Retro Gaming Australia

Streets of Rage II is pretty much the best game on the Mega Drive. Great graphics, one of the best soundtracks of all time and arguably the best gameplay in a 2D beat ’em up.

Saturday Night Slammasters (or Muscle Bomber in Japan) is a fighting/wrestling game developed by Capcom in 1993. The game features characters designed by legendary Fist of the North Star artist Tetsuo Hara, as well as an appearance by Final Fight‘s Mike Haggar.

Widely held to be one of the worst games of the fifth generation era, Bubsy 3D is a shining example of just how wrong things could go during early 3D game development. The developer, Eidetic, did eventually learn how to make good games in 3D – they went on to develop the Syphon Filter series and became a first party Sony Computer Entertainment developer known as Bend Studio.

Glover is a somehwat divisive platformer from the fifth generation era. Some people found it to be quite charming, others hold it up as a shining example of the deluge of middling mascot platformers which largely met their demise in the sixth generation era.

Mega Man X3 is one of the final titles to be released on the SNES (outside of Japan, anyway). Due to the limited release of and demand for the game, it has quickly become one of the most expensive SNES titles on the secondary market.

Video games don’t come much scarier than Fatal Frame (or Project Zero for the rest of us). Main character Miku goes to the mysterious Himuro Mansion to look for her brother Mafuyu, who has been missing for several weeks. The mansion is full of evil spirits, which Miku can vanquish with her special antique camera.

Phantasy Star is one of the great console RPGs of the 1980s. It was groundbreaking upon release for a number of reasons – fantastic graphics, a much more complex story than most games at the time, and a female lead character.

With Sonic the Hedgehog being Sega’s breakout success in the home console space, it seemed only natural to develop a Sonic game to promote their new CD based add-on, the Mega CD. The Sonic development team essentially splintered off into two groups; a team at Sega Technical Institute in the USA led by Yuji Naka which developed Sonic 2, and a team in Japan led by Naoto Oshima which made Sonic CD. This led to Sonic CD having a distinctly different feel to Sonic 2.

God Hand is a difficult yet highly amusing beat ’em up developed by Clover Studio. You play as Gene, who wields one of the titular God Hands, which gives him all kinds of awesome powers. Gene has a bit of a puerile sense of humor which is reflected in his range of special powers, which includes crotch kicks, spankings and a home run hit.

Mario Golf for the Nintendo 64 is one of the great multiplayer games of the fifth generation era, inviting players to compete on courses with various Mario related themes. It’s easy to pick up and play, but can get quite fiendish on the later courses.