathe life” into you, serving as checkpoints for when you inevitably plummet toward your demise. If you fall and survive, hooray! A portion of your health bar will deplete, but you can refill the meter by collecting wisps of life floating above the corpses of previous climbers. It’s not a gory game; the bodies are artfully depicted as humanoid shapes wrapped in some kind of cloth. Hmm, I wonder what that’s about…

We aren’t the only living things in this cave, however. You’ll only catch glimpses of it from time to time, but when you do, you’d better descend faster than you ever have before. I won’t spoil the mystery in writing, but you might catch a few hints of it in my successful Nightmare Mode run linked below. (Spoiler: Nightmare Mode requires you to beat the entire game in a single life—and you may or may not unlock more maps upon completion, but who’s to say?)

The longer you play, the more tech reveals itself—creative ways to interact with the game mechanics that open up entirely new options for climbing. I even invented a move myself, which I call ‘The Crazy Man.’ It’s when you cut your rope and, instead of landing safely on a surface, you hook onto something nearby mid-air to keep descending. It’s incredibly useful for those moments when your partner is watching you play and you want them to tense up and gasp.

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The Setup

Fast forward to May 9th, where the Colorado Melee scene hosted Altitude Sickness 3. With 235 entrants and a Melee bracket so densely packed with talent it earned the weight of being called a National, the atmosphere was already electric. While Junebug was brought in for their exceptional commentary, their unique position as a top-level DK specialist provided a rare opportunity: a high-stakes show match against the state’s most talked-about rising star. What followed was arguably the most high-profile Donkey Kong ditto the scene has ever witnessed.

If you haven’t watched the VOD yet, I strongly suggest you do so before reading further—you can find the link below. Consider this your final warning: spoilers ahead.

The Reality of the Throne

The most convenient narrative for this set would be a simple coronation: the winner claims the title of “Best DK in the World.” It’s the classic underdog story of the new blood challenging the old guard, especially with Junebug stepping away from his active competitive status. However, framing the match this way ignores the logistical reality of the rankings. Unless Junebug remains active or Dial M surpasses June’s 19th-place rank on the 2025 MPGR, a single show match can’t objectively settle the “Best in the World” debate.

Beyond the rankings, the nature of the Donkey Kong ditto complicates the “Best DK” claim. The matchup occurs so rarely at the top level that a player can be the best in the world against the rest of the cast without ever mastering the intricacies of the mirror match. Their true value as players is best showcased when they are squaring off against the high tiers, not necessarily each other.

The discrepancy in their playstyles further muddies the waters. They represent two opposite ends of the DK spectrum: Junebug plays a reserved, clinical Kong - reminiscent of Wizzrobe’s methodical Captain Falcon - while Dial M favors an explosive, high-risk approach. Much like “S2J” Johnny Kim, Dial M prioritizes speed and raw threat, forcing opponents to respect heavy-hitting options or risk being sent offstage early. Because one style might naturally counter the other in a vacuum, the set becomes less a definitive ranking and more a specific study in how these two philosophies collide.

The Architecture of a Champion

Dial M may have the faster hands, but Junebug’s win illustrates the difference between technical skill and set management. Winning a First to Five requires more than just high-damage sequences; it requires the stamina to dismantle an opponent's confidence game by game. By the end of the set, it wasn't just about who played DK better, but who understood the player across from them more deeply.

This depth of understanding was echoed in the post-game interview, where Junebug compared Dial M’s trajectory to the relentless growth mindset of a player like Zain. Junebug’s prediction - that Dial M is on a path toward the Top 20 or even Top 10 - reframes the loss not as a failure, but as a necessary step in an evolution for Dial M that is only just beginning.

Perhaps the most staggering realization is that Dial M is doing all of this at just 14 years old. Junebug has been honing his craft at in-person events longer than Dial M has been alive, yet the young phenom is already meeting that veteran standard head-on. In the end, adaptation and the willingness to grow will always champion a single moment of raw ability. Dial M may not have walked away with the set, but by proving he could push a legend to his limits, he achieved a feat grander than any “Best in Class” title could ever confer.

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Leave it to the PCGamingWiki community to "compile" a definitive directory of restoration projects for classic games. Many of these feature unofficial PC ports - just look for Playable or Complete written in the status column.

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_unofficial_ports

A few that leap out at me:

• Silent Hill: The Arcade - Believe it or not, this light-gun arcade game actually has a real story! A group of kids traveling to Silent Hill to investigate occult claims gets mixed up in the town’s supernatural happenings. It looks like it takes about an hour to finish and supports co-op play as well.

