Personal gaming mini-blog

Retroid Pocket Nova is a relatively new emulation handheld that quickly got itself a cult following in the community. It’s a seemingly contradictory device with quite some compromises, but it works really well if you know what you’re buying.

Nova combines:

• a 4:3 OLED screen perfect for older games (up to the PS2 era)
• a dpad-focused control scheme perfect for even older games
• enough raw power to play anything you throw at it from the appropriate era and then some
• enough power still left to enable almost any shaders on top of the game
• the best controls on the market that I’m aware of
• a small and lightweight form factor (255 g)
• a plastic front, contrasting the common full-glass front (some may like it, I don’t)

The chipset powering it (Snapdragon 8 Gen 2) is very well known, so I won’t bother retracing what others already described countless times. I’ll focus on my own experience with the device instead.

For quite a while I’ve been following the topic of emulation handhelds (or “retro handhelds” if you prefer). When I was considering a switch to a new device, often there were some questions I couldn’t find clear answers for in the whole Internet. As they say: “be the change you want to see”, so let’s get started with some of my subjective experiences.

If you have no slightest idea what this post is about, this might be a good place to start: https://retrocatalog.com/

First let’s get it out of the way: this is not a fully serious post, although not completely untrue either. This post is also considered work-in-progress, probably with more entries to come.

This is a non-exhaustive list of terms whose widely established semantics I am willing to question and discuss until the heat death of the universe, along with explanations why.

A few months ago I replaced my trusty Xbox One BT gamepad with a new one, made by 8BitDo. I’ve had no prior experience with this company, but from what I gather they specialize in reasonably priced retro-styled gaming controllers and are quite highly regarded in some communities.

This is my personal list of the most notable/memorable games I’ve played in the last few years (not necessarily released then!). Separated into categories that matter to me, games sorted alphabetically. Most of them perfectly playable on GNU/Linux.

A solid clone of the modern XCOM games with a few twists making it fresh.

A great take on the “murder mystery” concept taking action on a ghost ship.

The whole game boils down to deducing two things:

• The identity of each character.
• The way they died.