Retro Gaming Australia

Captain America and the Avengers is a reasonably popular Data East-developed arcade beat ’em up. The home ports are, however, kind of sucky largely due to the limited capabilities of home consoles compared to the arcade board.

The 90s were pretty dark times for comic book characters, not just in terms of the darker stories and the aftermath of the collector driven market crash, but also the fact that Acclaim Entertainment controlled the Marvel license for most of the decade. Even when some characters escaped the Acclaim brand, they wound up in absolutely terrible games as evidenced by The Incredible Hulk: The Pantheon Saga, which is generally considered to be the worst superhero game before Superman for the Nintendo 64.

You’ll be able to take your favourite Marvel and Capcom heroes for a ride on April 25th when Capcom releases Marvel vs. Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes onto the App Store.

Nothing has been said regarding pricing or features though, so you’ll probably have to wait until the game is released to find that stuff out.

One would presume that this release is on feature parity with other recent releases of the game. We’re also praying that the game has iCade support, given the notoriously awful control schemes featured in Capcom’s other iOS fighters.

Capcom was on fire in the 90s.

Marvel Super Heroes is one in a long line of late 90s Capcom fighting games featuring characters from Marvel Comics. This one is based loosely around the Infinity Gauntlet event that was playing out in the comics in the 90s. The arcade version was released in 1995, but it was two years before it made the trip home. Do yourself a favour and go for the Saturn release if you want the home version.

The one that started a real turnaround for superhero games.

Spider-Man is the nineteenth (I believe) game based on Marvel’s most popular comic book character, and the first to be published by Activision, who still holds the license to this day. The game was developed by Neversoft using the same tech from Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.

Video games and comics share similar audience demographics, so it was only a matter of time after the meteoric rise of the games industry that popular games found their way onto the colourful pages of the comic book.

There are many comic books based on video game series – far more than I had anticipated when this feature was conceived – but we’re going to look at them all over time.

First up is Marvel’s 1991 six issue miniseries Double Dragon. (continue reading…)

Marvel’s latest feature film Captain America is due out in theatres later this month. You know, the one starring the guy that played the Human Torch in the Fantastic Four movies before they decided to reboot them.

Anyway, the promote the upcoming release of the film, Marvel has posted a 16-bit inspired flash game featuring the Cap. (continue reading…)