Retro Gaming Australia

Donkey Kong Land 2 is the Game Boy adaptation of Donkey Kong Country 2. Whereas the original Donkey Kong Land was an original game inspired by DKC, the second game is more or less a cut down port. It’s still pretty good, but you’re really just better off playing the SNES original.

We at Retro Gaming Australia would love to see more retro-inspired rewards in the Australian Club Nintendo Stars Catalogue. So, it is fair to say we were a tad jealous when we spied the Japanese Club Nintendo offering original polo shirts featuring designs from some of our favourite Nintendo titles.

For 550 points each, members can reward themselves with a polo shirt for which they can choose both the colour (from a selection of eight) and logo from one of six which represent Animal Crossing, Game & Watch, Donkey Kong, The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros.

Personally, I’m partial to the pink shirt with Animal Crossing’s Rover as the logo.

Hirokazu Yasuhara, designer of gameplay and stages for early Sonic the Hedgehog titles, has joined Nintendo.

Both Yasuhara and Nintendo have confirmed his new position at Nintendo Software Technology in the U.S., Gamasutra reports. Nintendo Software Technology has developed many games for Nintendo consoles including Metroid Prime Hunters, Mario vs. Donkey Kong: Mini-Land Mayhem and various DSiWare titles. However, the Sonic co-creator’s new role at Nintendo currently remains a mystery.

Yasuhara worked on the Sonic franchise on and off up until 2002, he then moved to Naughty Dog as a senior game designer working on both the Jak and Daxter and Uncharted series.  Before his recent shift to Nintendo, Yasuhara was senior design director at Namco Bandai Games America.

1080 Snowboarding is the first snowboarding game developed by Nintendo. It was handled by members of the Wave Race 64 team. It has a pretty cool Trick Mode, though said tricks are quite difficult to execute compared to games like SSX.

Mischief Makers was a rare example of a 2D platformer on the Nintendo 64. Developed by Treasure and published by Enix (Japan) and Nintendo (rest of the world), the game puts you in control of Marina, a robotic made on a quest to save her creator from his estranged twin brother, who just happens to be the head of an evil empire.

Bionic Commando: Elite Forces is the only iteration of the series not to be published by Capcom. In fact, it was developed by Nintendo Software Technology and published by Nintendo. It’s a little bit different to the other entries in the series – more techy and futuristic, and you don’t control Radd Spencer – rather, an unnamed male or female commando.

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…)

Never did catch ’em all. Got damn close, though!

The game(s) that launched a phenomenon. Pokemon Red and Blue had tipped the handheld gaming industry on its head in Japan, and the rest of the world could not resist the lure of Pikachu and his 150 friends. The western release of the game is not actually the original Japanese release Pokemon Red / Green, but rather based on the enhanced release Pokemon Blue, which featured redrawn sprites and a substantial number of bug fixes.

Mario’s most stylish adventure.

Paper Mario is the second J-RPG Mario adventure. It was announced as something of a spiritual successor to Super Mario RPG (though at one stage, it was a direct sequel), but the hook is that the game is presented as a story book, with all of the characters made out of paper.

I will surely pay you next Tuesday for a hamburger today.

Popeye was developed by Nintendo for the arcades in 1982. They had originally tried to score the rights to Popeye for what became Donkey Kong, but King Features Syndicate wouldn’t have a bar of it – until Donkey Kong was a huge success and they found out what they missed out on. With Nintendo having no home console presence outside of Japan at the time, they licensed the game to Parker Bros. for release on the myriad of systems available at the time.