Retro Gaming Australia

Aaahh!! Real Monsters was one of Nickelodeon’s most popular Nicktoons during the 1990s, so like many others, it endured the video game conversion treatment. It takes a bit of inspiration from The Lost Vikings, with the player controlling three characters (Ickis, Krumm and Oblina) with unique abilities required to traverse the game’s puzzling environments.

Before Bungie was forced into its singular Halo focus, they made other games. One such game was Myth: The Fallen Lords, an ultra gory real-time strategy game. Myth was different to most RTS games of the day in that it didn’t focus on resource collecting and base building – it was all about trying to get through missions with the least number of casualties by using advanced formation tactics and taking full advantage of the game’s rich physics system.

Max Payne was a surprise hit in 2001 thanks to its liberal use of bullet time, which was popular due to the relatively recent success of The Matrix. The game is pretty damn awesome, due largely to the fantastic atmosphere. Shame about the nightmare levels, though.

Sega aggressively promoted its Game Gear system early on, taking full opportunity to highlight the fact that it was a full colour system, unlike the Game Boy. The system never really caught on thanks to its obscene battery draining capability, but it did manage to find a small audience that supported it into the latter half of the 90s.

Before the Arkham series blew us all away, Konami’s Batman Returns brawler for the SNES was generally considered to be the best game to feature the Dark Knight. It borrows a generous number of concepts from other brawlers, but it executes them well.

Double Dragon III marks the point at which the series was driven into irrelevance, due to its sheer crappiness when compared to contemporary brawlers like Final Fight. The game introduces a third playable character, Sonny, who is basically a yellow version of the Lee brothers.

Castlevania: Bloodlines (The New Generation for PAL, or Vampire Killer for Japan) is the only Castlevania game to have been released on a Sega system. That has led to it gaining a bit of a “red-headed stepchild” treatment at the hands of series fans due to the game’s weird attempt to tie the series into Bram Stoker’s Dracula novel, which has mostly been retconned now.

Lethal Enforcers was Konami’s take on the light gun game, and one of a scant few games by the publisher to use digitised actors. There were three games in the series, but few are familiar with the third entry which was released in mid 2004. This ad is for the Mega CD version of the game.

Day of the Tentacle is one of the finest games from the golden age of adventure games, and a painful reminder of how LucasArts was once a developer and publisher that did more than just coast off the Star Wars license.

Maxis’ SimCity is one of the most popular computer games of all time. There are few people out there who had a computer in the early 90s who can’t say that they watched on in glee as they summoned a monster to flatten their digital metropolis. The series is set to be rebooted with the release of a new entry in the series, also called SimCity, in 2013.