Late to the Party: Mega Cat Studios Retro Game Trio!

Let's be real: there's a lot to loathe about 2026, what with our economic state of affairs, the increasingly robust perversion of the internet via AI slop and constantly shifting weather patterns. Hell, we can't even find solace in the little things anymore, like going down to the store and just buying a damn pack of Pokemon cards (but that's another feature for another time).

That being said, we can at least count on something: there are still plenty of stellar studios that continue to release retro-inspired classics. (And with physical copies to boot – literally!)

 Given the tumultuous curveballs we keep seeing through this already shifty year, Press Pause Radio (or myself, more specifically) is a bit late to the party on some of the early year releases from Mega Cat Studios. So join us as we dive into peeks at Plyuk and Old Towers for the NES, in addition to Super Fanger for the SNES.

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QCF: CAIRN

We all have a vision in our heads of something that we love doing beyond any reproach. A passion that we put on a pedestal, and fabricate this perfect version of what we aspire it to be, and when that drive reaches a fever point, no one else will ever understand your vision. Not family, not friends, and not even colleagues who share your love of the avocation at hand. Everything else starts to lose meaning—or worse yet—become a hindrance between you and the focus you need to lock the hell in for to achieve the goal at large.

Even though we’re all capable of that intense dedication to something we love, there’s a big gulf between someone striving to be the world’s best bowler and someone trying to be the first Alpinist to reach the top of the world’s only unclimbable mountain. A new survival-action title from the same folks who brought us Furi, in CAIRN, from The Game Bakers, aims to challenge the limits of human tenacity, both through the lens of Aava and the personal state of mind she finds herself in, and the symbiotic level of perseverance that players will need to guide her to the peak.

As simple as that all sounds, it’s the execution of CAIRN’s buildup and turbulent framing of Aava’s quest to surmount Mount Kami that sets it apart as an experience that’s unlike anything I’ve played before it—an experience that constantly teeters between being a tale of inspiration and a cautionary tale of self-destruction.

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QCF: Big Hops

The legacy of Super Mario Sunshine is such a polarizing 3D Mario game to look back it, and it isn’t an entry that’s often romanticized for its jumping physics either. At its core, Sunshine does have an admittedly solid foundation behind its snappier controls, which give the title a distinctive ebb and flow to its respective platforming mechanics, setting it apart from the other entries in the series. However, when that same series has some heavy hitters like Super Mario Odyssey and Super Mario 3D World, it starts to make sense why Super Mario Sunshine is widely considered to be at the bottom of that class too.

And yet—the entry still has its fans—one of whom felt inspired to recreate many of those quirky fundamentals from the Gamecube exclusive into a new 3D platforming adventure that would take influences from other contemporary titles, and blend them together with modern sensibilities to their design to create something that’s new yet familiar.

This game is Big Hops, and it comes from the mind of Chris Wade and his studio, Luckshot Games. After breaking onto the scene with their debut, Gang Beasts-inspired party game in 2018, Wade and his team hustled onto their next project and spent six years working on their sophomore release, Big Hops.

The end result is a charming, yet flawed, outing into an expansive open-world adventure that presents an interesting take on the theme of questioning what exactly makes an adventure so magical to experience—the destination or the journey. The message is poignant in its delivery and makes for a fun time, even if it occasionally stands at odds with the gameplay from time to time, as the game is more of a jaunt than a crusade.

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PPR Presents Limelight: Baby Steps

God dammit y’all, he’s doing it—George is going to stream Baby Steps.

After all of the hype, the memes, and the ongoing discourse over its themes of overcoming Toxic Masculinity, the same people who brought us Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy have unleashed whole brain-breaking, finger-numbing exercise of rigor and patience that’ll test every fiber of your being, or at least George's anyway.

Be sure to tune in to our Twitch or YouTube at 7:00 PM PST on 01/15/2026 to watch Nathan stumble around like a drunken Bambi! You can check out the streams here or directly on our Twitch and YouTube channels, and vibe along with us as we work towards ushering in a new age of Limelight for y'all!

PPR Presents Play Play: Gladmort Press Kit Demo

2025 sure has been a banger year for the Neo•Geo, like—we’ve got Final Vendetta, Vengeance Hunters, and the game in our latest entry of Play Play: Gladmort, by Chipsonsteroids and Pixel Heart.

