Retro Gaming Australia

Saturday Night Slam Masters is kind of a weird foot note in the history of Capcom fighting games. It’s a combination of a fighting game and a wrestling game with characters designed by Fist of the North Star mangaka Tetsuo Hara. Also, it has Haggar.

Earthworm Jim was pretty heavily advertised, but it was well worth the money. Not only was the campaign clever, but the game was actually good. Shiny’s debut marked them as a force to be reckoned with, at least until their unmitigated failure with Enter the Matrix.

Dynamite Headdy is a platformer developed by Treasure and published by Sega. Headdy is a puppet with a detachable head that can be fired in eight directions. The game was a relatively late release on the Mega Drive, and thus wasn’t quite as popular as Sega had hoped. A 32X release was planned but cancelled.

Desert Strike was the first of a five game series created by Mike Posehn in conjunction with Electronic Arts. It was one of EA’s most popular series on the Mega Drive, and found its way to a variety of platforms. A 3-in-1 compilation of the first three games was planned for release for the Mega CD, but never eventuated.

Before they became masters of the real-time strategy and MMO, Blizzard had a history of developing a wider variety of games. One such title was Blackthorne (or Blackhawk for its PAL release), a platformer arguably inspired by Flashback involving a merc named Kyle who travels to the planet Tuul to save his ancestors. The game has two releases – the 1994 SNES and DOS release, and the 1995 32X and Mac release. The key difference is that the latter uses pre-rendered 3D models as sprites.

Mischief Makers was a rare example of a 2D platformer on the Nintendo 64. Developed by Treasure and published by Enix (Japan) and Nintendo (rest of the world), the game puts you in control of Marina, a robotic made on a quest to save her creator from his estranged twin brother, who just happens to be the head of an evil empire.

Silent Hill puts you in the role of Harry Mason, a dedicated father whose search for his missing daughter Cheryl brings him to the titular town following a car crash. The game’s emphasis on psychological was a departure from the standard survival horror fare of the day, which mostly relied on jump scares.

Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver is the second game in the series, and the first to be developed by series mainstay Crystal Dynamics. It focuses on the vampire Raziel, who was cast out of Kain’s crew after having the audacity to evolve faster than his boss. Coincidentally, there’s a pretty solid rumour going around that the series is due for a reboot, which should please those who didn’t like the direction the series took in later entries.

Final Fantasy IX was a return to the more traditional roots of the early Final Fantasy games when compared to Final Fantasy VIII. Series creator Hironbu Sakaguchi has referred to FFIX being his favourite as it was the closest to his ideal view of what Final Fantasy should be.

Tactics Ogre is a remake of the first game in the series, Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen, originally released for the Super Nintendo in 1993. Some may get confused by the series naming, which seems to shift between Ogre Battle and Tactics Ogre with each release – made more annoying in this case, where the game has been released under both names.