Changelog
What's new
An overview of what has been added to RetroWeb and what got fixed. Newest first.
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The site came alive — the screen powers on like an old TV
- Feature The home page now behaves like a television screen: on load the picture unfolds from a thin band, the corners are shaded like a tube, the heading glows softly and every so often its tracking slips. The counters run up from zero and the wall of box art behind the text drifts slowly.
- Feature On wide displays a position indicator appeared on the right — the percentage of the page you have covered and a dot for each section. Hover shows its name, a click takes you there.
- Content Seven hundred games gained an opening line for the listings and a hundred and twenty articles a closing “Why play”. Another two hundred games got box art.
- Platforms The hardware section grew from three handhelds to twenty-eight — the whole Anbernic RG35XX and RG40XX line, Miyoo, Retroid Pocket, AYN Odin 2, Powkiddy and TrimUI. The Java ME and browser-games platforms got a photo as well.
- Fix Signing in was broken for a while because the database had gone to sleep through inactivity. It is running again, and an automatic check now wakes it every three days so this does not recur. If the server still fails to answer, the page says so plainly instead of showing a technical error.
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A search results page
- Feature Search now has its own page. The header suggestions show twelve rows, but a query like “mario” matches more than a hundred — press Enter and you can go through all of them at leisure.
- Fix Search suggestions found nothing at all in English, German and French. They were loading the index from an address that does not exist for the language versions, and failed silently.
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One-click sign-in and smarter search
- Feature Signing in takes one step less: instead of typing a six-digit code, you get a link in your e-mail and just tap it.
- Fix Search now copes with looser matches. It used to need one exact contiguous phrase, so “zelda ocarina” found nothing — “The Legend of” sits between those words. Words can now come in any order, and a typo still works: “residnt evil” finds Resident Evil.
- Games Call of Duty was only half-covered: entries like Finest Hour, Big Red One, Infinite Warfare and Vanguard were missing, and the ones present lacked platforms — Ghosts had one instead of six. The series now has 32 titles. Games missing from other franchises were added too: Path of Exile, Hades II, Legend of Grimrock, Metro: Last Light and the original 1980 Rogue.
- Content 238 of 240 series now have a write-up — including S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Metro, which were not tracked as series at all. On a series page you can jump straight from the intro to the list of entries.
- Images In-game screenshots are now also stored at a high resolution, so they no longer look blurry when enlarged. This covers newly added images for now; the rest of the catalogue will follow.
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Images for a thousand games and richer series
- Images Almost two thousand new images across more than a thousand games. Games with no image at all dropped from 482 to 343. The Microsoft Store was added as a source — it covers games Steam does not carry, so Minecraft and Halo 3: ODST on Xbox 360 finally have pictures.
- Content Series write-ups are longer, and their length now follows how big the franchise is: a series with dozens of entries across generations gets four to five paragraphs, a two-game series stays brief. 183 of 238 series now have a write-up.
- Games Eighty-three new game series — Advance Wars, Armored Core, Banjo-Kazooie, Batman: Arkham, Colin McRae Rally and more. The site now tracks 238 of them.
- Feature Series pages now jump straight from the intro to the list of entries, just like platform pages do.
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Over six thousand games and richer galleries
- Games One hundred and seventy-seven games across seven platforms — Amiga, SNES, Mega Drive, Atari 800, GameCube, Xbox One and newer arcades. The catalogue has passed six thousand titles.
- Images Game galleries no longer show the same picture twice — two and a half thousand such copies are gone. At the same time a hundred and seventy-three games gained an extra image, and cover matching on Wikipedia stopped confusing entries in a series and serving logos instead of covers.
- Content Six hundred and twenty-eight games gained a developer credit and another twenty-six a release year. Nineteen games had a fragment from old source notes instead of an opening line, and seven articles were shorter than they should be.
- Feature Platform pages now jump straight from the contents to the “Where to start” picks and to the games list. The platform write-up tends to be long, and anyone who came for playing tips had to scroll past the whole history.
- Languages All four languages now cover the entire catalogue with nothing left over. The playtime label also stayed in Czech on pages in other languages.
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Arcade cabinets and quality rules
- Games Seventy-four arcade games drawn from a gallery of cabinets on display in Czechia. Coverage of that collection rose from 35 to 106 of 114 machines — Pong, Rally-X, Crazy Climber, Time Pilot, Tapper, Gyruss, Tron, Toki and Street Fighter II among them.
- Content Written rules for adding games, plus a tool that checks the whole catalogue against them and reports what each title is missing — images, opening line, article length, closing recommendation, release year and series placement.
- Languages Two hundred and twenty-four new games translated into English, German and French.
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User accounts and a player diary
- Feature Sign in by e-mail without a password — you get a code and type it once. On every game you can mark that it interests you or that you have played it, and your account holds the list split by platform, with filters and search.
- Games A hundred and fifty-one games for the Nintendo DS, 3DS and Wii, where the canon was covered but the second tier was missing. Plus eight Czech browser games — Samorost, Questionaut, Osada and others.
- Fix On mobile the search suggestions overflowed off-screen and long titles were cut off. The list now anchors to the window and titles may wrap onto more lines.
