Retro Gaming Australia

Sony announced earlier in the week via the official US PlayStation Blog that a limited selection of PlayStation 2 games will be made available for sale on PlayStation Network.

The first titles to appear as part of the new “Only on PSN” campaign are God Hand, GrimGrimoire, Maximo: Ghosts to Glory, Odin Sphere and Ring of Red. As of next month, the PS2 games will appear in their own category.

Sony Computer Entertainment Europe has said that the PS2 games will be appearing on the PAL stores in the next month or so, but did not specify which titles will appear.

It’s been all over the news, so you’ve probably heard about this one already. While the iDevice range has undoubtedly impacted a lot of lives, we cannot forget the achievements of Apple under Jobs’ leadership in the late 1970s and 1980s. The Apple II and Macintosh lines were part of an onslaught of affordable home computing, and with those computers came games. Major companies like Electronic Arts published their first games on Apple machines, and major franchises like Madden and Prince of Persia debuted on Apple platforms.

Divisive.

Castlevania‘s first trip into 3D was well received by critics at the time of release, despite what they try to claim years later. It was cast out of series canon by series producer Koji Igarashi in around the time of the release of Harmony of Dissonance, though his official stance is that Castlevania 64 is now a side story.

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Or Dynamite Deka, if you prefer.

Die Hard Arcade was an arcade brawler loosely based on the events of the film. It was the last game developed by Sega Technical Institute before they were wound up. The Die Hard license was attached to the game after it was completed – the game was originally called Dynamite Cop, a title retained for the game’s sequel.

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It’s been a while since we’ve had a foreign language ad on here, so here you go.

Golden Axe II was the Mega Drive exclusive sequel to Golden Axe. Unlike the later arcade sequel The Revenge of Death Adder, Golden Axe II is virtually identical to the first game, a factor not unnoticed by the media at the time. Sadly, The Revenge of Death Adder still hasn’t seen a home release in any form. This ad originates from Spain.

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The Contra series’ darkest hour.

It seemed like a good idea on paper. Give Contra to a competent developer, bring it into 3D, make money. Unfortunately, the first part of this experiment, Contra: Legacy of War was a shameful effort. Yet Appaloosa managed to do worse on its second attempt – C: The Contra Adventure. These games are so bad that Konami refuses to acknowledge them as part of the Contra series. The game ended up being released exclusively in North America.

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The cancellation of this was like a sweep to the last legs of the Dreamcast.

Half-Life was a smash hit on the PC, and plans were quickly brought together to take the game to the Dreamcast. They were even planning to give the Dreamcast version a few exclusive levels in the form of Half-Life: Blue Shift. However, the game was cancelled just days before release, and Blue Shift was redirected for release on the PC.

RIP Ensemble.

Age of Empires was a fantastic real time strategy game that came from one of Microsoft’s many pushes to get people to play games on Windows. Most would argue that the second game in the series is the real gem, though.

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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.

If you’ve been around the Australian gaming scene for a while, you’ve probably heard of Cameron Davis. He’s had multiple roles in the industry, ranging from games journalist to producer on several titles at Krome Studios.

Davis is also something of a comic writer and artist, having run several web comic series over the past few years. His latest effort is Blow the Cartridge, which focuses entirely on classic video games.

New comics go up on Wednesday, and there’s even a poll on the site where you can vote on the subject of the next comic. Or you could pester Davis in the thread he started up here, I suppose.