Retro Gaming Australia

Howard Phillips, largely known for his role as the face of Nintendo of America in the 1980s, put together a rather unique Nintendo World Championships package for sale over the last week. The pack included the 126th Nintendo World Championships cart, Philips’ personal copy, his original all access badge, a press kit for the event and a signed certificate of authenticity.

The package was listed on eBay for $US7,500.00 and wound up selling for $17,367.00.

Phillips stated in the auction that he hoped the package would go to an enthusiast, rather than a reseller. We’ll just have to wait and see if that is the case.

The Nintendo 64 Expansion Pak boosts the RAM of the Nintendo 64 from 4MB to 8MB. Most games used the memory expansion for high resolution modes, boosting the outputted resolution from 320×240 to 640×480. Unfortunately this typically resulted in even worse framerates (looking at you, Turok 2). A number of later generation games either required the Pak (Donkey Kong 64, The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask) or greatly benefitted from its use (Perfect Dark).

Last month, both The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons and The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages were released on the Nintendo 3DS Virtual Console in Japan. Many were hoping that North America and PAL regions would too see such a release on their respective 3DS eShops forthwith.

The producer of The Legend of Zelda series, Eiji Aonuma, didn’t keep us waiting long. However, rather than confirming the western release via the usual means, Aonuma instead opted to make the announcement on the official The Legend of Zelda series Miiverse community – posting “Our plan is to release these two games in other territories some time before summer!

That’s some happy-making news.

Source: Nintendo Life

F-Zero AX was the arcade equivalent of F-Zero GX, released by Nintendo and Sega for the not-widely-used Triforce arcade system, which was based on GameCube hardware. Players of F-Zero GX could take their GameCube memory cards to an arcade with an F-Zero AX arcade machine and download a save file that would unlock the AX Cup, letting them race on the F-Zero AX tracks on the home version of the game. Those not fortunate enough to have access to an AX arcade machine had to beat story mode on hard to unlock the AX Cup, which is a legendary feat few can accomplish.

It turns out that the entirety of F-Zero AX was actually sitting unaccessible on the F-Zero GX disc. Some industruous hackers armed with copies of the GameCube Action Replay have dug into the depths of the disc and found the arcade game nestled within.

If you have an Action Replay or Gameshark, you can find the code necessary to make GX boot into AX here.

Today marks 20 years since the release of the original Star Fox, but we decided to instead steer attention towards Fox McCloud’s finest hour – Lylat Wars, or Starfox 64 depending on your region.

In their most recent Nintendo Direct event in Japan, Nintendo announced that both The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons and The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages are set for release on the 3DS Virtual Console in Japan.

The two Zelda Game Boy Color titles were original released on February 27, 2001 in Japan, and made their way to the west later that year. The 3DS Virtual console versions also release February 27 and are priced at 600 yen a pop. Up until March 20, players can purchase both games for the discounted price of 1,000 yen.

We suspect The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons and The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages will too be available in North America and PAL regions in the near future.

One of the major complaints about the PAL version of the Virtual Console has been that we get PAL versions of games on it. Before the wondrous days of multiformat television, video games used to be converted from NTSC to PAL, often poorly. The end result was usually a game that ran approximately 16.7% slower, and had black bars on the top and bottom of the screen to fill up the extra lines of resolution that PAL has over NTSC.

Now that we’re on HDTV, the PAL and NTSC standards are history, but Nintendo insisted on releasing 50hz versions of games on the WiiU. It appears with the imminent release of F-Zero (due today for only 30 cents!), Nintendo has changed their tune, offering the full screen, full speed version of the classic futuristic racer.

Whether this is a once off remains to be seen.

The Super Mario Bros. film is an often maligned piece of media due to the dramatic shift the property made during the transfer from video game to movie. The film spent ages in development, going through numerous writers and directors, and the end result was dramatically different from what was originally planned.

One of the most popular and groundbreaking games of the 32/64-bit era was GoldenEye 007. The game is widely held to be one of the best licensed games ever produced, but the reason it’s so popular is its splitscreen multiplayer feature.

Solstice is an isometric puzzle game developed by Software Creations for the NES. It draws a bit of inspiration from early Ultimate/Rare isometric adventures on the ZX Spectrum. Respect++ if you can beat Solstice without exploits – I’ve always found it to be bloody difficult.