Retro Gaming Australia

One of my favourite series of the seventh generation of consoles is Dead Rising. Every game in the series has featured a number of callbacks to other popular Capcom franchises, and the third game, launching with the Xbox One next week is no different.

Dead Rising featured the classic Mega Man costume, complete with Mega Buster and laser sword. Dead Rising 2 featured Arthur from Ghosts’n Goblins‘ armor and underpants. Dead Rising 2: Off the Record had Protoman’s armor. Now in Dead Rising 3, you can run around in Mega Man X’s armor.

The launch of the PS4 in North America has me thinking about my history with console launches, and how leaps in hardware made for new gameplay experiences. Super Monkey Ball was originally an arcade game, but being a post 2000 release, seeing it in an arcade outside of Japan was an impossibility, making the GameCube launch release most people’s first experience with the game. It was kind of an evolution of the Marble Madness concept, guiding a ball around a level, except that this time, you controlled the level rather than the ball. Simple at first, but it got bloody hard.

Independent video game books publisher Read-Only Memory, the house behind the recently published Sensible Soccer history book, has launched a new Kickstarter for a highly ambitious book covering the Sega Mega Drive.

Called Mega Drive/Genesis: Collected Works, the book aims to be the ultimate retrospective for Sega’s widely loved 16-bit behemoth. It aims to be a definitive volume – they’ve got Sega on board to give them unprecedented access to the company’s archives and personnel. The book will include production artwork, interviews, development sketches, manufacturing plans and interviews with 20 Sega personnel, some of whom have never been interviewed before.

Mega Drive/Genesis: Collected Works is currently only available in hardback with a pledge of £30 (plus £15 for international shipping) with an expected delivery date of June 2014.

Big week for Mega Drive again.

Mega Drive Bundle – The Punisher, Daze Before Christmas, Sparkster, Mega Man: Wily Wars, Death and Return of Superman, Alien Soldier – The some of the most highly sought after Mega Drive games in one bundle.

Spider-Man / Venom: Separation Anxiety (Mega Drive)

Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes (GameCube)

Mario Tennis (N64)

Mario Party (N64)

Mario's 5 Game Value Pack (Super Mario All Stars + Super Mario World Bundle)

Nintendo 64 – Grape Purple

Xbox Display Kiosk – Pick up from Mt Warrigal, NSW

Best of Buy it Now
Resident Evil: Gaiden (GBC)
Syndicate Wars (PSX)
Game Boy Gallery (GB)
Metroid Fusion (GBA)
Battletoads & Double Dragon (NES)
Bangai-O (Dreamcast)

Nintendo eShop (Australia, Europe)
None

Nintendo eShop (North America)

WiiU Virtual Console
Wario’s Woods (NES) – $US4.99

3DS Virtual Console
Wario’s Woods (NES) – $US4.99

PlayStation Store (Australia, Europe)

New Releases
The OddBoxx (Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee (PSOne Classics), Oddworld: Abe’s Exoddus (PSOne Classics), Oddworld: Munch’s Oddysee HD, Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath HD) – $AU29.95

Discounts
Beyond Good & Evil HD – $AU5.78 (PSPlus: $AU4.34) – 60% off
Space Channel 5 Part 2 – $AU2.92 (PSPlus: $AU2.19) – 60% off
Space Invaders Extreme (PSP) – $AU5.78 (PSPlus: $AU4.34) – 60% off
The Seed: Warzone (PS2 Classics) – $AU2.94 ($AU2.65) – 60% off

PlayStation Store (North America)

New Releases
The Adventures of Cookies and Cream (PS2 Classics) – $US9.99

Discounts
Shin Megami Tensei: Persona – $US9.99 – 50% off
Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 2 Innocent Sin – $US9.99 – 50% off

Good Old Games

New Releases
Wing Commander 5: Prophecy Gold Edition – $US5.99

Discounts
Activate Autumn – 60% off Activision titles

Steam
Duke Nukem 3D and Shadow Warrior Bundle – $US3.74
Serious Sam HD Double Pack – $US4.49

The Play It Again Project is a game history and preservation project that is dedicated to preserving Australian and New Zealand-authored computer games from the 1980s. It’s a collaborative effort between a number of Australian universities, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, the New Zealand Film Archive and the Berlin Computerspiele Museum. Today they launched a project to document and exhibit the history of Oceanic game development – The Popular Memory Archive.

Backed by the Australian Research Council, the Popular Memory Archive aims to explore the stories behind the people and the games of the early home gaming era, interviewing the creators of many of the pivotal games from the local scene, but also gathering the memories of the people who played them.

“The game culture in the 1980s was highly participatory, hands-on and often characterised by a do-it-yourself ethic which is why we are aspiring to create a history of games as they have been used and experienced,” said Associate Professor Melanie Swalwell, one of the driving forces behind the project.

The Popular Memory Archive will also play host to monthly panels with guests from the early game development era, covering topics such as copyright and game collectors.

A number of games based on the popular Batman animated series from the early 90s were published in 1994 and 1995. The Game Gear version was developed by Novotrade, best remembered for Ecco the Dolphin, and is a fairly straight forward jump and run game.

In the aftermath of the success of Final Fantasy VII, Squaresoft started bringing over other popular RPGs and spin offs. One such game was Chocobo’s Dungeon 2, the second in the serious of Chocobo rogue like spin-offs, and the first in the Mystery Dungeon series to be released outside of Japan.

Thunder Blade is a reasonably popular arcade game from Sega. The Master System port is pretty heavily compromised, but still somewhat enjoyable. This ad is from the brief period of time where Tonka handled Sega’s distribution and marketing in North America.

Zombie Nation is a really odd shooter for the NES where you play as either a disembodied samurai head or tengu mask, who are on a quest to destroy a meteor that has turned the population of the United States into zombies.