Atari Jaguar controller

Five controllers we left behind

The humble video game controller has gone through a lot of changes over the years. Compare the NES pad to the Wii remote, and you could argue that it’s come full circle. But there have been plenty of evolutionary dead ends along the way. Here are five we left behind. Original Xbox controller The original …

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Altered Beast – a classic in disguise?

Those with over-active minds, such as ours, have often wondered why Sega chose to bundle Altered Beast with the Mega Drive. It wasn’t exactly a system-selling game in terms of quality, and that’s us being kind about it. But ask yourself this – what game should Sega have picked instead? The five other games that …

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Rollcage tyre

For promotional use only

Everyone loves something for nothing, so when some freeness is offered as a bonus for pre-ordering, or dished out at a games show, you’re not going to turn it down, are you? But you’re also not going to use it, are you? Let’s see what tat’s been languishing in a box in the attic for …

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How Nintendo built a better SimCity

Will Wright’s original city building sim has been released on almost thirty different formats over the years, but today we’re going to take a look back at just one version in particular – the SNES version from 1991. This isn’t any old SimCity. It’s Nintendo’s rendition of SimCity. Part of the SNES launch line-up, alongside …

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The many facehuggers of Alien 3

Just in case you’ve been in cryogenic sleep since 1992, Alien 3 is the one where there was only one Xenomorph and not a great deal happened. The movie had a very difficult production and at one point was even being filmed without a finished script. This ultimately led it to it receiving very mixed …

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eBay round-up: Sonic the Hedgehog special

When Sega released Sonic the Hedgehog back in 1991, there’s no doubt that they knew they had a huge hit on their hands. Even though the ‘hog then arguably went on to to star in more bad games than good, the fan base has remained loyal and more than willing to spend vast sums on …

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Bloody Hell – it’s a Mortal Kombat retrospective

Sonic, Mario and Mortal Kombat – if there was a franchise guaranteed to sell magazines back in the ‘90s, it was one of those. After appearing in arcades in 1992, Mortal Kombat had become a phenomenon, fuelled by the controversy caused in its wake. Today, Mortal Kombat looks incredibly tame. Comical, even. Back in 1992, …

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DC-UK: part of Future’s unofficial past

It’s time for another of our regular look backs at a video game magazine of old. This time our incessant rummaging around the attic has unearthed Future Publishing’s unofficial Dreamcast magazine, DC-UK. Word – by which I mean Wikipedia – has it that Sony Computer Entertainment Europe stopped Future Publishing from pitching for the official …

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Sonic 2 is twenty

Twenty years ago this week – Tuesday, November 24th 1992 to be exact – Sega released Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Weekday releases are increasingly becoming the norm in the UK, but back in 1992 it was unheard of. Sega’s witty marketing department even went as far as dubbing its Tuesday release as “Sonic 2’s Day”. …

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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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Rare In2It Philips handheld appears on eBay

The Nintendo DS wasn’t the first handheld to feature a touch-screen. Back in 1996, Philips planned to release a touch-screen handheld aimed at girls called the In2It, also known as Kidcom during its pre-production. Despite extensive focus testing, which entailed groups of children providing sketches of their ideal handheld and – somewhat bizarrely – also …

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eBay round up – an arcade game special

I’m sure every gamer has dreamed about owning an arcade machine at some point. To the infuriation of girlfriends and significant others across the world, a little known website known as eBay exists. The really worrying thing is that some arcade machines don’t really cost a great deal – we’ve managed to find working machines …

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Forgotten N64 heroes

Our four part ‘forgotten heroes’ series draws to a close, but you may have noticed that this one is different from the rest. Rather than focus on Nintendo’s forgotten heroes we decided just to look at those from the N64 era. It’s a system that we don’t talk about much on Games Asylum, even though …

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