While the emulators included may lack some features or be less accurate than a standalone emulator, its the price you pay for the convenience. As long as you have a decent machine you can play games from various systems, often times at better quality than on the original platform, with cloud saves, retroachievements support, customizable controls and other great features that make retroarch useful and worth the low low price of FREE and readily available on steam.

Wait, seriously? They have reviews for this thing? Well, guess I’ll throw mine in too, since writing is my jam anyway!

So, what can I say about this program/platform/thingamajig? I downloaded it because an old friend swore it would let me play all those childhood classics I grew up with. And after 18 hours of playtime, I can confirm: it’s awesome!

Now I can freely hunt down old SNES, Nintendo, PS1, Sega, you name it! All those retro gems most younger gamers wouldn’t touch because "ew, pixel graphics!" But who cares? Game Boy classics, Doctor Mario, vintage Mario, total nostalgia overload. And don’t even get me started on Bomberman from my SNES days, pure gold!

Yeah, you’ll need to do a tiny bit of digging to find ISO files, but once you load them up? Magic. So, do I recommend this program/platform/whatever? Absolutely. Stellar stuff!

between objectively poor UX and UI design, from not being able to find proper settings for specific cores, to individual roms not wanting to be detected or function properly, Retroarch is an absolute mess that is beaten by literally every individual emulator, both in convenience and ease of interface. (okay, maybe not literally, but you get the point i hope.)

everything i've tried to do with this emulator, from PS1 emulation to DS emulation and beyond has been headache inducing, as the UI alone makes finding things an absolute trainwreck, and many options are in a post launch quick menu, relating to individual emulator cores, and even with that, there's so many seemingly useless extra options that just serves to bloat the experience of finding what you need as a whole. intuitive is not a word i would ever use to describe retroarch.

if you're after specific systems and games to emulate, rather than a catch all for Steam Deck (and even then, i would never recommend Retroarch to anybody until the UI gets cleaned up and slimmed hardcore) i'd highly recommend searching for individual dedicated emulators for your games. retroarch as an all in one is not user friendly at all, and just frustrates me personally just trying to find basic settings. you're better off with dedicated, at least those will give you settings where they actually should be and are typically free from bloat, if not just better to feel through in general for the settings you need.

Online updater is missing, making this version useless.

i love, i love, i love

very convenient for emulating my favorite retro games.....

Great tool, great platform, could use a more wide array of emulators, but it's already great as it is.

my totally legal games are safe on here thanks to retroarch

It does what it says it does. A great emulator. Only complain I have is that configuring the Nintendo 64 controller sucks. However, that controller itself was quite weird for consoles. Other than that, I've been enjoying Sega Master System games. A console I never had, that did have some great games.

JUST DOOO ITTT!!!!!