Owning a rare game is one thing; owning a sealed version of a rare game is quite another. But to own something that was never commercially available to the public? That’s taking collecting to the extreme. Plenty of things only available to industry insiders have been sold on eBay recently. A good example is this …
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, …
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 …
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 Dayâ€. …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
The philosophy of a video game corporation nowadays is that if a game doesn’t prove to be popular, then all support and everything to do with it should be dropped like a hot potato, and attention focused elsewhere. This sort of thinking only started around ten years ago, when budgets for video games began to …
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 …
None of the characters below are starring in the upcoming PlayStation All-Stars, but by our reckoning Sony still has the rights (or could easily access the rights) to at least five of them. Whether gamers would want to play as a cartoon mouse or a medieval jester over Nathan Drake or Cole MacGrath is another …
Everybody knows that Donkey Kong was popular in the ’80s, but it’s easy to forget just how popular. The arcade classic kick-started a craze, with Donkey Kong appearing on just about everything his stupid face could be slapped onto. It was an arcade game like no other at the time and managed to notch up …
You won’t find Wonderboy or Alex Kidd on this list of Sega’s long lost heroes – we’re going even deeper into the depths of obscurity. Presenting eight former heroes that Sega have seemingly forgotten about: Tempo Despite starring in three different games on three different formats – Game Gear, 32X and Saturn to be exact …
Anybody who thinks that the Wii U line-up is a bit on the dusty side should take a good look through the history of video games. Specifically, the launch of the Mega CD – some of the biggest and most renowned games released alongside it were approaching eight years old. We’re not talking about the …