Retro Gaming Australia

We’re polite people here at Retro Gaming Australia, so we’ll sum up Alien 3 by saying that it wasn’t exactly what people wanted in a follow up to one of the most influential action movies of the last 50 years. This left the companies that licensed the rights to make video games in a bit of a pickle, since the whole “no weapons” thing in the film kind of screwed up their plans. So they just threw weapons in anyway, and everyone rejoiced. While Probe Software handled most of the Acclaim published versions of the game they vary wildly based on the system, but they’re all generally quite good.

Final Fantasy X was one of the biggest games of the PlayStation 2’s 2001 line up in Japan and North America, though European and Australian fans had to wait until mid 2002 to get their hands on it. A HD re-release is currently planned for the PlayStation 3 and Vita, but probably won’t be out any time soon.

Before it became a popular TV show, Stargate was a feature film from the minds of disaster kings Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich. A film which Acclaim quickly snapped up and had a few studios pop out games for. It’s a pretty straightforward, mostly unremarkable run and gun game. The Super Nintendo port was the first game developed by Melbourne developer Tantalus Media.

Space Ace is a spiritual successor to Dragon’s Lair, being based on entirely the same gameplay model and designed by veteran animator Don Bluth. Like Dragon’s Lair, it’s also been ported to every format under the sun to varying degrees of success.

NFL Quarterback Club is part of something lost to the passage of time – non-Madden NFL games. Although this first iteration wasn’t particularly good, NFL Quarterback Club found its feet on the Nintendo 64, where it was a legitimate, and in the case of the 1998 version, maybe even better, competitor to the Madden NFL series. Unfortunately after that, Acclaim’s quality control went out the window and the series pissed away any goodwill.

Mace: The Dark Age was part of a rush of 3D fighting games released by Midway in the mid to late 90s. Although its visuals were impressive at the time, the gameplay was subpar – but when you’ve just bought a Nintendo 64 and need new and exciting things to play, that’s not really enough to stop you.

With the unexpected success of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and the rise in popularity of extreme sports, everyone threw their hat into the arena. Acclaim teamed up with Z-Axis to make Dave Mirra’s Freestyle BMX which although not quite as good as the Hawk series, was pretty good in its own right.

Super International Cricket was the long-awaited follow up to International Cricket, one of the most popular NES games in Australia. It came out as part of a relative resurgence in interest in the SNES in Australia, which was led by games like Donkey Kong Country and Killer Instinct. One of the game’s unique features is an appeal button, which lets you appeal incessantly to the umpires.

Universal Soldier was essentially a pallette swap version of Turrican 2 hastily thrown together to cash in on the ultra violent Jean Claude Van Damme/Dolph Lundgren action film released in 1992. Three original stages were produced for this version, replacing some of the shmup stages in the original. The SNES version mentioned in the ad was never released.

The 1999 Superman game, often referred to as Superman 64, has the reputation of being the absolute worst game of the fifth generation era of video game consoles. The game generally involves flying through a series of rings, while dodging “Kryptonite fog” in some weird VR version of Metropolis that Lex Luthor has set up.