Lately, I’ve been covering a lot of games. Like, a LOT. So, to avoid flooding your feed with every cool game that crosses my path, I’m going to start doing weekly recaps in a few categories. This is the inaugural issue of Homebrew Side Quests: a look at new projects pushing old hardware in directions the original manufacturers often did not plan for.
Spider Maze 2 is a classic “one more round” maze game for the C64 from The New Dimension and Blazon, built as a more polished, colorful sequel to the 2018 original. You guide a little yellow guy around compact stages, hoovering up every diamond while dodging spiders and dealing with hazards like timers, bonus pickups, and rising spikes that complicate your route planning. It packs in niceties like a multicolor loading screen, animated sprites, a high score table with disk save, sixteen stages with tougher layouts after level four, and even a hidden cheat for people willing to poke at it.
Also on Commodore duty, US Championship V’Ball has finally received an Amiga conversion, courtesy of JOTD and no9. Based on Technōs Japan’s 1988 arcade beach volleyball game, this version targets both ECS and AGA machines, running at 25 FPS with separate 64‑color and 128‑color builds for more capable setups. You still control George and Michael chasing a big tournament payout, either solo or in co‑op, but under the hood, you are getting a full 68000 transcode, redone graphics and sound, and WHDLoad support.
Staying with Commodore but shifting to something spookier, The Last Pumpkin is a new C64 platformer from Donut80 that follows on from their Egg Feud project. One player controls a bouncing pumpkin, the other a cat, in stages set in and around a haunted castle where you must collect bones and sweets while avoiding bats, ghosts, and other monsters. Movement is built around constant bouncing and full-screen wrapping, so you fall off one edge and pop out on the other, which turns navigation into a timing puzzle as you chase keys and stomp enemies for extra candy. It supports solo or two-player modes, and it feels tuned for chaos in couch co‑op.
On the Amiga side, Double Baboon Ninja is shaping up to be a standout AGA showcase. Danlabg’s in‑development arcade action game casts you as a pair of simian ninjas defending Baboon City from an alien invasion that has turned residents into blobs, with slick animation and a neon city backdrop that would not look out of place on modern platforms. The current demo contains the first level with a work‑in‑progress boss, and supports one or two button controllers, and community comments already read like early word of mouth for a future “must‑have” Amiga release.
For high-end Amiga hardware, G‑Wars fills a different niche: it is a Geometry Wars-style twin‑stick shooter built to stress accelerated configurations, with dense particle effects and fast movement. You pilot a small ship in a closed arena, dodging swarms of abstract enemies while chasing score multipliers and managing crowd control, flexing the power of those late-era Amigas.
Demon Pages shifts gears into CRPG territory on classic PCs. Inspired by late 90s Western role-playing games, it features party-based exploration, isometric visuals, and a structure that leans on dialogue choices and dungeon crawling. IndieRetroNews’ coverage highlights it as a full-featured release rather than a small jam project, which is nice to see in a space where retro styled usually means “short”. It runs on old hardware but is also comfortable on modern emulators for convenience.
Finally, Metal Canary is the oddball: a brand new horizontally scrolling shoot ’em up targeting Wii, Dreamcast, and Steam, with a physical Wii release planned for Retrocon 2026. Nai Adventure reportedly had a Wii build up and running in about six hours using their existing tools, and the game is already playable from start to finish on Nintendo’s 2006 hardware. The Dreamcast version continues that system’s surprisingly long post‑life library, and the fact that both consoles are getting simultaneous support alongside PC in 2026 says a lot about where the homebrew and boutique publishing scene is at right now.
For a hobby that supposedly lives in the past, this is a pretty lively present
