Sonic Blast was one of the more ambitious outings for the blue blur when it initially released on the Game Gear. Though a handful of other titles such as Donkey Kong Land previously attempted to bring pre-rendered visuals to underpowered portable handhelds, Blast did so with actual color at its…
Read MoreThink about all the things that make a great racing game; an intense sensation of speed, well-balanced racing lines and track design, and for party racers, a nice set of characters and unlockable weapons. That’s my list of requirements; you probably have your own. I think, however, we can all…
Read MoreI had never had the opportunity to play Earthbound before. That’s not from lack of desire to experience it, but being Australian means that I miss out on all kinds of classic RPGs (and a bunch of modern ones as well) that people rave about. However, Earthbound was an especially…
Read MoreShantae has a legend almost as powerful as the 1001 Arabian Nights that it draws inspiration from. The Game Boy Color game went through all kinds of development and then publisher hell and in the end the publisher, Capcom, was only able to shift copies to retailers by forcing them…
Read MoreSonic the Hedgehog for the Game Gear was a legitimately solid title that, while flawed in several regards, still managed to establish itself as a viable alternative to the Mega Drive release. It was an even more impressive effort considering the game was not developed by Sonic Team but by…
Read MoreSonic the Hedgehog on the Sega Game Gear is perhaps not the game that immediately comes to mind upon hearing the name. Preceding Sega’s days as a third party publisher or before systems had the capacity to handle one of the company’s innumerable ports, the decision was made to create…
Read MoreAfter a couple of weeks of sheer excitement with great new game releases – XCOM on the iPad, The Last Of Us on the PS3, and Time and Eternity for the otaku amongst us, it seems that we’re in a rare quiet moment for game releases right now. So picking…
Read MoreWhen it rains, it pours. Just last week I was praising the release of one classic JRPG on the 3DS Virtual Console after ruing the lack of its peers on the service. Not one week later another classic Game Gear JRPG has hit the service. Defenders of Oasis might be…
Read MoreEver since the Nintendo 3DS Virtual Console started rolling out I have been waiting (and waiting) for the classic RPGs that I loved to play on the go to start hitting the store. Specifically of course I’m referring to the Game Boy’s Final Fantasy Legends games, but there were others,…
Read MoreThe majority of the adventure genre is fittingly moulded around exploration. The most common approach to “exploring” in retro gaming was to utilise trial and error puzzles with ambiguous solutions rather than teach the player intuitively so that the length of the experience could be drawn out. The former approach…
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