Retro Gaming Australia

Madden NFL 97 marked the series’ debut on the PlayStation and Saturn, due to the cancellation of Madden NFL 96 for those platforms (and the PC) for quality control reasons – an unimaginable turn of events for today’s EA, who will release new Maddens without regard to quality. Amusingly, the developer behind the ill-fated Madden NFL 96 was Visual Concepts, who went on to develop the NFL 2K series for Sega.

Beetle Adventure Racing! is a fantastic racing game for the Nintendo 64 that focuses on exciting tracks and ridiculous shortcuts. The original release focused on the recently reborn Volkswagen Beetle, but a special Australia exclusive re-release replaced the Beetles with Holden HSVs.

Dune 2000 was a partial remake, partial reimagining of Westwood’s classic Dune II. It was an attempt by Westwood to modernise Dune II, by adding features like unit balance and full motion video cutscenes (starring John Rhys-Davies among others) to the formula, but it was not well received.

James Pond, as the name would suggest, is an underwater parody of James Bond. The game was developed by Vectordean and Millennium Interactive for the Amiga and Atari ST, but also received considerable attention when Electronic Arts published it for the Mega Drive.

Desert Strike was the first of a five game series created by Mike Posehn in conjunction with Electronic Arts. It was one of EA’s most popular series on the Mega Drive, and found its way to a variety of platforms. A 3-in-1 compilation of the first three games was planned for release for the Mega CD, but never eventuated.

Well, Sorcerer’s Stone in this case…

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (or Sorcerer’s Stone for our American visitors) was the first of seven books in the Harry Potter series. Electronic Arts snapped up the rights to make games on the series when the film rights were licensed, and farmed them out to a variety of developers. The result was four different games on four different platforms, and I’m not all that certain that any of them are good.

I’ll let you fill in the blanks.

Shaq Fu is an infamous fighting game developed by Delphine Software International and published by Electronic Arts. The game has a reputation as being one of the worst fighting games in existence, but the reality is that the absurdity of the concept generally overshadows the underlying game. Word on the street is that the game was not conceived with Shaq in the titular role, but rather just as an original otherworldly fighting game – demands from the publisher may have been the factor that led to the basketball superstar’s inclusion.

Search for Shaq Fu on eBay