RetroHub

RetroHub switches on an interactive television terminal like the ones that sat in living rooms in the early 1990s. You turn it on, the set hunts for its signal, and then it offers a mosaic of numbered tiles you pick with a fingertip or a remote.

Everything is drawn pixel by pixel. The screen is 320 by 240 dots, the palette holds sixteen shades, and the font was traced by hand, French accents included. The rendering imitates a cathode-ray tube - scan lines, darkened edges, rounded corners - and the picture refreshes slowly, the way it did then.

REAL DATA, PRESENTED THE OLD WAY

Behind the tiles are short information pages, the way those terminals did it: a few lines, large characters, readable from across the room. The set dressing is period, the content is not - the weather, lottery results, stock quotes, the day's news and hockey are real data, refreshed several times a day. They are provided for information only.

The terminal speaks English throughout.

THE GAMES

One tile leads to them, and they are all drawn by hand in the same palette. Tape-Brique and its wall that hollows out, Bizz-Billes and its colour wheel where the marble falls sideways, Tac-o-Tac against a teacher who levels up each time you beat him, Zipper and its mazes to close off - and a dozen more, from dice to cards.

They play solo, with several people in front of the same screen, and some play head-to-head online - each on their own device, either trading a six-letter code or being matched with someone looking for the same game. Random matching keeps two rooms, one French for Quebec and one English for North America, so nobody lands in a game they cannot read. A code, though, crosses between them: two friends always find each other.

High scores have their own board, where first place is not number one - it is grand master.

WORD GAMES AND QUIZZES, WRITTEN FOR ENGLISH

The hangman words and the quiz questions are not translated, they are written: 150 words and 400 questions of their own. A quiz translated from another country asks about books you have never heard of; these ask what someone in North America would actually know.

ON PHONE, TABLET AND TELEVISION

The same app serves all three, always in landscape: the terminal screen is 4:3, and holding it upright would make no sense. The picture keeps a whole-number scale - the pixels stay sharp, never smoothed, whatever the size of the screen. On an Android TV, everything is driven from the remote: the number keys dial a tile, the arrows move, the back key steps up one level.

FREE, AND IT SAYS SO

RetroHub is free and lives on advertising. Half the time the slot shows a banner drawn by the app; the other half, a real ad. The first time you switch it on, the terminal asks whether ads may take your interests into account. Refusing does not remove them - they stay, but generic. The question is always available again in the settings.

RetroHub Annual removes the advertising: CA$4.99 a year after one free month, shown in your local currency on Google Play. It renews automatically and can be cancelled any time in your Google Play account subscriptions.

An account is optional: everything plays without one. It carries your name to the high-score board and finds your games again from one device to another, and it opens with a service you already have - with no password to create. The app asks for neither your location, nor your contacts, nor your files.