Retro Gaming Australia

Mega Man 7 is the somewhat unfairly maligned 16-bit continuation of the classic Mega Man series. The game was rushed to market by Capcom, and wasn’t quite up to the high standards set by Mega Man X and its sequels.

Mega Man in Dr Wily’s Revenge (or Rockman World) is the first of the portable Mega Man series which saw five instalments on the Game Boy. It was the first Mega Man game to be outsourced by Capcom, yet most people were still happy with the end result.

It’s Mega Man’s 25th anniversary next Monday, so enjoy a week’s worth of ads featuring Capcom’s ubiquitous mascot. This particular ad is for the original release of Rockman in Japan.

Wolfenstein 3D was one of the most popular games of the early 90s on the PC, so eventually plans were laid to bring it to consoles. Unfortunately the first of those ports ran straight into Nintendo’s strict censorship policies and the game was sanitized – all elements linking the game to the Nazis were removed (including Hitler’s moustache), the dogs were changed into rats and all blood was removed. The number of levels was halved, but two new weapons were added – a flamethrower and rocket launcher. In spite of all of the changes, the game actually still plays okay.

Bleem! was a PlayStation emulator for Windows released in the late 90s which was really the first program capable of running commercial PlayStation software on a PC. It was a high level emulator, supporting smoothing and other such functions as well as plugins. Bleem eventually decided to bring the project to the Dreamcast, letting you play your Sony games on your Sega console. However, despite the intentions shown in the ad, Bleem couldn’t get the compatibility required for a decent commercial release, so instead of releasing one all-encompassing Bleem emulator product, they wound up releasing them on a per-game basis. Only three Bleempacks were released – Metal Gear Solid, Gran Turismo 2 and Tekken 3.

Sony took Bleem to court over violating their rights – Bleem won the court case, but the litigation bled them dry and they wound up bankrupt. Funnily enough, the two individuals behind Bleem, Randy Linden and Sean Kauppinen would actually wind up working for Sony – the former on emulation technology for SCEA.

If my memory serves me well, Cybernator was the first ad we ran as part of this feature. This ad is for the US version – it’s similar, but the ad copy is significantly different. The game itself – well that’s still awesome.

Time Killers is an utterly abysmal fighting game released in the aftermath of Mortal Kombat, when people assumed that violence alone could carry a game. About the only redeeming feature of Time Killers is the ability to cut each others’ limbs off. The Mega Drive release didn’t come out until about 4 years after the arcade game, and by 1996, Time Killers seemed even shitter than in 1992.

Fighting Force, as we’ve said time and again, was at one stage intended to be Streets of Rage 4. However Fighting Force turned out so rubbish that we thank Zombie Jesus that it wasn’t.

Mortal Kombat 3 came out on just about every major platform, including the PC, the version which this ad is pitching. The PC port was actually a remarkably high quality port. The first release was DOS based and was quite possibly the most faithful port of the game. The later Windows based release was based on the PlayStation version, which isn’t quite as good.

The Need for Speed, the first game of the Need for Speed series, is drastically different to the games bearing the name in the current day. It featured heavy involvement from Road & Track magazine, and was all about trying to show off exotic sports cars. The Need for Speed was originally released on the 3DO, but quickly made its way to other CD based formats.