You cannot be blamed for not having heard of Wonder Momo, a Namco arcade game from the mid-late 80s which was never released outside of Japan. It belongs in the box of "odd" Japanese games, being a beat-em-up with the unusual setting of a Super Sentai (Power Rangers to the gaijin amongst..

The Castlevania titles have seen releases on a variety of game consoles over the years, but it's this PC Engine release that's garnered a lot of attention and focus among diehard game fans and collectors over the years. Since the game was only released in Japan, gamers who wanted to play the game ..

While the game was the second numbered Final Fantasy when it was released in North America back in 1991, it's actually the fourth entry in the series due to the second and third 8-bit releases remaining in Japan at the time. It marked the series debut on Nintendo's 16-bit console and added quite a..

There's no question that Fatal Fury 2 was quite a step up in quality from the original, but it seems SNK still wasn't completely satisfied with the game and decided to release an upgrade in the form of Fatal Fury Special. Rather than start from scratch, they basically took Fatal Fury 2, added in t..

In 1982 Sega made a little gaming history with Zaxxon: the first 3D arcade game to use an isometric perspective – even more shockingly, it used sprite-based graphics at a time when 3D games were pretty much all being done with vectors. Whilst Zaxxon got a lot of attention due to its flashy graph..

It's widely known that Sonic and Knuckles (S&K) started out as the latter half of Sonic 3, but development constraints forced SEGA to split the game in two, putting S&K onto an innovative Lock-On cartridge that, when combined with Sonic 3, pieced the game back together into its original st..

After making several appearances on various Japanese personal computers and then being ported to the Famicom system, Hudson decided to bring the unique vegetable-themed text adventure Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom over to American NES gamers. The game was obviously quite a change of pace fr..

When it came time to follow Zombies Ate My Neighbors, LucasArts decided to go with a third-party developer. Using basically the same gameplay engine as the one found in Zombies, the developer was able to successfully create a game that looked and played very similarly to the original release calle..

Thanks to Nintendo making imports available on the Virtual Console, you've probably come across Chō Aniki: a shooter on the PC Engine in the same mold as Gradius and other side-scrollers, but with some rather unconventional enemies and a lot of muscles. You may be less familiar with this sequel, ..

Shadow Dancer started out life in 1989 in the arcades as the sequel to the ever-popular Shinobi, which was a sizable hit for creator Sega. In the same year the company also released the rather excellent Revenge of Shinobi as an early title for the fledgling Mega Drive/Genesis. It strayed from the ..

Final Fight 3 came along fairly late in the Super Nintendo's lifespan, but that certainly didn't bother fans of the series who were looking for one more heavy dose of beat-'em-up action. Capcom decided it was time to spice up the gameplay some and the end result was something that would appeal to ..

Don't feel bad if you've never heard of the MSX. It was an early-80s Microsoft-driven initiative to create a hardware standard for home computers to transform software development in the same way that the VHS standard transformed home video: by removing the need to develop for multiple hardware pl..

We saw a lot of legendary titles come out of the 8-bit era of gaming, but probably none quite as ahead of its time as Blaster Master. The game combined so many different gameplay ideas into one amazing adventure that offered up more playability than probably any other title of its kind at that tim..

You can be forgiven for not having heard of Chotetsu Brikin'ger (often referred to as Ironclad Brikin'ger on the web) as it's one of a handful of Neo Geo CD titles that was never released in MVS cartridge form for arcades or outside of Japan (though according to message boards this VC release is b..

Poor Alex Kidd. The pint-sized, big-eared wonder never really caught on as a mascot, although it was not through lack of trying on Sega's part. Alex appeared in a number of games featuring vastly different forms of gameplay and, with this last throw of the dice, Sega tried to pair the ailing chara..

No company in the storied history of video gaming has tried harder to not create a true sequel to one of their hit games quite like Capcom did with the myriad releases that followed their hit fighting game Street Fighter 2. Not only did they create a number of tweaked releases of game itself, but ..

After creating the excellent Earthworm Jim videogame and subsequently making an awesome cartoon based on it, it was quite logical that Interplay would not give up on the franchise just yet. Not too long after the cartoon, they released Earthworm Jim 2, which was intended to be even better than the..

There was a time when Technos ruled the beat-'em-up genre of fighting games during the 8-bit era with their Double Dragon and River City Ransom titles, but sadly the 16-bit generation wasn't as kind to the company. Once Capcom's Final Fight hit the scene, there was little room left for any other b..

Activision was the first to sell a mahjong solitaire (for lack of a better term) game for IBM PCs and Apple Macs in 1986 under the name Shanghai. They even got the programmer of the original game -- which was created on University of Illinois mainframes -- to do the programming and create backgro..

There's no denying that the original NES release of A Boy and His Blob brought some fairly unique gameplay ideas to the table when it was released in 1989. David Crane, who'd already seen success with his Atari 2600 hit Pitfall, brought a few ideas from his classic and combined it with a completel..