Retro Gaming Australia

One of the best PC RPGs of all time, Fallout, is available for download free of charge from Good Old Games for the next 48 hours.

Normally the game would set you back $US4.99

The servers are being hammered as you’d expect, but you don’t need me to tell you that you totally need to download this.

Earthworm Jim was pretty heavily advertised, but it was well worth the money. Not only was the campaign clever, but the game was actually good. Shiny’s debut marked them as a force to be reckoned with, at least until their unmitigated failure with Enter the Matrix.

Before they became masters of the real-time strategy and MMO, Blizzard had a history of developing a wider variety of games. One such title was Blackthorne (or Blackhawk for its PAL release), a platformer arguably inspired by Flashback involving a merc named Kyle who travels to the planet Tuul to save his ancestors. The game has two releases – the 1994 SNES and DOS release, and the 1995 32X and Mac release. The key difference is that the latter uses pre-rendered 3D models as sprites.

Possibly my favourite RPG on the PC.

Fallout 2 is set roughly 80 years of the original game, with the player controlling a direct descendant of the original Vault Dweller. Your village, Arroyo is in peril: you need to find a Garden of Eden Creation Kit (G.E.C.K.) in the remnants of Vault 13, the facility from which your ancestor began his/her journey. It’s a bit lighter and funnier than the first game, but it doesn’t compromise on the story or gameplay.

Ah, the days of mocking your competitors.

ClayFighter was a fighting game developed by Visual Concepts and published by Interplay. The game used clay figures and stop motion animation instead of sprites, but the gameplay underlying the fancy graphics was far from good. In spite of this, the series continued for another three iterations.

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Amusing concept, terrible game.

Boogerman: A Pick and Flick Adventure is an unconventional platformer where the titular character uses snot, farts and burps to subdue his enemies. Although it has an amusing art style and is wonderfully animated, Boogerman‘s gameplay is quite terrible. This ad is for the UK release.

Search for Boogerman on eBay