Revisiting The House of the Dead 2

Released: 1998 Formats: Dreamcast, Arcade, PC, Wii Early Dreamcast release The House of the Dead 2 was praised for being arcade perfect, showing that the console could handle arcade conversions with total ease. Lest we forget, the original The House of the Dead never received a decent home version. The Sega Saturn iteration – handled …

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Haunting: Starring Polterguy

Released: 1993 Formats: Mega Drive, PSP (via EA Replay) EA gets a lot of criticism these days for knocking out games that aren’t exactly innovate. Our take is that this criticism isn’t entirely justified – Boom Blox remains one of our favourite Wii games, physics-based puzzler Create was vastly overlooked, and we’ve heard good things …

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Remembering Ridge Racer

Released: 1994 Formats: PSone, Arcade If a developer released a racing game in this day and age with only one track, we’d either expect the rest to be available as free DLC or consider them to have a screw loose. Back in 1995 though this happened. After wowing gamers in the arcade, Namco’s Ridge Racer …

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Remembering Star Fox 64

Released: 1997 Formats: N64, Wii Virtual Console, 3DS Just like the upcoming Wii U, the N64 had plenty of naysayers before release. Unlike the claims about the Wii U being underpowered though, the criticisms against the N64 weren’t unfounded. Even the developers of such launch titles as Killer Instinct Gold and Mortal Kombat Trilogy claimed …

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Tales from the Amiga public domain

The Amiga was a magnificent bundle of circuits. Just when people thought they’d seen what the machine was capable of, something else bettering it would be released. Some of the last commercial Amiga games – I kid you not – included Wipeout 2097 and Quake. Sure, they required a few extra pieces of hardware in …

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Sonic Blast

Released: 1996 Formats: Game Gear, Master System (Brazil only) The Game Gear lived such a long life that the last few games for it were not based on Mega Drive titles but rather spin-offs of early Sega Saturn games such Panzer Dragoon Mini, Virtua Fighter Animation and Baku Baku. Sonic Blast was another late Game …

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Dynamite Cop

Released: 1998 (Japan), 1999 (US and Europe) Format: Dreamcast Sega were determined not the repeat the mistakes from their past with the Dreamcast. Unlike the Sega Saturn they had a Sonic game ready for launch, third-party support was strong, it was easy to develop for and the system had well over 20 games ready to …

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Christmas Nights into Dreams

Released: 1996 Format: Sega Saturn Here’s a little story for you. When Sega originally revealed Christmas Nights they announced that it would only be available as a freebie to those who purchased certain Sega Saturn games. With my only source of income at the time being a paper-round, there was no way I’d be able …

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Dungeon Keeper

Released: 1997 Formats: PC The arse end of the ‘90s was a brilliant time to be a PC gamer. Windows 95 had given PC gaming the huge kick it needed, all new PCs came with CD-ROM drives as standard and dedicated graphics cards were starting to appear. Back then the newest first person shooters, like …

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Skool Daze

Released: 1985 Formats: ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 Whereas games are nowadays often designed to have worldwide appeal, back in the ’80s many titles for the likes of the Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amstrad were rich with British cultural references for that era. There was Flunky, a game set in entirely Buckingham Place; a platformer featuring …

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Demo One

Released: 1995 Format: PlayStation Rather than lazily shove a handful of demos onto a disk and tie them all together with a rudimentary menu system, Sony put an awful lot of attention into the curiously titled Demo One – the disk that came bundled with every fresh PlayStation. I assume they put effort into it …

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Super Mario Land

Released: 1989 Formats: Game Boy, 3DS Virtual Console Due to a combination of a lack of time, money and experience, most console launch games tend to be either on the basic side or rushed out. The Game Boy’s line-up was no different, comprising rather basic games such as Alleyway, Yakuman (MahJong) and rudimentary sports titles. …

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Bart vs The Space Mutants

Released: 1991/1992 Formats: Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Commodore 64, DOS, GameGear, Mega Drive, NES, Master System and ZX Spectrum If you haven’t ever played this game then you’ve at least heard of it – take another look at the list of systems it was released on. Pretty exhaustive, right? And people say that there …

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Kuni-Chan’s Game Paradise

Released: 1991 Format: Sega GameGear Kuni-Chan no Game Tengoku (Kuni-Chan’s Game Paradise) has so much history buried deep within its After Eight-shaped cartridge that it’s hard to know where to begin. The intro is a good place, I suppose – it’s set within the walls of Castle of Illusion, the very same place that Mickey …

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