Retro Gaming Australia

Abe was a real gas bag.

Oddworld: Abe’s Exoddus is the second game developed by Oddworld Inhabitants, and sees Abe once again helping his Mudokon brethren escaping from the clutches of the presumably thirsty Glukons, who wish to turn the Mudokons into a tasty beverage.

King of the Kiwis.

Jonah Lomu Rugby was developed by Rage Games and published by Codemasters for the PlayStation, PC and Saturn in 1997. At that stage, Lomu was one of rugby union’s most popular stars – now he’s arguably the best player to have strapped on a pair of boots.

Mario’s most stylish adventure.

Paper Mario is the second J-RPG Mario adventure. It was announced as something of a spiritual successor to Super Mario RPG (though at one stage, it was a direct sequel), but the hook is that the game is presented as a story book, with all of the characters made out of paper.

A non-crappy licensed game from the 16-bit era.

Disney’s Aladdin was a combined effort between Sega, Virgin and Disney, originally released for the Mega Drive for the 1993 holiday season. The game boasts animation on an entirely different level to everything else on the system, thanks to a technique called Digicel, which could compress data from animators’ drawings into the limited storage capacity of the Mega Drive cartridges. It is the second highest selling game on the system.

I will surely pay you next Tuesday for a hamburger today.

Popeye was developed by Nintendo for the arcades in 1982. They had originally tried to score the rights to Popeye for what became Donkey Kong, but King Features Syndicate wouldn’t have a bar of it – until Donkey Kong was a huge success and they found out what they missed out on. With Nintendo having no home console presence outside of Japan at the time, they licensed the game to Parker Bros. for release on the myriad of systems available at the time.

Reprints ho!

The Final Fantasy Legend is probably better referred to as Makai Toushi Sa·Ga, since it’s technically part of the SaGa series rather than a Final Fantasy game. Anyway, Squaresoft originally released three Legends games in the early 1990s, but Sunsoft decided to take the oportunity to cash-in on the success of Final Fantasy VII and VIII and re-release them and Final Fantasy Adventure (the first Mana game) in 1998.

God bless the ring!

Ehgreiz is a 3D fighting game developed by Dream Factory and brought to arcades by Namco and Squaresoft. The game gained fame for featuring Final Fantasy VII’s Cloud Strife and Tifa Lockheart as playable characters – Squaresoft published the PlayStation port, where even more FFVII characters were added into the mix.

Capcom was on fire in the 90s.

Marvel Super Heroes is one in a long line of late 90s Capcom fighting games featuring characters from Marvel Comics. This one is based loosely around the Infinity Gauntlet event that was playing out in the comics in the 90s. The arcade version was released in 1995, but it was two years before it made the trip home. Do yourself a favour and go for the Saturn release if you want the home version.

Changed the course of racing games on consoles forever.

Gran Turismo is exactly what it says on the tin: a realistic driving simulator. You have to admit that the sheer amount of work that goes into the series is impressive, but I guess one’s enjoyment of the game is tied to how much they care about cars.

Metal Gear lunacy at its finest.

Metal Gear Solid: Special Missions (or VR Missions for our American brethren) is a mission pack featuring 300+ VR training missions, similar to the half dozen that were on the original Metal Gear Solid disc. The expansion was actually the second disc of the game’s Japanese re-release Metal Gear Solid: Integral, which was an improved version of the original game, but Konami decided to release it by itself outside of Japan. This ad is for the French release.