Retro Gaming Australia

Beauty and the Beast doesn’t exactly scream out for a video game adaptation, but Sunsoft did their darndest, releasing not one but two games for the Mega Drive based on the film. Beauty and the Beast: Belle’s Quest was intended for a female audience, but the ladies tend not to look upon its simplistic gameplay favourably.

Ghouls’n Ghosts is one of Capcom’s most popular games from the late 1980s, having reached just about every major platform of the era. In the name of obscurity, we present to you the advertisement for the Japanese X68000 release, which is arguably the best home version available.

ActRaiser 2 is the somewhat maligned follow up to the popular early SNES god game/platformer hybrid. The reason why it’s maligned is because it got rid of the whole god game part of the gameplay – the thing that made the original unique. It’s also really difficult.

Sonic & Knuckles is alright on its own, but combine it with a copy of Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and you have the best Sonic game ever produced. They were actually intended to be one game throughout most of development until the high cost of production for the large cartridge size the original Sonic 3 project needed forced Sega to cut the game into two – Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and Sonic & Knuckles.

Captain America and the Avengers is a reasonably popular Data East-developed arcade beat ’em up. The home ports are, however, kind of sucky largely due to the limited capabilities of home consoles compared to the arcade board.

Devil May Cry‘s brand of stylish action took many of us by storm when it first launched in late 2001. It originally started development as Resident Evil 4, but the direction the game took proved to be too much of a departure from the survival horror roots of the Resident Evil series (despite the final RE4 being a massive change of direction). We recommend avoiding the PAL version, unless you want a sandwiched picture that runs bog slow compared to the real thing.

Bulls vs. Lakers and the NBA Playoffs is the second game in EA’s pre-NBA Live basketball series. It’s a massive improvement over Lakers vs. Celtics, adding in features such as signature dunks, instant replay mode, improved shooting and passing control, a free throw meter and a much cleaner interface.

Doom II: Hell on Earth was one of the most anticipated releases of 1994. While not drastically different from the original game, it added the double barrel shotgun and a seriously refined set of 30 levels (plus two secret ones paying homage to id Software classics).

Alter Echo is one of those utterly abysmal action/adventure games that nobody makes anymore. Probably the only good thing to happen as a result of astronomical increases in video game budgets.

Did you know that at one stage, Bungie was owned by Rockstar? They released only one game together before Bungie was snapped up by Microsoft, a rather interesting third person shooter called Oni. To say Oni was heavily influenced by Ghost in the Shell is an understatement, but its mix of melee combat and shooting action didn’t come together quite as well as hoped.