Retro Gaming Australia

Widely held to be one of the worst games of the fifth generation era, Bubsy 3D is a shining example of just how wrong things could go during early 3D game development. The developer, Eidetic, did eventually learn how to make good games in 3D – they went on to develop the Syphon Filter series and became a first party Sony Computer Entertainment developer known as Bend Studio.

From the bowels of the “Mascots with attitude” back catalogue comes Bubsy the Bobcat, Accolade’s big hope of the early 1990s. Bubsy’s first game Bubsy in Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind was a modest hit, but the underlying game just doesn’t cut it when compared to contemporaries such as Super Mario World and Sonic the Hedgehog 2

Jack Nicklaus licensed his name to Accolade for about 10 years, so just about every system released after that point had a golf game licensed by the Golden Bear. They’re not actually that bad, but EA’s were better.

Barkley Shut Up and Jam! was Accolade’s attempt to cash in on the popularity of arcade basketball games in the mid 1990s. The game was trounced at retail by NBA Jam, and left a lot of people pissed off that Sir Charles was excluded from the home port of the NBA Jam Tournament Edition (and late run copies/later ports of the original NBA Jam) due to an exclusive licensing arrangement.

Ballz was a…not-so-good “3D” fighting game released for the 16-bit consoles in 1994, with a “director’s cut” released for the 3DO in 1995. The game was developed by PF Magic, who had greater success with the Dogz and Catz desktop distractions (before Ubisoft got a hold of them).

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.