Retro Gaming Australia

Today’s ad is for a game many of us wish we bought upon release, if only for our wallet’s sake;

Click on the image for the full size ad

Snatcher is a futuristic cyberpunk adventure game developed and published by Konami. It is best known for being written and directed by Hideo Kojima. This advertisement is from the United States. The Mega CD version of the game is the only one released outside of Japan to date. The game sold poorly on release, but its positive word of mouth has led to high demand, giving the game a high price tag on auction sites. Meanwhile, most Japanese copies of the game will cost less than a cup of coffee.

Today’s advertisement is a little more grisly;

Click on the image for the full size ad

Resident Evil: Director’s Cut was released for the PlayStation in 1997. This advertisement originates from the United States. The director’s cut version of the game features some different camera angles, new costumes and an arrange mode. It was also meant to feature the uncut, full colour version of the introductory FMV, but a miscommunication at Capcom led to this being omitted. A second version of the director’s cut was released, with the addition of Dual Shock support.

The first of many ads we’ll feature on this game, given its heavy marketing campaign;

Click on the image for the full size ad

Earthworm Jim was the first game developed by Shiny Entertainment, which was formed after David Perry and a number of other talented individuals struck out from Virgin Interactive onto their own. Perry was the driving force behind several bigs hits at Virgin, most notably Disney’s Aladdin for the Mega Drive. This advertisement originates from the US, but I believe it was used across the world.

Who said that every game we’d feature would be good? This is proof that they’ll make a game out of anything;

Click image for full size ad

Neighbours was published by Impulze for the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amiga and Atari ST in 1991-1992. This particular advertisement originates from the UK. The game puts players in control of a skateboard-riding Scott Robinson, who has to dodge dogs and kangaroos and other such…wonders of Ramsay Street. Truly bizarre.

Today’s advertisement is for one of the best games on the GameCube;

Click the image for the full size ad

Metroid Prime 2: Echoes (Dark Echoes in Japan) was developed by Retro Studios and published by Nintendo in 2004. This advertisement originates from Spain. While not as big a seller as its predecessor, Prime 2 is one of the best graphical showcases on the GameCube and was one of the best rated games of 2004 – a year with some fearsome competition. It was also one of the first games released in PAL territories which required a 60Hz capable television set.

Posting these ads wouldn’t be much fun if we didn’t post ones for the games we all love;

Click the image for the full size ad

Final Fantasy VII was developed by Squaresoft and published outside of Japan by Sony Computer Entertainment. This particular advertisement comes from the United States. The game is credited with turning the tide in the fifth generation console war, putting the PlayStation far ahead of the Saturn and Nintendo 64, and bringing Japanese RPGs to a mainstream audience. The game is now available as a PSOne Classic on the PlayStation Store.

Let’s kick off the new feature with an ad for a game that is a favourite of many SNES collectors:

Click on the image for the full size ad

Cybernator, or Assault Suits Valken, is one of the best run and gun platformers on the Super Nintendo/Super Famicom. Originally developed by NCS Corp and published in Japan by Masiya, Konami picked it up for international release. A remake, simply titled Walken, was released for the PlayStation 2 in 2004. You can also get it on the Wii Virtual Console. This particular ad originates from the United Kingdom, where it was one of the last games to use the Palcom Software brand that Konami used to bypass Nintendo’s publishing restrictions.

A couple of months ago I mentioned that I was working on two major projects for the site that would be ready in the first quarter of this year. Of course, neither of these projects actually eventuated by the end of March. One is a long way from being ready to launch in a form I am happy with. The other…I had no idea really what to do with it. Fortunately, inspiration struck and I found a form for the project that I am happy with.

From Sunday, Retro Gaming Australia will be updating daily with a new feature called the Video Game Ad of the Day. Each day, you will see an advertisement from a classic video game appear on the site. Some other sites post ads, but they are decidedly US centric (probably because US mags in the 90s had 150 pages of ads an issue – not exaggerating). In order to be different, we will be posting ads not only from the US, but from countries across the world. We’ve got ads from Australia, the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Japan, Russia, South Africa and more. These posts would not be possible without the work of individuals from Out of Print Archive and Retromags who work painstakingly hard on preserving classic video game magazines, so please grace them with your traffic.

So, tune in daily, check out the new ad and link it to everybody you know!

Those good updating habits are difficult to keep up between projects and the fact that nothing interesting is happening in retro gaming right now, but we’ll do our best to continue.

We’ve got another selection of 14 Australian video game commercial to add to our collection, bringing it up to 60. They are:
Amiga CD32 System Ad
Atari 2600 System Ad #5
Atari 2600 System Ad #6
Atari 7800 Rap Ad
Burger Time for Intellivsion
F-Zero for the SNES
Intellivision System Ad #2
Mission X for Intellivision
Nintendo 64 Clear Purple Controller Bundle
Mega Drive System Ad 1990
Mega Drive: The Next Level Ad #1 from 1994
Timezone Daytona USA
Toe Jam and Earl for the Mega Drive
Zelda II: The Adventure of Link for the NES

Asura and Gaia Crusaders at Hardcore Gaming 101
Couple of interesting detailed articles on some arcade games at HG101. Burn Cycle and Oh Shit are the last two kusoge featured.

Unseen64 updates:
Urban Decay (PC)
Cyber Fighter (PC-FX)
X-COM Alliance (PC)
Necrocide: The Dead Must Die (PC)
Elysium (PC)
SwitchDeath (Jaguar)
Bounty Hunter (MD)

GB Hunter and Gamebooster at NES World
NES World has a pair of articles on these two passthrough devices that allowed you to play Game Boy software on your Nintendo 64.

Recent Virtual Console releases:
Bomberman Hero (N64)

We’re proud to announce that we’ve added a new section to Retro Gaming Australia today – TV commercials! We’ve rummaged around the Internet and scrapped together a small collection of commercials which aired on Australian television between the 1970s and 2005. We’ve got ads ranging from the well known Tim Ferguson Nintendo 64 ads to the obscure John Sands Sega SC-3000. The links currently redirect you to our Youtube channel – we’ll be reviewing this in the future, but it works fine for now.

We’ll be adding to this collection over time, so if you’ve got something that we don’t have here, please drop us a line at admin@thisurl.com

You can access our commercial library here.