Retro Gaming Australia

007: Tomorrow Never Dies is the video game adaptation of the second Pierce Brosnan-led James Bond outing. It was originally offered to Nintendo and Rare after the breakout success of GoldenEye on the Nintendo 64, but the offer was turned down in favour of doing an original sequel, Perfect Dark. EA snapped up the license and handed it over to Black Ops Entertainment for a quickfire third person shooter. While Tomorrow Never Dies wasn’t exactly a great game, it was successful enough for EA to hold the Bond license until the mid 2000s.

Bulls vs. Blazers and the NBA Playoffs is the third game in EA’s NBA Playoffs series, which preceded the better known NBA Live series. The pace of the gameplay is much slower than the Live series, but it does have Michael Jordan in it.

CyberTiger is a rather odd footnote in the history of EA Sports, coming from a brief period of experiementation where the company decided to try making arcade versions of their sports games to sit on shelves alongside their simulations. Didn’t go so well.

Haunting Starring Polterguy is one of the more original Mega Drive games to come out of Electronic Arts. You play as Poulterguy, a skateboarding punk who recently met his end due to a shoddy skateboard manufactured by the Sardinis. To get your revenge, you need to scare the Sardinis out of their four mansions using your ghostly talents such as possession to turn the Sardinis’ material items against them.

If you thought Command & Conquer: The First Decade was a good deal, wait til you get a load of Command & Conquer: The Ultimate Collection, due to hit stores and EA’s Origin service in October.

For $US49.99 or £24.99 (no AU price yet), you get the following Command & Conquer games:
Command & Conquer
Command & Conquer: The Covert Operations
Command & Conquer: Red Alert
Command & Conquer: Red Alert – Counterstrike
Command & Conquer: Red Alert – The Aftermath
Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun
Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun – Firestorm
Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2
Command & Conquer: Red Alert – Yuri’s Revenge
Command & Conquer: Renegade
Command & Conquer: Generals
Command & Conquer: Generals – Zero Hour
Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars
Command & Conquer 3: Kane’s Wrath
Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3
Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 – Uprising
Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight

That’s a lot of Command & Conquer – no Sole Survivor, though!

In the modern era, sports game updates are relatively incremental affairs – the sheer time it takes to develop a game from the ground up doesn’t gel with the annual release schedule. In the 16-bit era, it was a different story – one year’s sports update could be substantially different from the previous. FIFA ’95 was EA’s second crack at a soccer game, and it offered numerous improvements over the first game, including domestic club teams, vastly improved graphics, control and animation.

It’s unbelievable when you think about what big business Madden NFL is for EA now, but once upon a time, the series didn’t actually carry the official licenses of the NFL or NFLPA – it had to make it on quality gameplay alone. John Madden NFL ’93 was the last 16-bit version to be released before EA managed to get an NFL license. A special Championship Edition of the game was released exclusively for rental in the United States and as such, a complete copy is among the rarer games on the system.

Rugby World Cup 95 marked the start of EA Sports’ foray into the world of rugby union. The game is fun, if a little odd to grasp and first. It was used as a base for EA Sports’ rugby league game Australian Rugby League a year later.

Madden NFL 99 is considered to be a major turning point for the series with the introduction of the franchise mode, which lets you take the helm of a team and steer them through fifteen seasons, chopping and changing your lineup to make it the best it can be. It was also the first of the Madden games on the PlayStation to feature 3D models for the players.

Despite being released 3 years into the 5th generation era, Madden NFL 98 was still using 2D sprites for its players – a factor that lead to Sony’s NFL GameDay 98 being the go to game for football fans in 1997 and 1998. While Madden NFL 99 would return the series to glory, the 98 game serves as a reminder that EA’s behemoth was not always invincible.