Retro Gaming Australia

Frogger is on every goddamn system ever, but it’s still pretty damn neat. This particular ad is for the VCS/2600 release.

Silent Hill 2 is arguably the highlight of Konami’s psychological horror series. While the PC version wasn’t quite as well received as the PlayStation 2 version, it is miles ahead in quality of the recent HD Collection.

Skate or Die: Bad ‘n Rad is an oft-overlooked early Game Boy platformer. Players have to manage their skater’s momentum to negotiate their way through some pretty taxing levels – it’s a bit frustrating at times, but the concept is pretty neat.

This is a dual game ad from Konami, featuring Snake’s Revenge and Super C (or Super Contra) for the NES. Before the release of Metal Gear Solid, most in the West treated Snake’s Revenge as the sequel to Metal Gear, not knowing of the existence of the MSX only Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake. There seems to have been a backlash against the game in the years since as a result of its non-canon status, and lack of Kojima involvement.

Sunset Riders is one of Konami’s more successful 90s arcade releases that wasn’t a beat ’em up. The SNES version is a bit closer to the arcade original than the Mega Drive one, but was released in smaller numbers. That makes it an expensive cartridge to acquire.

Goemon’s Great Adventure (sometimes called Mystical Ninja 2: Goemon’s Great Adventure) is the second N64 adventure featuring Konami’s blue haired ninja, and actually the last one to be released outside of Japan – and tends to carry a high price in PAL regions due to its low print run. Seems now the only place you’ll see Goemon is in pachislot games.

It’s a little bit of a disservice to call Konami’s Amidar a Pac-Man clone, given its basis in the Japanese drawing game Amikaduji, but that never stopped anyone.

Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes is a remake of Metal Gear Solid using the technology from Metal Gear Solid 2. The game is often criticised for its over-the-top cutscenes, which were directed by Japanese cult filmmaker Ryuhei Kitamura. Some also feel that the accentless voices take away from the game, in spite of the fact that they are consistent with the rest of the series. I feel like I am in the minority since I actually like the game.

If my memory serves me well, Cybernator was the first ad we ran as part of this feature. This ad is for the US version – it’s similar, but the ad copy is significantly different. The game itself – well that’s still awesome.

Konami and LucasArts had a brief partnership in the 16-bit days which yielded a few decent games. Most people know of Zombies Ate My Neighbours, but Metal Warriors was overlooked by audiences at the time – their loss. It’s a lot like Cybernator – another great SNES mech-based action-platformer published by Konami, although the games have nothing to do with each other.