Retro Gaming Australia

Kirby Super Star or Kirby’s Fun Pak is a compilation of eight Kirby themed games. Some of the games are mini-games (like Gourmet Race), while others are platformers in the standard Kirby mode. There’s even a remake of the original Kirby’s Dream Land in there.

Super Mario RPG was one of the most popular J-RPGs of the 16-bit era. Like many RPGs of that vintage, the game was not released in Australia or Europe, which aggravated many fans, since the game proved to not be compatible with most universal adaptors. It did eventually make it here through the Wii’s Virtual Console service.

For the longest time, many outside of Japan were led to believe that Snake’s Revenge was the true sequel to Metal Gear, but upon encouragement from one of the guys that worked on Snake’s Revenge, Hideo Kojima set out to make the real sequel – Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake. It was not until the release of Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence some 13 years later that the West got an officially translated version of the game.

Sonic the Hedgehog 3 was meant to be Sega’s big game for 1993, but the project proved far too ambitious with the required cartridge size needed to house the game’s content simply being far too expensive to produce. They split the game into two halves – Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and Sonic and Knuckles, and hurriedly assembled a team to develop Sonic Spinball to go to bat in its place, eventually releasing Sonic 3 in March 1994 and Sonic & Knuckles in October 1994.

The Mega Drive version of Batman Returns was a kind of middling platformer that sold quite well, so Sega decided to have Malibu Interactive work on an enhanced version for the Mega CD. This version was praised for its new driving sections, but people still didn’t really care for the base game.

F117A Stealth Fighter is one of those early simulations that put you in the cockpit of the famous American stealth fighter. The stealth fighters were infamous for being able to avoid radar detection – except from Australia’s Jindalee Operational Radar Network.

Mega lo Mania, known as Tyrants: Fight Through Time in North America (hence the name in the ad), is an early real-time strategy game developed by Sensible Software. Players compete with 3 other warlords across the ages for the right to rule over increasingly larger lands. Your soldiers start off with nothing but sticks and stones, but after a few levels you’ll be rocking nukes. Mega lo Mania‘s console release was pretty low profile, which is probably why it tends to get overlooked outside of Amiga fan groups.

FIFA Soccer 96 was the first annual instalment of the series to feature a 3D camera, then dubbed by EA Sports as “Virtual Stadium” technology. This ad is for the 16-bit Mega Drive version, which lacked that feature, but was still a decent upgrade over FIFA Soccer 95.

Spyro the Dragon is the second title developed by Insomniac Games – quite the departure from their violent first person shooter debut Disruptor. The game struck a chord with the PlayStation audience and Spyro became one of the most popular brands on the system.

The Mega Drive wasn’t exactly an RPG powerhouse, especially when compared to the SNES, but it had a couple of games that could certainly hold their own. One such game was Shining Force II, a strategy RPG developed by a division of Sega that would eventually separate from the company and form Camelot Software Planning (best known for Mario Golf, Mario Tennis and Golden Sun)