Retro Gaming Australia

The regular season gets underway today, so here’s an ad for an AFL game few will remember. There’s a common misconception that Aussie Rules Footy for the NES was the first AFL game, but Australian Rules Football, produced for the various micros actually came out about two years earlier. It was developed in the UK for the expat market. The presence of the VFL logo would suggest that it was also the first licensed game based on the sport, and the only one to feature the VFL license.

Before Naughty Dog made games about mass murderer “everyman” Nathan Drake, they made platformers – quite good ones too. Crash Bandicoot was created in conjunction with Universal Interactive and Sony Computer Entertainment, and really set the standard for platformers on the PlayStation.

ClayFighter 2: Judgment Clay is the sequel to the surprisingly successful (but not all that good) claymation fighter, ClayFighter. Only three characters from the original were retained, and the Mega Drive release was cancelled.

The Bouncer is another collaboration between DreamFactory and Squaresoft. It was heavily anticipated during the early days of the PlayStation 2 due to the high quality of previous DreamFactory/Square collaborations and impressive early footage. However the game was scaled back during development and the final product failed to match the vision. It is not a bad game, it is just short and bare.

Samurai Shodown for the 3DO is arguably the best non-Neo Geo home release of the game. Shame you have to use the ghastly 3DO pad to play it.

This is a dual game ad from Konami, featuring Snake’s Revenge and Super C (or Super Contra) for the NES. Before the release of Metal Gear Solid, most in the West treated Snake’s Revenge as the sequel to Metal Gear, not knowing of the existence of the MSX only Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake. There seems to have been a backlash against the game in the years since as a result of its non-canon status, and lack of Kojima involvement.

Rambo for the NES is a fairly typical licensed run and gun platformer upon first glance, but it actually shares quite a bit in common with Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. The game is based on Rambo: First Blood Part II, but deviates from the film at numerous points.

Wizardry is widely held to be one of the most influential games of all time. It is often credited as being the game which inspired the creation of the Japanese RPG, as Dragon Quest designer Yuji Horii lists it alongside Ultima as being a major influence in the design of the first game in the series. While the Wizardry series ceased in the West with Wizardry 8, spin-offs continued to be produced in Japan.

Sunset Riders is one of Konami’s more successful 90s arcade releases that wasn’t a beat ’em up. The SNES version is a bit closer to the arcade original than the Mega Drive one, but was released in smaller numbers. That makes it an expensive cartridge to acquire.

Dragon Power is a great example of what used to happen to games based on anime licenses in a time before anime was popular in North America. It’s actually an adaptation of the second Dragon Ball game for the Famicom, with Goku replaced by a generic kung fu fighter. In France and Spain, where Dragon Ball was adapted well before it was in North America, Britain and Australia, the game was released intact.