Retro Gaming Australia

Starting the new year off with a bang with this ad for the North American release of House of the Dead 2, which was stripped of its light-gun support in that particular version due to post Columbine anxiety. No such alteration was made to the PAL or Japanese releases.

This isn’t exactly the sort of ad that inspires one to purchase said game. One of those things that made Sony seem like less of a threat in the games industry than they turned out to be.

3Xtreme is the third and final game in Sony Computer Entertainment’s shortlived extreme sports series. The game continues the series trademark Road Rash-inspired extreme sports racing motif, but switches up the graphics from sprites to polygons – to the detriment of the frame rate.

With the smashing success of Grand Theft Auto in the sixth generation, every publisher felt the need to do a game based on criminal activity and gang culture. Of course as Ubisoft proved with 187 Ride or Die, slapping something together with those themes and throwing it out there expecting success is a pretty shitty thing to do.

Real Bout Fatal Fury 2: The Newcomers is the third instalment of the Fatal Fury spin-off series Real Bout. In addition to being one of SNK’s better fighting games, it also has one of the best box arts of all time.

LucasArts Archives Volume 1 is a budget package which features three of the company’s best adventure games on CD-ROM: Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max Hit the Road and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, which really made it one of the best deals of all time. As a bit of a sweetener, the company threw in a 3 level demo of Rebel Assault, and a CD filled with demos of various other LucasArts games.

Doom II: Hell on Earth is the follow up to the one of the most influential games of all time, and while it seems like it is treading familiar ground, the devil is in the detail. Doom II‘s levels are much larger and more intense, and the combination of these larger areas with the more dangerous enemies makes for a more challenging game.

It’s kind of sad to think about it, but Sonic the Hedgehog 2 was the last universally praised Sonic game. Sega really threw everything they had at the sequel – it was a joint development effort between Japanese and American development teams. It was bigger, better looking, had a great soundtrack and some of the best momentum based platforming you’ll ever see. It was the #1 best selling game on the Mega Drive and Genesis, and may still be the best selling title in Sega’s catalogue.

Fade to Black is the follow up to the popular Flashback. It’s an interesting beast – one of the first 3D third person shooters. However, at that point, developers were still trying to figure out how to make 3D games play well – and Fade to Black is fiddly and clunky.

This ad is a simple teaser for the home versions of Mortal Kombat 4, perhaps the most maligned entry in the series. Eurocom did a pretty admirable job bringing the game to the PSX and N64, but they weren’t working with the best of material to begin with.