Retro Gaming Australia

The Dex Drive was an accessory released in PlayStation and Nintendo 64 versions which allowed users to back up their memory card / memory pak saves to a PC and share them with friends and post them online. Being from the late 90s it uses a clumsy serial interface, but they’re still quite sought after.

There was something of a football game explosion in the early days of the PlayStation. Psygnosis got in there with their own take on the great game with Adidas Power Soccer.

The Army Men series of games were generally on the nose, but were big earners for 3DO back in the day. One can assume that ads like this one helped to make Sarge’s Heroes one of the more successful ones, because the game is a mess of muddy graphics and subpar 3rd person shooting action.

G-Darius is the fourth entry of the series. While it doesn’t feature the multi-screen spanning play of the first two games in the series, it is the first to be presented with 3D polygonal graphics, and adds a new beam duel system.

Earthworm Jim was a launch title for the Game Boy Advance, but the port wasn’t particularly great – nor was this advert, which lacked the delightful double entendres and silly jokes of the original ad campaign.

Apple II hit Choplifter was popular enough to get ported to everything, including an arcade upgrade. This particular ad is for the Commodore VIC-20 version, and is based on Dan Gorlin’s original version.

The launch of the PS4 in North America has me thinking about my history with console launches, and how leaps in hardware made for new gameplay experiences. Super Monkey Ball was originally an arcade game, but being a post 2000 release, seeing it in an arcade outside of Japan was an impossibility, making the GameCube launch release most people’s first experience with the game. It was kind of an evolution of the Marble Madness concept, guiding a ball around a level, except that this time, you controlled the level rather than the ball. Simple at first, but it got bloody hard.

A number of games based on the popular Batman animated series from the early 90s were published in 1994 and 1995. The Game Gear version was developed by Novotrade, best remembered for Ecco the Dolphin, and is a fairly straight forward jump and run game.

In the aftermath of the success of Final Fantasy VII, Squaresoft started bringing over other popular RPGs and spin offs. One such game was Chocobo’s Dungeon 2, the second in the serious of Chocobo rogue like spin-offs, and the first in the Mystery Dungeon series to be released outside of Japan.

Thunder Blade is a reasonably popular arcade game from Sega. The Master System port is pretty heavily compromised, but still somewhat enjoyable. This ad is from the brief period of time where Tonka handled Sega’s distribution and marketing in North America.