Retro Gaming Australia

Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins is arguably Mario’s finest portable 2D adventure to date. As well as being remembered for its fantastic level design and cool power ups (like the rabbit ears), Super Mario Land 2 also played host to the first appearance of Wario, who was more of an evil Mario doppelganger than the crazy, money hungry bastard we know today.

Following from the success of Star Wars on the NES, it seemed like a no-brainer to bring the game to the Game Boy. A few compromises are made along the way, but the game is still quite similar. The Game Boy version actually went through a number of hands – Ubi Soft, Capcom and Nintendo published the game at different stages of release and in different countries.

Remember when Tim Burton didn’t feel obligated to cast Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham-Carter in everything? Remember when he actually made good movies? Then you might remember Beetlejuice. Evidently someone at LJN thought that the black comedy was perfect video game material, and commissioned Rare to develop a game based upon it. The result isn’t actually very good.

Sonic Shuffle is Sega’s attempt to latch onto the Mario Party craze. It an admirable effort – they even brought in Mario Party developer Hudson Soft in to assist with development – but the pace of the game is just far too slow, not to mention the insufferable load times and cheating AI.

Power Stone is one of Capcom’s finest brawlers, yet it never really gets the attention it deserves. Players fight against each other in an arena full of weapons and breakable objects, vying for control of the titular power stones – grab three of them and you can execute your special attack.

As one of the most influential games of all time, Doom continues to be ported to just about every platform released – either officially or unofficially. This has been going on for many years; even though Doom was a couple of years old by the time the PlayStation was released, the game was still popular enough for Midway and GT Interactive to team up to bring it to Sony’s console and sell more than a million units.

Mortal Kombat 3 is probably the most divisive game in the series. Some believe it is the point where everything started to fall apart – too many characters, many of which have ridiculous or stupid designs, and that the story ceased to make sense. Others enjoy the increased speed, variety of new characters and dystopian setting. No matter which camp you come from, I think we can all agree that it was pretty stupid to leave Scorpion out.

It wasn’t the first crossover brawler by a long shot, but there’s something about Super Smash Bros. that makes it the most popular. It could be that all the various Nintendo universes, no matter how absurd, seem to click together. It could be the accessible gameplay that lends itself perfectly to couch-based multiplayer. Or it could simply be the fact that you can beat the snot out of Jigglypuff.

Pixar’s worst film, A Bug’s Life, also happens to be a subpar video game. What a surprise!

Godzilla for the Game Boy is a port of the somewhat bizarre MSX version, which is a puzzle game rather than the “smash everything in sight” style of gameplay you’d expect. Toho Inc. published the game in the US while Nintendo published the game in Europe.