Retro Gaming Australia

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

NBA Full Court Press was part of an initial push by Microsoft to get some sports games onto Windows. Australia’s Beam Software developed the game – an odd choice since they’d never made a basketball game before. NBA Full Court Press wasn’t particularly well received.

WCW: The Main Event comes from a time when WCW was in kind of an awkward growth stage, lacking the star power of the WWF, but still offering reasonably good wrestling action. The video games, however, were terrible.

Super International Cricket was the long-awaited follow up to International Cricket, one of the most popular NES games in Australia. It came out as part of a relative resurgence in interest in the SNES in Australia, which was led by games like Donkey Kong Country and Killer Instinct. One of the game’s unique features is an appeal button, which lets you appeal incessantly to the umpires.

…San Dimas High School Football rules!

Another classy LJN and Beam Software collaboration, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Video Game Adventure was loosely based around the storyline of the first film, despite not being released until around the time of the second film’s release.

Developed here in Melbourne by Beam Software.

While not the first Star Wars game to debut on Nintendo’s 8-bit system (a Namco developed game for the Famicom predates it), Beam Software’s take on Star Wars was hyped up as one of the biggest things to hit the NES. It wasn’t particularly great, but you’d have been easily convinced otherwise judging by the press reaction of the time. Then again, Lucas hadn’t allowed the worst of the Expanded Universe to happen yet, and had not touched Star Wars himself for many years. In fact, if I am not mistaken, the NES game was the first time LucasArts (then Lucasfilm Games) was allowed to do anything with the Star Wars IP.

Sean Connery is a totally believable Russian.

The Hunt for Red October is a video game adaptation based on the film adaptation of the Tom Clancy-authored book of the same name. The Game Boy and NES versions of the game were developed in Australia by Beam Software, but were not well received.

Big money! Big prizes! I love it!

Super Smash TV was the name given to the 16-bit ports of Midway’s arcade hit Smash TV. This ad is for the Probe-developed Mega Drive/Genesis version, but it’s worth nothing that the Super Nintendo version of the game was developed here in Australia by the late Beam Software. Both versions were published by Acclaim. Like the ad suggests, the game is pretty damn difficult, but it’s all in good fun.

Search for Super Smash TV on eBay