Retro Gaming Australia

Alex Kidd in Miracle World is a Master System game which should need no introduction. Secret Commando, on the other hand, went by a different name in every territory – Secret Commando in PAL regions, Ashura in Japan and Rambo: First Blood Part II in North America.

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.

E.T.’s Rugby League is quite possibly the first video game developed around the Australian rugby league competition. It was commissioned for development by Ozisoft, who enlisted the help of World Class Rugby developer Denton Designs to adapt their existing rugby game into a rugby league game. It was endorsed by Cronulla Sharks legend-turned fishing show host Andrew “E.T.” Ettinghausen, and carries the official licenses of the New South Wales Rugby League and Australian Rugby League.

One of the reasons that Sony wasn’t seen as much of a threat in the video game sector when the PlayStation was being prepared was because most of their output on consoles and computers up to that point was rubbish. One such game was ESPN Baseball Tonight, which attempted to leverage the name of the biggest sports television network on a rather poor baseball sim.

Frogger is on every goddamn system ever, but it’s still pretty damn neat. This particular ad is for the VCS/2600 release.

Batman Begins is the only one of the three Christopher Nolan directed Batman movies to receive a video game tie-in for all major console formats. It’s probably not a bad thing in the end, as Batman Begins can only be described as middling at best. The only standout part of the game is the Batmobile levels, which share technology with Burnout 3.

Another World is a landmark game from the early 90s, best remembered for its blend of cinematic action and puzzles. The US release was called Out of this World, and has some ghastly ass box art.

Alone in the Dark is widely heralded as the game that established the modern survival horror genre, and was Infogrames most popular original series. Unfortunately, the sequels were never really as good as the original, and the brand really suffered in the 2000s with the awful Uwe Boll film and the problematic 2008 game.

WWF Rage in the Cage was the third of Acclaim and Sculptured Software’s 16-bit WWF games. It’s very similar to Royal Rumble, which released around the same time, but trades the battle royal for a steel cage match, introductions by Howard Finkel and a bunch of postage stamp sized FMV sequences. It also boasts a few exclusive wrestlers – The Nasty Boyz (Brian Knobbs and Jerry Sags) and the Headshrinkers (Fatu and Samu).

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.