Retro Gaming Australia

We at Retro Gaming Australia have been hard at work for nearly 18 months on a rather huge project, part of which is a gallery featuring the covers of all Australian video game magazines. We’ve exhausted our own resources for now, but we’ve only got roughly half of what’s out there, so we need your help to complete the project.

If you have a collection of old Australian video game magazines, access to a scanner and a little bit of free time that you are willing to donate to us, please let me know at admin@retrogamingaus.com

We need covers for the following magazines in particular:
N64 Gamer
PlayStation Gamer
Australian GamePro
Edge Australia
GamesTM Australia
Megazone/Megacomp/Sega Megazone
Segazone
GBA World
PSW
GameStar
Nintendo Magazine System
Official Australian PlayStation Magazine (Next)
Official Australian PlayStation Magazine (ACP)
Official Australian PlayStation 2 Magazine (ACP)
Total Gamer

We’ve been posting ads from old video game magazines for nearly 6 months now, and it’s a feature that quite a few people enjoy. Unfortunately to this point, the only way you could see what we’ve posted was to slowly scroll back through the Ad of the Day post category and see the articles one by one.

In order to rectify that, we’ve created an index which lists all of the games we’ve posted ads for in alphabetical order. Ideally we’d like to get a more elegant solution going in the future, but this will do for now.

You can find the index at the list above, or under our Resources section.

Retro Gaming Australia is looking for a few good people to help take it to the next level. Due to new professional obligations, the time I am able to dedicate to RGA is going to be reduced but with your help we can turn the site into something truly special.

We need people to occupy the following roles

– News writers
– Feature writers
– Archivists
– Community managers

All roles are currently volunteer (i.e. unpaid) positions. We do not require writers to be based in Australia, or even focus solely on Australian content.
(continue reading…)

After putting Retro Reading to bed, I’ve been contemplating the future of coverage on the site.

The founding principle of RGA was to establish a community forum for the discussion of retro gaming in Australia, and unfortunately, that hasn’t been as successful as I had hoped – in some ways, I think Australia just hasn’t had the retro gaming boom seen in the US and UK. In pure statistical terms, our growth is astronomical, but the base figures are so low that it doesn’t matter. We’ve started to produce more original content, but since I’m working alone here (if you’re interested in writing anything for the site, contact me), that takes time. We have plans for more original content as well as more resources concerning the industry in Australia, and they will roll out in the future.

I’ve been wanting to update the site more frequently – those ad posts are nice, but it’s depressing seeing three or four of them in a row on the front page. So I’ve decided that we’re going to experiment with posting a couple of news articles each day over the next couple of weeks. If we’re happy with it, it’ll become a permanent fixture.

Other components that once made up Retro Reading will also appear on the site in their own sections in due course.

As you may already know, we have a Google spreadsheet with a list of scores awarded to computer and video games by magazines published in Australia, stemming back as far as about 1992. We call it the Australian Video Game Magazine Score Archive – you can find it under our Resources section up top.

We’ve had an update in the works for a long time, and now it’s up.

So what’s in the latest update? Almost 400 new scores, taking our total up to just under 8,000. New to the score list is the much loved PC oriented magazine Atomic – we’ve got the review scores from the first 50 issues of the magazine in there. We’ve also added scores from half a dozen issues of the Derwent Howard version of Official PlayStation 2 Magazine.

As of today, you can now comment on blog posts using your RGA forums account. Just log into the forums as per normal, and comment away.

Due to a glitch, your usename on the blog posts will appear in lower case. To fix that, just go into the “Blog control panel” link on the sidebar, and change your display name.

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!

As a bit of a side project over the last week, I decided to make a list of all Platinum releases on the original PlayStation since the one on Wikipedia was rather inaccurate. This should prove helpful to those of you who want to avoid having those dreaded silver releases and keep your collections original and pretty. Inversely, if you are compelled to collect all of the Platinum titles (surely one of you is), then this list should help you on your way.

List of PSX Platinum Games.

I’m currently working on an equivalent guide for the PlayStation 2, as well as a major update to the list of games that support 60Hz. Those will be posted up here in the coming days.

If you have any amendments to make to the guide, contact me at admin[at]retrogamingaus[dot]com

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.

While moving house, we found another stash of old magazines. One of those mags happened to be Hyper #160, which had a list of every score from the first 159 issues. Like anything Hyper, there were a few mistakes so we couldn’t completely rely on it, but it has plugged a heap of gaps in the Hyper section of the scores list. As far as I can tell, we’ve got the vast majority of Hyper scores up to January 2008.

The Australian Mag Scores list now features 7,500 review scores from 20 years of Australian gaming magazines. We’re still a long way from finished however. In particular, we need scores from the following issues (issue numbers may not be accurate):

Hyper
2006: March (149)
2007: March (161)
and everything from February 2008 on (172-207)

Gamestar
1994: September-December
1995: January-March, May-June

Australian GamePro
All issues

Edge Australia
All issues

Megazone
1989-1991: All issues (1-18)
1992: Jan/Mar (20)
1993: September (31), December (34)
1994: February (36), March (37), May (39), June (40), July (41), November (45)
1995: February (48), March (49), June (52), July (53), August (54), September (55), October (56)

N64 Gamer
While we have scores for N64 Gamer, we have not looked in most of the magazines to see the actual scores. Given the inconsistency of the scores section in the back of each issue, we’d prefer to have the breakdown of scores taken from each individual magazine.
1998: March to December (1-10)
1999: February (12), March (13), May (14), June (15), July (16), August (17), September (18), October (19), November (20)
2000: March (24), April (25), May (26), June (27), August (29), September (30), October (31), November (32), December (33)
2001: January to July (34-40)

Nintendo Gamer
2001: July-November
2002: January-June, August, November

Nintendo Magazine System
All issues except April 97

Official PlayStation Magazine
All issues except June 2001

Official PlayStation 2 Magazine (both versions)
All issues except January 2001, March 2001 and November 2002

Australian Station
All issues

PlayStation World
All issues except September 2002

PC Powerplay
1999: June (38), August-December (40-44)
2002: February (46), April (48), September-December (53-56)
2003: January (57), February (58), April (60), June (62), July (63), September-December (65-68)
and everything from 2004-2010 (69-185)

GBA World
All issues

Total Gamer
All issues

Official Xbox Magazine
All issues

If you can assist in any way, comment on this post or contact me through email or the forums.