- Platforms The “Home computers” section is now simply “Computers” — the subtitle promised 8-bit and 16-bit machines of the home era, yet the section also holds DOS PCs, Windows 9x and today’s gaming rigs.
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Translations complete and richer galleries
- Languages English, German and French now cover the whole catalogue — over five thousand games in all four languages.
- Feature A game's gallery now holds up to ten images. The page shows the cover and two shots with a badge for the rest — before, they all stacked up and pushed the text far down.
- Images Three new image sources: GOG for older PC releases, ZXDB for the ZX Spectrum and itch.io for browser games and homebrew.
- Games Two hundred and thirty-four new games — Wii U, Atari 2600, 5200 and 7800, plus titles from the highest-rated charts.
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Where to start, browser games and a write-up for every game
- Content Every platform now carries a shortlist of games to begin with and one line on why each. Big platforms offer eighteen to twenty, small ones four — 768 picks in total.
- Content Every game in the catalogue has an article, an opening line and a closing note on why to play it. The browser platform and Java/Symbian had held nothing but bare catalogue entries until then.
- Feature Browser games that still run link straight to where you can play them — Wordle, 2048, Slither.io, Cookie Clicker, QWOP, RuneScape and more.
- Games A hundred and thirty-five new games for the SEGA Master System, Saturn, Java and Symbian, Meta Quest and PICO-8.
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Series, a one-liner for every game, and linked versions
- Content A new Series section walks the big franchises across platforms and generations — Mario, Star Wars, Final Fantasy, Doom and more. Each has an introduction and a strip of its covers, so you can see at a glance how the brand changed.
- Content Every game in the catalog now opens with a one-line summary — a verdict plus the one detail that makes it worth your time. Until now only 355 games out of more than three thousand had one.
- Content The same title on several platforms is now cross-linked, and 167 of them come with a note on how the versions differed. In the 8-bit and 16-bit era that was no formality: fewer colours, different music, cut levels. For Prince of Persia, for instance, you'll learn why the Amiga version moves more smoothly than the Commodore 64 one.
- Games The catalog gained classics that were missing — Quake, Unreal, Duke Nukem 3D, Hexen, Descent, Ishar — plus the Czech scene: Brány Skeldalu, Fish Fillets, Mafia, Operation Flashpoint and František Fuka's ZX Spectrum titles. 3,279 games in total.
- Images Studios and platforms now show a strip of their games' covers — for the PC that says more than a photo of a beige box. Console photos have transparent backgrounds instead of white, and long platform articles now open with a jump list of their sections.
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The PC arrives, split into three eras
- Platforms The PC has arrived, split by performance era: DOS (XT through 486), Pentium and Windows 9x, and the modern 64-bit PC with today's graphics cards. Each era gets its own hardware article, because technically — and in how you play them — these are three different worlds.
- Games 257 PC games came with it — from Doom, Monkey Island and X-COM through Quake, Diablo and Half-Life to Skyrim, Hollow Knight and Factorio. That takes the catalog to 2,765 titles.
- Images Games no longer stop at the cover — two in-game shots come with them. These were added both to modern consoles (from Steam) and to retro platforms that lacked them. Over two thousand games now carry more than one image.
- Fix Fixed cover lookup on Steam. The list of words meaning “this isn't the game itself” was matched as a substring — and since it contained “ost” (soundtrack), it threw away every Lost Planet, Lost Odyssey and Ghost of Tsushima.
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The site is complete in four languages
- Languages French has caught up with the rest — all 2,504 games, 48 platforms, 23 studios and the hardware guides are now translated. Czech, English, German and French cover the content identically; until now FR handled only part of the catalog and the rest fell back to Czech.
- Images New box-art source: the Nintendo eShop. Nintendo exclusives are on neither Steam nor libretro-thumbnails, so this was the only freely available source — it took the Switch from 47 to 105 covers out of 113 games.
- Content This changelog page was added — an overview of what keeps arriving on the site.
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100+ games on modern platforms, plus the PS Vita
- Games The catalog grew from 2,097 to 2,508 games. The PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Switch and PS Vita now each carry over a hundred titles, every one with a full write-up.
- Platforms The PlayStation Vita joined as the 48th platform — its own hardware article, a console photo and 114 games.
- Fix Removed 12 wrong covers sourced from itch.io. Name matching there hit fan games and tabletop RPGs sharing a title — Titanfall was showing a picture of Godzilla.
- Images Cover art went from 1,917 to 2,153 thanks to Steam as a new source for modern platforms.
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Five new platforms and longer articles
- Platforms The PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch arrived. The PS2 and Xbox also grew to 110 and 95 games.
- Content 394 articles that were too brief got expanded to full magazine length — the median rose from 1,408 to 1,856 characters.
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PS2, GameCube, Xbox and a fourth language
- Platforms Three new platforms with 180 games: the PlayStation 2, GameCube and the original Xbox.
- Languages French joined as the site's fourth language — switcher, hreflang and a localized sitemap included.
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English and German complete
- Languages All content — games, platforms, studios and hardware guides — is translated into English and German.
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RetroWeb launches
- Content The first version of the site: a catalog of platforms and games built from curated notes, hardware guides and a dark theme with retro accents.