Retro Gaming Australia

Haunting Starring Polterguy is one of the more original Mega Drive games to come out of Electronic Arts. You play as Poulterguy, a skateboarding punk who recently met his end due to a shoddy skateboard manufactured by the Sardinis. To get your revenge, you need to scare the Sardinis out of their four mansions using your ghostly talents such as possession to turn the Sardinis’ material items against them.

Metal Gear Solid (known as Metal Gear: Ghost Babel in Japan) for the Game Boy Color is an alternate story (i.e. non-canon) set seven years after the events of the original Metal Gear. It plays a lot like Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, but with the wall-flattening introduced in the PlayStation game. It’s arguably one of the best GBC games around.

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night marks the start of a dramatic shift in the series, moving away from pure action toward a more exploration based gameplay with light RPG elements – the so-called “Metroidvania”. Finding a PAL copy of the game is an expensive endeavour due to high demand.

Koei found success in its early days producing strategy games for a variety of formats – including the consoles of the day. Their Historical Simulation Series seemed a bit out of place on a store shelf filled with funny animal platformers and shooters, but still managed to find an audience. Liberty or Death puts the player in the shoes of one of 6 Commanders in Chief (3 American, 3 British) during the American Revolutionary War.

Another case of a moderately clever ad for a terrible game. You can see where the money went. Goes by a number of different names: Yogi Bear in Japan, Adventures of Yogi Bear in America and Yogi Bear: Cartoon Capers in Europe.

In the modern era, sports game updates are relatively incremental affairs – the sheer time it takes to develop a game from the ground up doesn’t gel with the annual release schedule. In the 16-bit era, it was a different story – one year’s sports update could be substantially different from the previous. FIFA ’95 was EA’s second crack at a soccer game, and it offered numerous improvements over the first game, including domestic club teams, vastly improved graphics, control and animation.

Defcon 5 is a first person shooter released in 1995 – a largely forgotten first person shooter/strategy game hybrid that formed part of the early PlayStation lineup (along with releases on the PC and Saturn). The DEFCON system is frequently incorrectly used in popular culture – the higher the number, the lower the danger. DEFCON 5 denotes regular peace time readiness, while DEFCON 1 would mean imminent nuclear war.

WCW: The Main Event comes from a time when WCW was in kind of an awkward growth stage, lacking the star power of the WWF, but still offering reasonably good wrestling action. The video games, however, were terrible.

Before they were recycling Conrad for the nth time, the Spec Ops games were low budget generic military shooter trash.

The Virtual Boy is the only major failure that Nintendo has suffered since entering the home video games market in 1977, but the system’s limited availability and boastings of VR like experience have made it a hot item among collectors.