• Half-Life: Decay - This was the "secret" third expansion originally exclusive to the PS2 version of the game. It’s another co-op title, and while there are several ways to run it on modern hardware, the mod by user $am_I_Am seems to be the community favorite.

• Lego Island - Oh, how I miss this one! I ran into a bug as a kid that blocked my progress, and since it’s a PC title from 1997, getting original copies to run on modern systems isn’t something I’ve thought too hard about. It’s rad to see that those accessibility hurdles may have finally been cleared.

• Skate 2 - This is the wildcard pick I didn’t know I needed until now. With the Xenia emulator gaining traction, a project emerged using recompilation tools inspired by the N64 recompilation scene. The team forked those tools, and while their GitHub hasn't seen public movement in about a year, I’m hoping that just means they’re heads-down in private development. I’d love to see the original Skate games playable on PC without an emulation layer—also, is anyone still playing Skate 4?

• Mega Man 64 - This was what actually prompted me to write this article! Being a port of Mega Man Legends, a beloved PS1 title - the 64 version arguably ran smoother but had more rougher edges thanks to limited cartridge space. The PC port fixes all that by keeping all the improvements like better render distance and native analog support while allowing for mods to re-implement the PS1 pixel art textures and audio!

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We’ve entered a land slide era of decomp/recomp projects, the latest being arguably one of the biggest yet - Twilight Princess on the Gamecube! Decompilation for this game actually wrapped up in late 2025 and shortly after a few different teams began porting it to PC. On May 9th, the Twilight Realm team successfully launched Dusklight - the v1.0 released candidate that decompiles your copy of Twilight Princess into something your PC can natively run.

The Twilit Realm Github can be found here: https://github.com/TwilitRealm/dusk

At the time of writing, v1.1.1 is the latest release and it’s arguably a huge one! A few that I’m going to use as soon as I boot up the game next are…

• Custom keybings for Turbo (use to be Tab exclusive)

• D-Pad menu navigation

What does Dusklight do?

• Lots of video options - internal resolution scaling, higher frame rates, and modern resolutions support - including 16:10 for Steamdeck and 21:9 for ultrawide.

• Quality of Life enhancements - faster saving, faster climbing, better lighting

• Customizable controls - gyro aiming, lots of sliders and button remapping, native support for GCCs

• Classic Mode - For if you want it to feel just like it did on the Gamecube. 4:3 aspect ratio, 30fps lock and 2000s era lighting effects

I was playing last night on my OG Rog Ally and was amazed to see the game running at 120fps, 1080p with a TDP as low what Celeste uses. I think this means they did an EXCELLENT job of porting the decomp. They didn’t rush this one out.

My comment I read - someone on Reddit asked what the lowest spec device that could run this might be. Top comment was the Gamecube.

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First off, congrats on launching! I love your game so much. I can’t imagine how much effort it took. It’s officially been out for six months now, how does it feel?

I feel really good! Before release, we had written out what theoretical Worst, Mid and Best scenarios post-launch could be. So far we are in the middle of Mid and Best so I’m really happy about that! It’s also amazing seeing people playing the game and giving their thoughts and feedback.

Kasur Games, the studio listed as Verho’s developer, has released more than just your game. How did your project get picked by them and grow into a team of people?

I think of myself as the leader of the Verho team within Kasur Games. The studio founder and CEO, Tomasz Rusak, actually reached out about funding after the first year of development. That’s how Verho officially became a Kasur Games project.

When it comes to my team, I did start off as a solo dev. Soon after work began, I invited Valentino Cervini onto the project to do musical composition. We’re good friends and have done lots of other projects together - most of which can be found on my Itch.io account. Not long after that, I met Angelo “Grave” Petrilli on the King’s Field subreddit. We talked and he offered to handle sound design, thus joining the team! Close to the end of development, my friend Łukasz “Kaku” Fetliński joined. He helped with modeling some weapons and environmental assets so I could focus on polishing the final product.

Is King’s Field-like an okay term for describing your game? How do you feel about games adopting that sort of a description?

I’ve been calling this style of game King’s Field-like before I heard other people calling them that, so I like it! I think it’s a cool term even though these days a lot of people have switched to calling them Field-likes. Overall, it’s difficult to perfectly describe this genre of game, similar to Rogue-likes and Souls-likes. Everyone has a different definition of what these games truly are so it will probably stay this way. Who knows, maybe in a few years someone will come up with a more exact definition for King’s Field-likes and we’ll start saying that.

