Retro Gaming Australia

We’ve been so spoiled by good Batman games in recent times that we tend to forget that pre-Arkham Asylum Batman games were largely terrible. Among the worst would be Batman & Robin for the PlayStation, based on the rather awful film of the same name. Another quality Acclaim product.

Bubble Bobble and Rainbow Islands have been released on just about every platform around. This particular ad was for the PC, PlayStation and Saturn release in 1996. This release is infamous for outing the fact that Taito had lost the original source code for Bubble Bobble – developer Probe was sent an original PCB and had to piece the game together from that.

NARC is one of Midway’s more controversial arcade hits, and, as you’d expect, a cut down version made its way home on the NES courtesy of Rare and Acclaim. The NES version had just about all references to drugs removed by virtue of Nintendo of America’s heavy handed censorship.

RoboCop 3 is not only a bad movie, it’s also a bad video game. But that shouldn’t surprise you, coming from Acclaim.

This is a wasted opportunity – they could have had Ernest Borgnine on the cover!

WWF Rage in the Cage was the third of Acclaim and Sculptured Software’s 16-bit WWF games. It’s very similar to Royal Rumble, which released around the same time, but trades the battle royal for a steel cage match, introductions by Howard Finkel and a bunch of postage stamp sized FMV sequences. It also boasts a few exclusive wrestlers – The Nasty Boyz (Brian Knobbs and Jerry Sags) and the Headshrinkers (Fatu and Samu).

Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 was one of the last big releases for the 16-bit consoles for Acclaim, who by that point was shifting resources onto the Saturn and PSX. The game is kind of impressive, given what the developers were working with – weak systems and limited cartridge space, but it is quite compromised when compared to the full arcade experience. Sheeva was the only character lost, but the number of stages was severely limited.

This ad can be used as an example of an instance where a good game was produced from a lousy movie (Alien 3), and a lousy game was produced from a good movie (Terminator 2). It’s not incontrovertible proof that bad movies make good games and vice-versa, because The Crow: City of Angels game we showcased last week exists.

The Crow: City of Angels is universally recognised as one of the worst games of the fifth generation era, which shouldn’t surprise you given that it was published by Acclaim.

Rambo for the NES is a fairly typical licensed run and gun platformer upon first glance, but it actually shares quite a bit in common with Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. The game is based on Rambo: First Blood Part II, but deviates from the film at numerous points.