"NOA COPY 2.23.87" has been released online. Video Game History Foundation founder Frank Cifaldi has released the ROM data for a prototype version of the original Legend of Zelda on the NES, triggering speculation that it could contain significant differences from the final retail version. Photos of the yellow cart – labelled "NOA COPY 2.23.87" – have been seen online for a whole, but Cifaldi has made its contents public, and people have already begun identifying differences in the code. Read the full article on timeextension.com ..read more

More information to come in the next few days. The publisher PixelHeart seems to be gearing up to make an announcement about its upcoming Ghost 'n Goblins-esque title Gladmort, putting out a video today asking for the community's help to take the Neo Geo game even further and promising more news shortly. Gladmort, in case you've never heard of it, is a promising run 'n gunner that is scheduled to come to the Neo Geo MVS, Neo Geo AES, and Neo Geo-CD in 2024, and is being developed by Chips on Steroids — who previously made Neotris. Read the full article on timeextension.com ..read more

"Even when I was in school, I would go off for hours at a time and write pop songs". The following article originally appeared on the website Fanbyte back in 2020 but has since been removed as part of an SEO cull. Given its one of the only interviews we're aware of with the composer Jim Andron about his work on Tetris CD-i and considering is not available elsewhere through Wayback Machine, we've decided to republish it here with some minor edits so that people can learn about how the remarkable soundtrack came to be. The video game composer Jim Andron isn’t the easiest person in the world to c ..read more

It's time to own up. Region locking is effectively a thing of the past today, but back in the '90s, it was a very real headache for those of us who wanted to occasionally dabble in the world of grey imports. Companies like Nintendo, Sega and Sony employed regional lock-out systems to prevent software from one territory being played on a console from a different territory, resulting in a host of aftermarket options for overcoming this limitation – including expensive and often complex converter cartridges. Read the full article on timeextension.com ..read more

Albeit unofficially... Ocean Software's video game adaptation of Waterworld for the SNES may not have been the most well-reviewed title of all time, but its soundtrack from Dean Evans almost always comes up in conversations whenever anyone mentions bad games with incredible music. Evans, who is also known for his remarkable soundtracks for The Flinstones (SNES), Jurassic Park (Amiga), Jurassic Park 2: The Chaos Continues (SNES), really hit it out of the park with the music for the game, creating a series of atmospheric, electronic soundscapes that we constantly find ourselves revisiting. Read ..read more

No, we didn't, either. Every now and then, we cover some non-video game-related news here on Time Extension purely because we can't resist – and today is one of those days. Thanks to a new video by Stuart Millard, we're now up to speed on the failed UK game show Scavengers, which was given a prime-time slot on Saturday evenings back in July 1994. Read the full article on timeextension.com ..read more

The free fan game took "thousands of hours of work". We're constantly amazed by the creativity and hard work of the Sonic community and the recent release of Dr Robotnik's Ring Racers is no exception to this. The free fan game, which was remarkably built using the Doom source port Doom Legacy, was released online yesterday (April 24th) across Windows and MacOS, with flatpaks for Steam Deck and Linux support also apparently coming in the future. It is a brand new kart racer representing "thousands of hours of work". and was built by a dedicated team of developers at Kart Krew, along with countl ..read more

A three-pronged attack. We've seen some pretty awesome community-made mods in recent years, such as a rare PS1 controller that can play PS1 games, a Wii console that's about the size of a pack of cards and even a NES cartridge that can play itself – but this latest invention from modder MaSaKee really has our pulse racing. The modder has taken a broken N64 controller and given it a new purpose: playing Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance games. We're talking physical carts here, too – this pad contains a fully-functional GBA console, and isn't based on emulation. Read the full articl ..read more

Was first included in Gradius back in 1986. Today is April 25th, which marks the 38th anniversary of the release of Gradius on the Nintendo Famicom in Japan – which also means that the Konami code hidden within the game turns 38 today, too. The world's most famous cheat code was added to the game by the late Kazuhisa Hashimoto after he found it was too difficult to play through during testing. Tapping in up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A and Start gives you a full selection of power-ups, making things a lot easier. Read the full article on timeextension.com ..read more

King of the ring. Capcom and SNK went toe-to-toe during much of the '90s, each trying to outperform the other in the realm of one-on-one brawlers. While the former found global fame via its Street Fighter series, the latter hit back in 1994 with The King of Fighters, a team-based and deeply technical rival which, at one point, was comfortably the most popular example of the genre in Japanese arcades. Read the full article on timeextension.com ..read more