Retro Gaming Australia

Pit Fighter was one of those arcade games that got ported to every system around, regardless of whether they could actually handle the game or not. One such port was to the Sega Master System, whose version of the game is pretty damn lame – but at least it’s better than the Spectrum version.

Two previously unreleased Nintendo Entertainment System prototypes have found their way out of obscurity in the last week.

The first release was Dino Hockey, a bizarre take on ice hockey by Sunsoft which features dinosaurs in place of humans. What makes this release more interesting is that there was almost no coverage in the press of the time about Dino Hockey, so it was relatively unknown among the NES community. The only sighting of the game was at the 1991 Summer CES. The prototype is barely playable, but it is still an interesting piece of history.

The second release is of the scrapped NES port of Atari arcade racer Hard Drivin’. This was released as part of the 10th anniversary celebrations of the prototype focused site Lost Levels, run by Frank Cifaldi. Cifaldi had recently caught up with the NES version’s programmer, Mark Morris, who was working on the game for Tengen. As you’d expect, the game was a bit much for the NES hardware, but it’s still a pretty admirable effort.

Via RetroCollect

Davis Cup World Tour is regarded as the best tennis game on the Mega Drive due to its ridiculously large tour mode, which enables you to compete in a huge number of tournaments while building your player. This ad was censored in a number of publications due to the woman’s bare arse.

Marko’s Magic Football is a rather lighthearted little romp mixing soccer tricks with platforming action. Didn’t realise that the Oliver Twins had worked on this one until just recently.

James Bond 007: The Duel was a run and gun platformer featuring Ian Fleming’s super spy that owes a lot to Namco’s Rolling Thunder, though it’s not nearly as good. I’m pretty sure the ad for the game marks Timothy Dalton’s last official appearance as Bond.

Awesome Master System and Game Gear resource SMSPower has released another Game Gear prototype ROM, this time for the unreleased puzzle game Crazy Faces.

Crazy Faces was developed by The Kremlin, the studio responsible for Master System and Game Gear ports of games such as Desert Strike. It’s a slide puzzle game with a bit of a twist, in that you summon the pieces onto the play field. The sliding pieces can only be stopped by a wall or another piece, which makes things a little more complicated.

The game’s puzzles feature characters from games published by both Sega and Domark (who was set to publish the game).

Crazy Faces was due to be published in 1993, but was cancelled for reasons unknown.