Retro Gaming Australia

The sheer number of Mortal Kombat II ads we have in our archive is testament to just how heavily advertised the game was. It was one of the major battlegrounds of the 16-bit era: the newly formed ESRB allowed Nintendo to soften their stance towards violence, leading to a Super Nintendo version that was on par with its Mega Drive equivalent in the gore stakes. We put this one up just for that absurd EGM quote.

This week’s subject for Retro Gaming Theatre is WWF Royal Rumble, arguably the best pre-AKI wrestling game released. We took on the Royal Rumble mode with Hulk Hogan, successfully eliminating 10 of the 11 opponents. The Undertaker ruined my perfect run – the cheeky sod.

Some might argue that the sequel, WWF Raw, was better, but I prefer the wrestler selection and slower pace of Royal Rumble.

Prototype collecting website Nintendo Player has unearthed a rather amusing little piece of software which they’ve dubbed NBA Jam XXX.

It’s pretty much the same as the released version of NBA Jam, except that the commentator swears like a sailor.

The game was provided to Nintendo Player anonymously, but a note was included that described how the version of the game came about. “Due to the memory constraints of the 16-bit system, the long strands of voice samples from the classic arcade game had to be modified to fit a Super Nintendo cartridge. Tim Kitzrow, NBA Jam‘s memorable voice-over announcer, was called back into the studio to shorten his calls. During one of these recording sessions, a number of outtakes were saved as a joke, which served as the basis for a special, profanity-filled, in-house-only game–one that, if word ever got out about its existence, could have severely jeopardized Acclaim’s relationship with the NBA league and completely shut down NBA Jam‘s development for good.”

Source: Nintendo Player

To try and differentiate Batman Forever from the other licensed dreck they were churning out, Acclaim Entertainment tried to class the game up by using digitised graphics of actors dressed up as Batman and Robin. Unfortunately, the underlying game is nearly impossible to control – I think it took me a week to figure out how to execute some of the most basic moves back in the day.

Basketball was at the height of its popularity in the mid 1990s – and NBA Jam struck at just the right time to ride the wave of the sport’s success. The home versions were some of Acclaim’s most successful releases in the company’s history.

Acclaim’s final 16-bit wrestling game got a low profile release on the 32X. It was one of the more maligned 32X games upon release because there’s almost no discernible difference between it and the Mega Drive version beyond a couple of extra animations and a secret character.

Fur Fighters is a third person shooter developed by Bizarre Creations for the Dreamcast. While it plays like most first person shooters, it tries to hide the ultra-violence behind a set of cutesy anthropomorphised animal characters.

So 17 years ago or so, Warner Bros. decided to team Michael Jordan up with the Looney Tunes characters in Space Jam, and Acclaim made a video game tie-in, as Acclaim usually did. You can guess what the quality was like.

Mortal Kombat 3 is probably the most divisive game in the series. Some believe it is the point where everything started to fall apart – too many characters, many of which have ridiculous or stupid designs, and that the story ceased to make sense. Others enjoy the increased speed, variety of new characters and dystopian setting. No matter which camp you come from, I think we can all agree that it was pretty stupid to leave Scorpion out.

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.