Retro Gaming Australia

With the Sochi Winter Olympics starting tonight, I thought we’d feature the weirdest game associated with the Olympics – Izzy’s Quest for the Olympic Rings. The platformer stars the mascot of the Games of the XXVI Olympiad, Whatizit, better known as Izzy. Unfortunately, the game isn’t particularly notable and the character is considered one of the worst Olympic mascots.

The Ocean published Jurassic Park games are completely different to the Sega games, with the focus on exploration and objective based isometric gameplay. There are even some first person sections in the SNES and PC versions for the indoor segments.

The Jurassic Park video game license was not exclusively granted to one publisher – Ocean gained the rights to do games for computers and Nintendo consoles while Sega had the rights for games for their own consoles and the arcades. The Mega Drive/Genesis game was developed by BlueSky Software on a relatively tight schedule, so it’s a bit janky, but playing as the raptor is mildly entertaining.

Mario Kart 64 marks the second kart outing for the heroes and villains of the Mushroom Kingdom. New characters, bigger tracks and more players are the best features of the game, but one can’t help but feel that the Mario Kart lost a bit of charm on the way to the Nintendo 64.

WCW made its video game debut in 1990, and it was pretty damn mediocre. Just like the product at the time.

Fatal Fury was one of the early successful fighters that came out in the wake of Street Fighter II. In fact, it was actually designed by the creator of Street Fighter. The SNES version isn’t as good as the Neo Geo original, but it captures most of the spirit of the game.

Prince of Persia has been ported to just about everything. The NES version is decent, but probably not the best of the home console ports.

Did you know that there were two Ghostbusters II games for the NES – one by Activision and one by HAL Laboratory? HAL’s version was never released in North America due to Activision tying up exclusivity there. Neither was particularly well received.

Adventure Island II is the follow up to the successful Adventure Island, one of the games which really cemented Hudson Soft as a force to be reckoned with in the 80s and 90s. The second game features a much larger variety of dinosaur partners to ride on.

Final Fantasy X-2 is the first direct sequel in the series, taking place about 2 years after the events of Final Fantasy X. Some felt that the game’s J-Pop thematics and costume change mechanics were a bit too much of a departure for the series, but it remains popular with most fans.