Retro Reviews - Page 4

Heroes on your handheld

Turtles, turtles everywhere. By 1990, you could find the four reptile ninjas not only in comics but on TV, t-shirts, toy store shelves and in theatres. Like the majority of the available products, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall of the Foot Clan was based on the popular cartoon and sees you battle across five levels to rescue captured reporter April O’Neil. All four of..

F-Zero is the name of the game, but will it also be the score?

In 2003 Nintendo’s premier racing series returned in superb style on the GameCube: F-Zero GX came out of the gate lightning fast, brutally hard and, rather oddly, developed by Sega. Made by Sega studio Amusement Vision, it marked the company’s first collaboration with Nintendo after...

Oh, we laugh at this game! Gradius is fine but this is nicer!

A fiendish giant octopus by the name of Zeo and his intergalactic mutant penguin mates are up to no good, wreaking havoc on the inhabitants of the Parodius Zone. Thankfully, help is at hand as Vic Viper, Pentarou the penguin, Twinbee and a gun-toting octopus have come to save the day. As a parody of Konami’s famous Gradius series, this..

Krud

Back, back, B. That’s the command that you need to enter to perform Scorpion’s spear move – but you have to do it slowly. Forget the quick tapping that you’d expect for a beat ‘em up, this is something with which you must take your time. It’s the same for all the special moves in the game, an irritant that’s just one of the many...

Holy platforming joy!

Gotham City is not a safe place to live. Goons and robotic drones roam the streets shooting anything in sight, gun turrets fire on people and heavy objects randomly fall from the sky. If the citizens of Gotham somehow manage to survive all that, they have to contend with the fact that the city was designed and built by prats, resulting in large chasms all over the place that..

Transform and tear your hair out

The magical mystery core has been stolen and taken away. The Aki-Do forces are the ones responsible and naturally they've split it in to five parts and scattered them across the galaxy. But forget that cobblers, the cool part about Vortex is that you take control of the Morphing Battle System which as the name...

A nice sampler of classic greatness

When you open the arcade gaming history books to the early years, they should feature the name "Atari" in big, bold letters. Though strongly associated with home consoles in later years, Nolan Bushnell started this gaming empire in the arcades with games like Pong and Breakout (the assembly of the latter...

Magic is on the cards

FTL's seminal RPG Dungeon Master kick-started an entire genre when it was released at the tail-end of the '80s; the gaming public fell in love with the concept of immersive, first-person adventures and developers fell over themselves to replicate the same atmospheric feel witnessed in the Atari ST classic. It wasn't just Western game designers who caught the first-person bug,..

Go Go!! 2D Treasure Makers

With a US release in 1997 Mischief Makers, or Go Go!! Trouble Makers in Japan, was not only an early example of a N64 centric side-scrolling 2D platformer, it also successfully made its mark in gaming history by being the first Treasure game to land on a Nintendo platform. However, it would be shallow to describe Mischief Makers as a simple Treasure-developed 2D..

This being a great game is no illusion

In the early days of the SNES, Enix made the beloved action RPG Soul Blazer. A strange but incredibly effective mixture of RPG and very light town-building elements resulted in one of the system's most underrated games. Although the game itself did not sell too well, Enix decided to try again, making a spiritual sequel with very loosely linked gameplay and..

Fun in the Sun

For a long time it was felt that portable gaming and role-playing games just didn't mix well. Despite some early attempts for the original Game Boy system, it was a widely accepted opinion that these portable game systems just didn't pack enough processing and storage power to be able to offer up a truly epic and engaging RPG experience, as well as the nature of portable gaming..

Another Capcom classic

With various versions of Street Fighter II, Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts, a bunch of Mega Man games and two exclusive Final Fight sequels, the SNES was a good machine to own for Capcom fans. They also released many other games on the platform including U.N. Squadron, a frantic side-scrolling shooter originally released in arcades in 1989. The game is based on Area 88, one of the..

A kut down but kompetent konversion

Smoother gameplay, new moves and more characters than its predecessor made Mortal Kombat II a hit with arcade players. The Game Boy port of the first Mortal Kombat had been a sluggish, border-line unplayable mess with terrible music so it seems unlikely anyone would have been eagerly awaiting the arrival of the second game on the system. However arrive it did and..

Water, water everywhere so let's all have a drink!

Mario made his 3D platforming debut on the N64 way back in 1996 in one of the greatest and most influential pieces of gaming ever. Fast forward the clock six years and you’ll find Nintendo’s attempt to beat the near unbeatable in Mario’s next adventure, but in order to top its predecessor a...

Extra-packed port of a platforming classic

The original Game Boy received a Mario platformer in the form of Super Mario Land, which in turn received a sequel before Nintendo shifted their attention to Wario. Following the release of the Game Boy Color however, they decided Mario should go portable once more and released Super Mario Bros. Deluxe, a port of the or

Super Mario Bros. 2: Ultimate Edition

It was certainly an odd choice of launch title way back in 2001 when the Game Boy Advance was released, with Nintendo choosing to launch it with a remake of a NES game that wasn't originally even intended to be a Mario game in the first place, with the original Mario Bros. tacked on. Nonetheless, people who...

He might be paper, but Mario's no flop

When Mario and friends appeared in their debut role-playing title nearly fifteen years ago on the SNES, it marked a significant new direction that the franchise would embark on and time has proved it's a popular one too. European gamers were understandably disappointed that Super Mario RPG never came to their...

An action-rpg for the ages!

When it came time to create a follow up to their fairly successful action-rpg Secret of Mana, Squaresoft decided to try something a little different. While they were already developing the direct sequel Seiken Densetsu 3 in Japan, they created a US development studio and put them to task creating a more...

Suck it, Bond

From its debut in 1997, developer Rare and the terrifying digital avatar of Pierce Brosnan ruled over the console shooter space in the Nintendo 64 tie-in of a then-two-year-old Bond movie, GoldenEye 007. Not only did it justify the genre on consoles while proving that movie games don’t have to suck, it became one of the defining...