Retro Gaming Australia

Solstice is an isometric puzzle game developed by Software Creations for the NES. It draws a bit of inspiration from early Ultimate/Rare isometric adventures on the ZX Spectrum. Respect++ if you can beat Solstice without exploits – I’ve always found it to be bloody difficult.

Grand Theft Auto V might have been delayed, but that doesn’t automatically stop the other games in the series from existing. Grand Theft Auto 2 proved to be quite popular on release, but I sorely recommend avoiding the console versions and playing the PC version. It’s just that much better.

Area 88, better known outside Japan as UN Squadron, is arguably one of the best shoot ’em ups Capcom produced. Area 88 was a reasonably popular manga series in Japan, involving ace pilot Shin Kazama, who is signed up to a mercenary by his supposed best friend, who had eyes on Shin’s bride-to-be. Shin is on a 3 year contract, and must either serve out the term or buy out the $1.5 million contract by becoming a the top pilot.

Civilization II is well known for its potential to eat up your free time. I particularly liked this recent story from a reddit user who’d been playing the game on and off for ten years, with his civilization stuck in a deadlock with two other powers.

BattleTanx: Global Assault was the second in a series of vaguely amusing arcade style multiplayer tank games 3DO published for the Nintendo 64. This ad has pretty much nothing to do with the context of the game.

The lowest point of the mascot based platformer. Bubsy is the bees knees compared to this piece of shit.

I wonder how many magazines perished as a result of this ad. None, probably.

It’s a little bit of a disservice to call Konami’s Amidar a Pac-Man clone, given its basis in the Japanese drawing game Amikaduji, but that never stopped anyone.

3Xtreme is the third and final entry in Sony’s series of extreme sports racing games. It replaces the sprite based graphics of the first two games with polygons, but the frame rate suffers for it.

2Xtreme is the follow up to ESPN Extreme Games, and retains the same Road Rash-inspired gameplay. It throws snowboarding into the mix for a bit of variety.