The developers of NG:Dev.Team have particular tastes. Making a macho running-and-gunning game in the

By Caroline Siede
By Todd VanDerWerff , Phil Dyess-Nugent , Brandon Nowalk & Sonia Saraiya
1. DUX , Sega Dreamcast (2009)
Somewhere at this moment, someone is forming a sentimental relationship with technology. They’re rustoleum cabinet transformations pawing at an iPad Air or listening to the complete King Crimson discography through Google Music on their Nexus phone and thinking it won’t ever get better than this. But in 20 years or less, those tools will be as hopelessly antiquated as an atlatl in the age of bows. Some people just don’t want to let go, though, and rather than crave the technology’s pure functionality, they savor its eccentricities. 
Why make games for the Sega Dreamcast in 2013, 12 years after the console was discontinued and replaced by more advanced machinery? Because nothing else feels quite like a Dreamcast game. You can mimic the Dreamcast by rigging a software emulator to play its games on your PC—or simply by recreating their distinct brand of weirdness on another platform—but for some people, nothing but the original will suffice. Martin Konrad and Rene Hellwig made DUX for the Dreamcast in 2009. It’s a traditional rustoleum cabinet transformations space shooter—your rustoleum cabinet transformations tiny ship slowly flies from left to right shooting down other spaceships. It’s not just built to play on the Dreamcast, it’s also built to evoke the system’s physical appearance. It does so superficially, with its whitewashed sci-fi corridors rustoleum cabinet transformations and your red triangular spaceship—both prominently featured in the Dreamcast’s design—and on a more subtle level with its minimalist, modern spin on classic design.
The developers of NG:Dev.Team have particular tastes. Making a macho running-and-gunning game in the vein of Contra isn’t enough for the German studio. Instead, the creators of Gunlord  aspired to make a game that felt like the old German shooters of the 1980s and early ’90s—like Factor 5’s largely forgotten Amiga game Turrican , itself rustoleum cabinet transformations a slice of Contra fallout. And so the developer made Gunlord , a game whose layout is as anachronistic as its title. (If it were meant to ape modern games, it would be called Gunlord: Origins Retribution Ascension .) The titular lord of firearms runs around multi-tiered fantasy landscapes (which look as if they were plucked from the side of a metalhead’s conversion van) and blows up robot monster hybrids. Gunlord can be played on Dreamcast, but its more fitting home is the Neo Geo, which was best known for lavishly animated two-dimensional games like this one. NG:Dev.Team went to great lenths to replicate the Neo Geo experience as well. Gunlord is available as a cartridge for Neo Geo arcade cabinets and as a wildly expensive cartridge for the Neo Geo AES home console.
As time marches on, the SNES dominates popular consciousness when it comes to classic role-playing games (it’s always “ Final Fantasy VI this,” and “ rustoleum cabinet transformations Crono Trigger that”), rustoleum cabinet transformations but the Sega Genesis had an earthy quality that made its fantasies something special as well. Games like Shining Force and Landstalker looked dirty—adventures rustoleum cabinet transformations out in the woods that appeared to be practically made out of wood. Pier Solar And The Great Architects by game studio WaterMelon nailed that Genesis RPG style. It’s rife with the same dark color and harsh sounds Genesis game’s are known for, as well as the brutal difficulty of its signature rustoleum cabinet transformations Phantasy Star RPGs. Three young botanists rustoleum cabinet transformations set out on an adventure to find a magic herb and save one of their dads, and they get in lots of random turn-based fights along the way. The team even obsessively rustoleum cabinet transformations recreated Genesis packaging for the game’s release.  “If we want a Genesis game to feel authentic, it has to come with a packaging equal or better than what we use to get back then,” Tulio Adriano Cardoso Goncalves, Pier Solar ’s designer, told Polygon . That’s commitment.
The Atari 2600 endures not because its games were especially good, but because it was the first home gaming machine to offer a variety of games beyond virtual ping pong. Pitfall and Adventure are foundational texts, but they’re not exactly readable at this point. Atari 2600 games are aesthetically abrasive, which makes it hilarious when developers who are still tinkering with the hardware remake modern blockbusters, like a devolved interpretation of Halo  that has been reduced to squawking essentials. Will Nicholes’ Duck Attack! , however, is an oddity. It’s a wholly modern 2600 game that’s actually fun and as awesomely weird as old 2600 games like Frankenstein’s Monster . Rather than control a duck, you’re in control of a robot who invades a mad scientist’s lab and tries to destroy his army of fire-breathing, nuclear-egg-laying mallards. Both the ducks and the robot are crafted with an impressive amount of detail