Live Magazine Christmas 2016 ISSUE Live Magazine December 2016 Issue | Page 35

The Virtual Boy was a console that
James and I would read about in
Nintendo magazines, and while we
were curious about the technology we were put off by the lack of
colours. By 1996 it was clear that
this console would never make it
to our shores, but the Nintendo 64
was on the horizon. The Playstation
and Saturn didn’t make much of an
impact on me. I’m not sure about
James, but I was fiercely loyal to
the Big N. As it was, the Nintendo
64 was still a fair way off its Australian release, and we had so many
more Super Nintendo games to get
through.
I remember James not being too
fond of Run Saber, though he did
enjoy playing Strider on the Amstrad CPC years earlier. I thought
that the game was an above average Strider clone, with an option for
2 players. The graphics were nothing special, but the game moved at
a brisk pace, and the controls were
precise. The music was appropri-

ate, but hardly memorable. We did
end up playing this one to the end,
though we may have been using
cheat codes to do so.

1995 - 1996

Wonderboy 3, is a restrictive platforming adventure that opens up
as you unlock new characters. You
begin the game with a single character, Bop Louie, who has to rescue
his brainwashed friends. You rescue
them by battling, which restores
their memories and they become
part of your team. While Bop Louie
can jump, he is restricted by water
and large jumps. This is where your
rescued friends come in handy, as
Freeon Leon can swim on the water’s surface, Gill can go under the
water, and Shades can float. James
and I would take it in turns playing
through the adventure, and Ufouria
quickly became one of my favourite
games of all time.

The Super Wildcard has a feature
called “Goldfinger”, which is a cheat
system that’s similar to the Action
Replay. Before you can use the
cheat codes you have to load the
game into the Wildcard’s memory,
then you can enter your codes before executing the game. James
was given a select number of
codes with the unit, but there was
supposed to be a way of converting Action Replay codes to be used
with Goldfinger. This process was
a bit hit and miss, as sometimes
the codes would work, sometimes
they would do nothing, and sometimes they would crash the game. I
have since learned that some SNES
games received multiple releases,
with different revisions of the game
code. This was mainly done to fix
bugs, though it may have been one
of the contributing factors as to
why these codes didn’t work half
the time.

Though the likes of Ninja Scroll and
Akira were already well known, anime as a form of entertainment was
still only starting to gain ground.
Anime had been around for years,
but the public didn’t really associate
shows like Astroboy or Battle of the
Planets with Japanese animation.
Super Play magazine was where I
received my anime education, and I
was fascinated with this more adult
form of animation. One film that
caught my attention was Street
Fighter 2: The Animated Movie. I
didn’t read about it in Super Play,
but someone told me about it… I forget who. As soon as I heard about