Retro Gaming Australia

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.

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.

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.

Before becoming the world’s greatest grill salesman, George Foreman was a two-time world heavyweight boxing champion. Foreman’s unlikely comeback, which saw him win his second title at age 45, was fodder for Acclaim to put him in a bunch of subpar boxing games, of which Foreman for Real was the last, and arguably the worst.

College Slam was basically NBA Jam with NCAA teams, built on top of the existing NBA Jam architecture by Iguana Entertainment, who did the NBA Jam ports for home consoles. The game features most Division 1 college teams from the time.

The Terminator 2: Judgment Day arcade game was one of Midway’s finer shooters. The home versions were renamed to T2: The Arcade Game to differentiate them from the other (godawful) Terminator 2 games Acclaim had in development at the same time they were working on the arcade port. The truck level is still a bastard.

The ultra violent show-within-a-show, Itchy & Scratchy, is perfect video game fodder. Unfortunately the geniuses at Acclaim got their hands on The Simpsons license for the majority of the 1990s and turned it into another half-baked platformer. Woe.

Once upon a time, Squaresoft used to make games that were not RPGs. This nearly bankrupted the company. 3D World Runner was one such game. You play as a space cowboy on a mission to save the galaxy from some snake-like creatures, which somehow correlates to running on a constantly forward scrolling screen. You can choose to play the game in 3D using a pair of old red and blue 3D glasses, hence the name.

Cerebral bore was a pretty apt description of the game.

Turok 2: Seeds of Evil was probably Acclaim’s biggest hit in the fifth generation era. The game looked pretty damn good, but suffered in the gameplay stakes. I think we can all agree that the game’s Japanese title Violence Killer: Turok New Generation is a far better name.

Throwing snowballs at turkeys: the video game.

South Park for the Nintendo 64, PlayStation and PC was the first game based on the now long running animated comedy. Acclaim picked up the license and had Iguana Entertainment churn out a quickie first person shooter. The result was not pretty – and it’s actually the best one Acclaim published. After Acclaim’s third abysmal South Park game (South Park Rally), series creators Matt Parker and Trey Stone refused to license the video game rights to the series for almost 10 years.