Retro Gaming Australia

G-Darius is the fourth entry of the series. While it doesn’t feature the multi-screen spanning play of the first two games in the series, it is the first to be presented with 3D polygonal graphics, and adds a new beam duel system.

Bubble Bobble and Rainbow Islands have been released on just about every platform around. This particular ad was for the PC, PlayStation and Saturn release in 1996. This release is infamous for outing the fact that Taito had lost the original source code for Bubble Bobble – developer Probe was sent an original PCB and had to piece the game together from that.

The Colecovision had the misfortune of being released about a year before the bottom fell out of the North American video gaming market, so it missed out on a great many arcade ports. Over time, homebrew developers have sought to right this wrong by porting many arcade games to the console, including the Taito classics Lock n Chase, Chack n Pop, and Elevator Action.

CollectorVision has decided to bundle these three Taito classics together in a new compilation called Taito Legends. To sweeten the deal, they’re throwing in a fourth, previously unreleased game – Jungle King. The bundle will be available at a special price too.

For those that already own the previous releases, Jungle King will be available separately.

No price or release dates have been announced as yet.

Bubble Bobble is one of the all-time classic arcade platformers, so it’s no surprise that it exists in some form on every single console and computer format released in the 30 or so years since.

There are two Flintstones games on the NES – the infamous Surprise at Dinosaur Peak, a late rental-exclusive release in the US which tends to fetch a ton of money, and the relatively common The Rescue of Dino and Hoppy, which gets relatively no attention despite being one of the better licensed platformers on the NES.

Lufia and the Fortress of Doom (or Estopolis Denki) is the first in a series of popular J-RPGs from Neverland and Taito. Being an RPG on the SNES, you can bet it’ll cost you a pretty penny to acquire a complete copy, but it’s worth it.

The heroes of the Bubble Bobble series (and assorted spin-offs), Bub and Bob, are set to be immortalised in plushie form, if eyewitness reports from the 2013 London Toy Fair are to be believed.

No details as yet beyond the fact that they’ll be manufactured by Together Plus, who’ve been doing all sorts of Mario merchandise as of late.

Via Video Game Memorabilia Museum

Akira is something of a tragedy when it comes to the video game treatment. Every single game based on the anime masterpiece has been utter shit.

Now you can experience the game that started the tradition of terrible Akira games – the Famicom version. Developed by Taito and released in 1988, around the time of the film, Akira for the Famicom is an adventure game, picking up just after the point at which Kaneda and his gang are captured.

It’s pretty bad – even the notoriously generous Famicom gave the game a pathetic 17/40.

Translation group DankTrans was behind this effort. The game ROM needs to be expanded for the patch to work (due to the English translation taking up a lot more space than the Japanese original), so applying the patch is not quite as easy as normal.

You can get the patch here.

Taito’s Growl (or Runark in its original Japanese release) is a rather odd take on the arcade brawler, given that you essentially play as an forest ranger who deals with poachers with a mix of fisticuffs and explosives. The home port for the Mega Drive lost a bit of the luster of the arcade version, unfortunately.

Taito’s arcade classic Chase H.Q. made the journey home to a myriad of platforms. This particular ad is for the Game Gear release, which was for all intents and purposes identical to the Master System version.