Retro Gaming Australia

Earthworm Jim was a launch title for the Game Boy Advance, but the port wasn’t particularly great – nor was this advert, which lacked the delightful double entendres and silly jokes of the original ad campaign.

Apple II hit Choplifter was popular enough to get ported to everything, including an arcade upgrade. This particular ad is for the Commodore VIC-20 version, and is based on Dan Gorlin’s original version.

The launch of the PS4 in North America has me thinking about my history with console launches, and how leaps in hardware made for new gameplay experiences. Super Monkey Ball was originally an arcade game, but being a post 2000 release, seeing it in an arcade outside of Japan was an impossibility, making the GameCube launch release most people’s first experience with the game. It was kind of an evolution of the Marble Madness concept, guiding a ball around a level, except that this time, you controlled the level rather than the ball. Simple at first, but it got bloody hard.

A number of games based on the popular Batman animated series from the early 90s were published in 1994 and 1995. The Game Gear version was developed by Novotrade, best remembered for Ecco the Dolphin, and is a fairly straight forward jump and run game.

In the aftermath of the success of Final Fantasy VII, Squaresoft started bringing over other popular RPGs and spin offs. One such game was Chocobo’s Dungeon 2, the second in the serious of Chocobo rogue like spin-offs, and the first in the Mystery Dungeon series to be released outside of Japan.

Thunder Blade is a reasonably popular arcade game from Sega. The Master System port is pretty heavily compromised, but still somewhat enjoyable. This ad is from the brief period of time where Tonka handled Sega’s distribution and marketing in North America.

Zombie Nation is a really odd shooter for the NES where you play as either a disembodied samurai head or tengu mask, who are on a quest to destroy a meteor that has turned the population of the United States into zombies.

Mega Man 8 is one of the more overlooked entries in the classic Mega Man series, probably due to the focus being on the X series at the time, being a 2D game in a 3D era, and having a pretty ghastly English dub. It has beautiful sprite work, though.

The criminal mastermind Carmen Sandiego is on the loose again, presumably with some form of time machine. As a result, you get to spend the next couple of hours doing history homework in order to catch her.

Nintendo effectively turned the Game Boy Advance into a SNES port dumping ground, but it’s safe to say that many of the ports were actually worse than their original versions. Probably the most offensive case was Donkey Kong Country, which was significantly brightened up – to the point where it looks absolutely awful on anything but the original, non-lit GBA console.