Retro Gaming Australia

Prince of Persia has been ported to just about everything. The NES version is decent, but probably not the best of the home console ports.

Did you know that there were two Ghostbusters II games for the NES – one by Activision and one by HAL Laboratory? HAL’s version was never released in North America due to Activision tying up exclusivity there. Neither was particularly well received.

Adventure Island II is the follow up to the successful Adventure Island, one of the games which really cemented Hudson Soft as a force to be reckoned with in the 80s and 90s. The second game features a much larger variety of dinosaur partners to ride on.

Final Fantasy X-2 is the first direct sequel in the series, taking place about 2 years after the events of Final Fantasy X. Some felt that the game’s J-Pop thematics and costume change mechanics were a bit too much of a departure for the series, but it remains popular with most fans.

Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island is one of the most imaginative and well-executed games of all time. Its art style is utterly amazing. And yet this is the best the marketing department could do.

Sonic 3D: Flickies’ Island (or Sonic 3D Blast in North America) is an isometric Sonic game developed by Traveller’s Tales for the Mega Drive and Saturn in 1996. The Saturn version advertised here was a desperation effort by Sega to cover the gap left in their holiday lineup by the delay and later cancellation of the planned 3D Sonic game, Sonic Xtreme.

James Pond II: Codename RoboCod sees the piscine secret agent on a quest to save Santa and his elves from the evil Dr Maybe. Popular in its time on the micros and Mega Drive, RoboCod has become a bit of a mainstay of the bargain bin with stealth re-releases on the Nintendo DS and PlayStation 2.

Mega Man Mania was a cancelled remake/compilation release of the five Game Boy Mega Man (or Rockman World) games for the Game Boy Advance. Planned for release at the same time as the Mega Man Anniversary Collection, the game was continuously delayed. It is widely believed that Capcom had lost the original source code for the games, and the release was cancelled due to the game not meeting internal quality standards.

Zonk is at a basic level a futuristic incarnation of Bonk, however, the game in which he stars in, Air Zonk, is a shoot ’em up rather than a platformer. Have to admit that the PC Engine version has a cooler name, but Turbobros should be used to the PC Engine being so much better than the Turbografx.

Syndicate is pretty much one of the greatest games of the 90s – it’s a damn shame that the series was overlooked after the release of Syndicate Wars. I’ll admit that I enjoyed the FPS revival released in 2012, even though it was so far removed from everything I love about the original games. This ad is spruiking the UK release of the SNES and Jaguar versions.