Retro Gaming Australia

French presidential candidate François Bayrou has, in an unusual move, targeted the video game enthusiast vote for the upcoming election. In an attempt to “unlock” more support, Bayrou has had the Konami code embedded in his campaign website (www.bayrou.fr).

Visiting Bayrou’s website and entering the famous cheat code (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A) reveals the candidate’s election message – 8-bit style.

Very cool.

Source: The Telegraph

Like many popular games of the day, Konami’s 1981 classic Frogger was released on every damn system imaginable. This particular ad was for the Intellivision version, which was published by board game manufacturer Parker Bros.

Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance was the second of three original Castlevania games developed for the Game Boy Advance, and arguably the most divisive. Many fans label the game’s soundtrack as the worst in the franchise’s history. Others feel the game is too easy. Despite these complaints, it is still considered one of the better games on the Game Boy Advance.

Konami and Square Enix have teamed up to produce more Play Arts Kai toys in celebration of Metal Gear’s 25th anniversary, which will be celebrated this July.

The Cyborg Ninja was the first cab off the rank – now the second figure in the range, the MGS1 Themed Solid Snake is available. You can order it from AmiAmi for 4390 yen.

More MGS-themed Play Arts figures are planned for the year, including Meryl Silverburgh, Solidus Snake and the MGS4 Raiden.

Again, we apologise for the bad lighting, but we wanted to show the actual item off.

Silent Hill puts you in the role of Harry Mason, a dedicated father whose search for his missing daughter Cheryl brings him to the titular town following a car crash. The game’s emphasis on psychological was a departure from the standard survival horror fare of the day, which mostly relied on jump scares.

The Nintendo Entertainment System is a difficult system when it comes to picking the best games. It’s one instance where the phrase “rose tinted specs” really comes into action. Many great video game series were started on the NES, but many of them do not hold up today. We have selected the absolute best games on the system to showcase in this article. If you want to start collecting games for the NES, these are ones that you absolutely must get.

The Essentials are games selected by the RGA team (along with a few highly knowledgable friends) and are the games we consider to be the best on the system – without question.

Our criteria for this list was simply that the game must be available in English, not just PAL. That does rule out a couple of quality Famicom only releases, but we will cover them in our upcoming NES Imports feature. Read on to find out our selections! (continue reading…)

As part of the celebrations for the 25th anniversary of the Metal Gear series this year, Konami and Kojima Productions have been working with Square Enix to produce figures of the most popular characters from the series.

The first figure, the Cyborg Ninja/Gray Fox, is now available in Japan. You can get it for 4400yen from AmiAmi.

The lighting in this room is awful, but I figured you all might like to see the actual box and figure, rather than the same old promotional stills.

Zone of the Enders HD Collection is set to launch this Autumn, according to a release from Konami.

Unofficial reports and retailer dates originally had the collection primed for a May release, but this does not appear to be the case.

The collection also appears to be getting a lot more attention than first thought, with images of redone introductory cutscenes recently being touted by Hideo Kojima. It was also recently revealed that the collection will feature the superior Special Edition release of Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner, which was not released in North America.

Metal Gear lunacy at its finest.

Metal Gear Solid: Special Missions (or VR Missions for our American brethren) is a mission pack featuring 300+ VR training missions, similar to the half dozen that were on the original Metal Gear Solid disc. The expansion was actually the second disc of the game’s Japanese re-release Metal Gear Solid: Integral, which was an improved version of the original game, but Konami decided to release it by itself outside of Japan. This ad is for the French release.

Apparently today marks 25 years since Contra debuted in Japanese arcades way back on February 20th, 1987. You should celebrate by playing Contra, or by watching this video of Neo Contra.

Yes, he is running on top of a helicopter propeller.

We’ll have some sort of feature on the series in the coming months. Maybe Konami will get around to revealing that reboot before then.