Retro Gaming Australia

Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island is one of the most imaginative and well-executed games of all time. Its art style is utterly amazing. And yet this is the best the marketing department could do.

Sonic 3D: Flickies’ Island (or Sonic 3D Blast in North America) is an isometric Sonic game developed by Traveller’s Tales for the Mega Drive and Saturn in 1996. The Saturn version advertised here was a desperation effort by Sega to cover the gap left in their holiday lineup by the delay and later cancellation of the planned 3D Sonic game, Sonic Xtreme.

James Pond II: Codename RoboCod sees the piscine secret agent on a quest to save Santa and his elves from the evil Dr Maybe. Popular in its time on the micros and Mega Drive, RoboCod has become a bit of a mainstay of the bargain bin with stealth re-releases on the Nintendo DS and PlayStation 2.

Mega Man Mania was a cancelled remake/compilation release of the five Game Boy Mega Man (or Rockman World) games for the Game Boy Advance. Planned for release at the same time as the Mega Man Anniversary Collection, the game was continuously delayed. It is widely believed that Capcom had lost the original source code for the games, and the release was cancelled due to the game not meeting internal quality standards.

Zonk is at a basic level a futuristic incarnation of Bonk, however, the game in which he stars in, Air Zonk, is a shoot ’em up rather than a platformer. Have to admit that the PC Engine version has a cooler name, but Turbobros should be used to the PC Engine being so much better than the Turbografx.

Syndicate is pretty much one of the greatest games of the 90s – it’s a damn shame that the series was overlooked after the release of Syndicate Wars. I’ll admit that I enjoyed the FPS revival released in 2012, even though it was so far removed from everything I love about the original games. This ad is spruiking the UK release of the SNES and Jaguar versions.

Starting the new year off with a bang with this ad for the North American release of House of the Dead 2, which was stripped of its light-gun support in that particular version due to post Columbine anxiety. No such alteration was made to the PAL or Japanese releases.

This isn’t exactly the sort of ad that inspires one to purchase said game. One of those things that made Sony seem like less of a threat in the games industry than they turned out to be.

3Xtreme is the third and final game in Sony Computer Entertainment’s shortlived extreme sports series. The game continues the series trademark Road Rash-inspired extreme sports racing motif, but switches up the graphics from sprites to polygons – to the detriment of the frame rate.

With the smashing success of Grand Theft Auto in the sixth generation, every publisher felt the need to do a game based on criminal activity and gang culture. Of course as Ubisoft proved with 187 Ride or Die, slapping something together with those themes and throwing it out there expecting success is a pretty shitty thing to do.