I bought my copy in a Steam bundle that included Monomyth. Now I see you can grab a copy along with Fly Knight and several others! Is there a secret King’s Field Kabal? Or is this just an amazing time to be a fan?

Most of that’s from devs I befriended while making Verho. We’re in an era of King’s Field-likes and will probably see more in the next 2-3 years. The question is how long people will be interested in them - I hope for a long time because I’ve always loved playing them!

I was getting shades of the Shadow Temple from OoT in one of your game’s areas. As well as navigating the sands of Gerudo Valley! Would you mind revealing some of your undying inspirations?

Fromsoft and Zelda were some of the biggest for sure. Another strong one is the Gothic series, especially the first 2 games. Lunacid by Akuma Kira felt huge, as did the King’s Field games themselves! I’ve played all of them including both Shadow Towers and Eternal Ring. I want to grasp the essence of those games so I can make things fans of them will enjoy.

Yariv (the setting of Verho) is a place with so much history. Entire generations have passed and shaped its structure. Everything about it felt so three dimensional and alive! Truly amazing work - have you always been a world builder?

I just like making stories and universes. I have three to four big ones that I’ve written but never used. Maybe one day!

The first thing I conceptualized about the Verho universe was the Curse of Faces [a curse that forces residents of Yariv always hide their face, lest they catch a glance of someone else’s face and die instantly.] Then I just kept building on the gaps and plot holes. There’s actually even more lore to the world than what’s shown in-game Some of it you can see in “Verho - Curse of Faces - Behind The Mask”, a lore series on YouTube we made with CobraTekku Games, our publisher. Some will be shown in expansion and future games. I have big plans for that world, but time will tell how I will be able to show it to everyone.

Every location is so unique, undoubtedly hand crafted with love. I imagine most fans could see a screenshot of a random wall or corner of a structure and be able to pinpoint exactly where on the map that is. I’m dumbfounded - how did you pull this off?

That’s funny! But a lot of Verho’s uniqueness is the product of me being kind of a bad 3D artist. I had never done modelling before so I just started making assets. I learned Blender for Verho. The more I did it, the better I became! A lot of cool things were actually the effect of me struggling to make something else. I’d need to pivot and would sometimes just let my imagination go wild!

When it comes to the process, usually I draw a map of the area first, then start modeling. A negative side effect of that is that many of my maps turn out flat, something I’m kind of regretting and wish to fix on future projects.

There are a staggering amount of weapons and runes. Player customization is extensive, just about every play style seems viable and enemies just keep getting harder and harder. What was balancing all this like?

Hmm, that’s a hard question. First of all, I believe I’ve finished the game with every build possible. I’ve run through it at least 15 times, including using a level one build. Second, I have a lot of spreadsheets. Stats, simulations, what the average experience level, health, mana and even damage per second should be in a given area. The final thing is player feedback. Even after steps one and two, there are always elements that feel too weak or strong, so I’m always listening to what players are telling me!

The Omens were an enemy who stuck with me - the flying skeletons who teleport around the player and attack with moves that require 360-degrees of awareness. How you ended up on this design? They’re really satisfying to fight!

It started with their concept art. When modelling, I decided to switch their skull heads for masks and made abilities based around each one. Foggy Borrows is also a pretty empty area so I was able to have enemies that can teleport and go through long distances.

I felt a little overpowered late game, using a three-hit combo that swung for 1500 per ‘turn’. Have you crushing builds from people in your community?

Yeah, I’ve seen a lot of busted builds. I think it’s part of the fun , being a little overpowered in the late game! Especially if you explore a lot, do all the game’s content. It’s a part of the Field-like identity.

I imagine releasing Verho and living to tell the tale feels like sitting on top of a mountain, your perspective is more all-seeing than anyone could imagine. With your newly earned insight on life, do you wish to continue making games? Any plans for your future?

I wouldn’t say I’m sitting at the top of a mountain. If so, then I can see MUCH bigger mountains around me! Kira having made Lunacid, Deep Denizens working on Hark the Ghoul, Freshly Baked Games making Queens Domain. So many others! I aspire to keep making better games until I’m on their level.

For the soon-to-be projects, it’s not a secret that I’m working on Verho DLC. I hope to release that later this year! I’m also releasing Bonehold in July, that is my side project [being co-developed with Bloodcorvus, a dev who worked on the game Blood West]. After the Verho DLC, I would love to make the next Verho game - if it will be possible!

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Once again, I owe a huge THANK YOU to SaikingS for indulging my curiosity with this interview! I can’t say enough good about the game he put together - go buy it and play it on Steam right now, if you haven’t already!