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Niece Leyla Hasso bags the women's world title, too

UK Super Mario Kart champ Sami Cetin has regained the PAL version Time Trial World Title for the second time. Sami previously held the title from September 1998 until April 2004, and beat one of the World Records set by former title holder Karel van Duijvenboden of the Netherlands on Sunday, March...

Fire Emblem's old rival deserves a second chance

As you dig yourself into Fire Emblem: Awakening’s monstrously addictive campaign, spare a thought for some of the other turn-based strategy RPGs which haven’t been given the chance to impress an entirely fresh generation of players. Like Langrisser, for example. Chances are, unless you really...

Three free tracks, album on the way

Last summer we directed you to a music track from rapper Richie Branson, called Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, which combined rap with enough game references to satisfy almost anyone. He's now returning with a new album that's focused on SNES classic Chrono Trigger, and to celebrate the 18th Anniversary since its...

Worldwide shipping is available

While Capcom may be showing little love for its iconic Mega Man franchise, fans and those inspired by the games continually do so in the developer's place. One example is the Mega Man Boss Battle exhibition currently running at the Gauntlet Gallery in San Francisco, a showing open until 31st March. It features a...

Console modification with the human touch

Although it's always exciting to open up the latest and greatest consoles and get to grips with the incredible advances being made by hardware manufacturers, there's something about vintage systems which makes them appealing long after they fall out of fashion and become technologically obsolete. Your...

Role reversal

Remember the story of Mike Hoye and his daughter Maya? He didn't want her to have to play The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker from a male perspective, so he hacked the game to make Link a "she". YouTube user Mike Mika has performed a similar trick, this time making the hero of Donkey K

The genesis of Sega's superstardom

It's fitting that the first non-Nintendo entry in our Hardware Classics series should be the Sega Mega Drive. This sleek 16-bit powerhouse remains Sega's most commercially successful console, having shifted around 40 million units globally. Famous for being the first console to challenge Nintendo's dominance in...

Down on the farm

Hollywood reboots are pretty tiresome these days — it would appear that film-makers have run out of new ideas entirely. Still, every cloud has a silver lining, because the loathsome trend of pilfering ideas from the past has inspired the YouTube series Gritty Reboots, which parodies the process but uses video games for its...

$10,000 funding goal in place

A Kickstarter campaign has been launched to produce a Super 4-in-1 cartridge for the SNES. The cart will contain four homebrew titles: Mazezam, UWOL: Quest for Money, Skipp and Friends Unexpected Journey and N- WARP Daisakusen. The creators are looking to secure $10,000 to fund the project. At the time of writing, they...

Arcade version discovered by hackers

If you're one of the thousands of people that still despairs that the arcade version of F-Zero GX — cunningly titled F-Zero AX — was really hard to find in its heyday, and has since all but died out, we've got some good news for you. The intrepid folks over at The Cutting Room Floor have found that the...

Everything but the kitchen sink

Hyperkin has been producing hardware clones for a few years now — clones which provide a decent alternative for those moments when your trusty SNES dies on you and you can't abide the feeling of buying a second-hand replacement. We've already covered the RetroN 3 and SupaBoy Portable on this site, and found them to...

Oh, the sweet beats

We may be called Nintendo Life, but ever since the Wii Virtual Console came into being it's given us a viable excuse to talk about a lot of other systems, including Nintendo'a arch-nemesis of the early-mid '90s, the SEGA Mega Drive / Genesis. Which is no bad thing, the games industry, past and present, is about a lot more than...

Another arrangement from the Synthetic Orchestra

While many enthusiasts and talented musicians create terrific remixes or orchestrations of popular game soundtracks, not all are as prolific or well-regarded as the Synthetic Orchestra. The creation of Blake Robinson, the studio is his project to take well known themes from various sources — many...

Still super after all these years

To many, it's the greatest video game console ever made. The Super Famicom — or Super Nintendo Entertainment System as it is more commonly known outside of its native Japan — is host to some of the finest pieces of interactive entertainment ever made. It was on this console that Nintendo refined so many of the...

ROM City Rampage is a blast from the past

Out today in North America and Europe, Retro City Rampage is, as the title suggests, a WiiWare release that aims to remind us of gaming's older days. Inspired by the original GTA, it includes a host of jokes, references and areas designed to bring to mind pop culture of the '80s and '90s. Also included...

Proximity mines always win

It's actually quite scary to think how many collective man hours the team at Nintendo Life has spent playing multiplayer on GoldenEye 007. During our formative years, this highly esteemed cartridge rarely left the console and any person that didn't own a copy and four controllers was shunned as something of an outcast...

The lengths we go to

If you want to play a bit of multiplayer in most games nowadays, and you don't have a friend nearby, it's as easy as selecting a menu and waiting for strangers to appear as competition. Online multiplayer can perhaps be a bit more personal than that, of course, with the ability to meet up with friends and have a blast, as we...

This is how you redesign a console

Let's be brutally honest here — the original DS design was ugly. Quite what Nintendo's designers were thinking when they came up with it we'll never know, but the dumpy, two-tone casing hardly got pulses racing, even back in 2004. It felt like a system that was rushed out of the door purely to meet a deadline,...

Give the dog a bone

The Nintendo Entertainment System — or NES, for short — is arguably the console on which Nintendo's current lofty status was built. Launched in Japan as the Famicom, the 8-bit platform is home to an almost endless list of solid-gold classics, including Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, Metroid,

Are you ready?

During the arcade boom of the early 1980s, Donkey Kong was doing great business for Nintendo. To capitalise on this popularity, miniature versions of the arcade game were released. First, there was Coleco’s Donkey Kong tabletop, followed by Nintendo’s Game & Watch Multi Screen version. We decided to pit these ‘portable’...

Looking for co-op partners

Last year we brought you a collection of dating profiles we happened to find online, which belonged to some of our favourite video game heroes! You wouldn't expect lightning to strike twice, but since it's Valentine's Day and miracles do happen, we thought we'd spend some more time combing through the darkest recesses...

How different things could have been

A former Microsoft executive has revealed that the company was considering buying Japanese video game veteran Sega before it decided to create the Xbox console. Speaking to IGN, Joachim Kempin said: There were three companies at that point in time, I think this was , Sega and Nintendo. There was always talk...

Monochrome masterpiece

The Nintendo DS may be the biggest selling handheld console of all time, but you could argue that this is only the case because of the vital groundwork laid down by the Game Boy. The original monochrome brick was pushed onto the market in 1989 in the wake of Nintendo's popular Game & Watch range, and would go on to sell...

The Triforce is strong in this one

Nintendo's Game Boy Advance is one of the company's most beloved handhelds. It had a hard act to follow, coming after the blockbuster successes of the original monochrome Game Boy and the Game Boy Color, but it managed to shift almost 90 million units globally. However, in typical Nintendo fashion, it took a...