Gratis Homebrew games zijn altijd lekker, helemaal als ze gebaseerd zijn op een bestaand concept als Arkanoid die weer een kloon was van Atari's Breakout. Johan Fischbach heeft nu zijn ROM versie van Retroid vrij gegeven en deze game kan je hier downloaden en spelen op originele Nintendo GameBoy via een flashcard of via emulator. Dus checken, want het speelt erg lekker weg.

Well, Retroid is not intended to be anything new. As the title indicates, it is really very retro in every sense. You will recognize all the ideas from other games and the soundtrack is based on popular tunes. The challenge in creating Retroid was not a creative but a technical one: Trying to find out whether a Game Boy game that meets the standards of commercially released titles from the late 1980s or early 1990s could be developed by a single person - a person, I might emphasize, who has nothing to do with computers professionally and knew nothing at all about "C" in the beginning (except that it is the third letter in the Latin alphabet).

The ideas in Retroid may all be "borrowed" - but none of the code is. Technically speaking, you are playing a new game that was developed from scratch, using only a few very basic development tools. You will find many "Game Boy-themed" games on the internet and some of these are quite impressive. But most of them actually are PC games that only look like Game Boy games. Unlike these, Retroid works on the real hardware.