George had the opportunity to check out a slice of this action title for SNK’s black-and-gold wonder, courtesy of a demo provided by the developer, where he played it with original hardware via the NeoSD Flashcart from Teraonion. Check out what he has to say about it, and all of the ways you can scope out this game now, regardless of whether or not you have what may be the most expensive retro console to own.

QCF: AVGN 8-Bit

One might almost expect a game with the namesake of the Angry Video Game Nerd series to be horrible by design. After all, the Nerd — created and portrayed by James Rolfe — has a penchant for bringing what he calls the worst of the worst to light, sometimes sprinkling in bits of reluctant video game trivia with a sea of curse word-ridden catchphrases. In some instances, it's not entirely unwelcome to see low doses of a weird low-budget robot, cursing mutant, or some other weird shit.

An FMV intro of Rolfe as the Nerd at the beginning of Retroware's AVGN 8-bit may not inspire confidence in the ease or enjoyment of any trials ahead: "This game sucks ... just the way I like it."

Thing is, it doesn't actually suck. Dare I say it's pretty well-rounded, though not the most inventive experience in terms of level flow, gameplay mechanics, or boss battles. This game won't change your life, but you'll have some fun along the way.

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QCF: Hollow Knight: Silksong

It isn’t very often that the cultural zeitgeist of video games just comes together on a subject like the friggin’ Planeteers summoning Captain Planet, right? I mean, thinking back, the last few times something like that happened were the releases of Pokémon GO or Grand Theft Auto V—video game releases that surpassed the typical grand-scale spectacle for their respective audiences and had instead exploded into being these larger-than-life experiences that invaded all of the water coolers out there.

Well, it happened again with the long-awaited sequel to the 2017 sleeper hit from indie studio Team Cherry—Hollow Knight: Silksong.

What was once ranked among the vaporware meme status of Half-Life 3 or, to a lesser extent, Banjo-Threeie (can’t really do Shenmue III or Zach Snyder’s Justice League, because well, those ended up coming out), the highly anticipated follow-up finally emerged from years of silence with a surprise launch date that was showcased in the 2025 Gamescom event. The sporadic appearance of the trailer not only showed everyone watching and in attendance that the game was alive and well, but it also steadily concluded with an eye-opening launch date that was just a mere two weeks away.

No advance press copies or influencer kits—a worldwide release for everyone to experience completely sealed from behind Team Cherry’s doors until its Sept. 4 launch date. The clandestine rollout couldn’t be more thematic for Silksong, as the crux of the game teased a quest that spanned a world far bigger and more daunting than Hollow Knight’s Hallownest ever was, and after spending hours of needling my way through the troubled lands of Pharloom, I can safely say that the hype is real.

Silksong is one of the finest Metroidvanias ever made—a true peak for the sub-genre of “search-action” gaming.

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QCF: Promise Mascot Agency

The Yakuza/Like a Dragon titles are a series of video games that quickly etched their mark onto my heart, especially after I started to lose hope of whether or not the next Shenmue entry would ever happen. In spite of the action-laced criminal drama that the series is famous for, though, the B-Story styled side-quests and activities were what always hooked me for hours on end, more often to the extent that the main objectives of the games were ironically set to the side. While Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio made sure to pack plenty of flashy distractions and gripping stories, there was a certain recurring trend among the low-stakes pastimes that were included in each Yakuza title—a business-simulator-like mini-game. These side-operations didn’t just have some flimsy premise to justify their inclusion, either; these games are often sizable productions, complete with their own wacky gravitas of the “Saving the Orphanage” variety attached to the ordeal, and in some instances were just as deep as the main plot.

Thinking back, I remember spending a whole night grinding away at Ichiban Confections, and just easily lost count over how many times that I had thought to myself, “Man, this should be a whole-ass game with a full-time 40-hour campaign and everything…”

Well, it would seem that Kaizen Game Works must have heard my silly pipe dreams and did just that with Promise Mascot Agency, and even enlisted the incredible talents of Takaya Kuroda for good measure.

Beyond the parallels to the Dragon of Dojima’s outings, Promise Mascot Agency offers an engrossing story of perseverance and redemption through a massive melting pot of gameplay mechanics that have no business working together as well as they do. The end result is a fresh and weirdly addictive venture that delivers an experience that’s even better than the bizarrely solid sum of its parts.

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