Retro Gaming Australia

We’ve been so spoiled by good Batman games in recent times that we tend to forget that pre-Arkham Asylum Batman games were largely terrible. Among the worst would be Batman & Robin for the PlayStation, based on the rather awful film of the same name. Another quality Acclaim product.

Bubble Bobble and Rainbow Islands have been released on just about every platform around. This particular ad was for the PC, PlayStation and Saturn release in 1996. This release is infamous for outing the fact that Taito had lost the original source code for Bubble Bobble – developer Probe was sent an original PCB and had to piece the game together from that.

RoboCop 3 is not only a bad movie, it’s also a bad video game. But that shouldn’t surprise you, coming from Acclaim.

This ad can be used as an example of an instance where a good game was produced from a lousy movie (Alien 3), and a lousy game was produced from a good movie (Terminator 2). It’s not incontrovertible proof that bad movies make good games and vice-versa, because The Crow: City of Angels game we showcased last week exists.

The sheer number of Mortal Kombat II ads we have in our archive is testament to just how heavily advertised the game was. It was one of the major battlegrounds of the 16-bit era: the newly formed ESRB allowed Nintendo to soften their stance towards violence, leading to a Super Nintendo version that was on par with its Mega Drive equivalent in the gore stakes. We put this one up just for that absurd EGM quote.

We’re polite people here at Retro Gaming Australia, so we’ll sum up Alien 3 by saying that it wasn’t exactly what people wanted in a follow up to one of the most influential action movies of the last 50 years. This left the companies that licensed the rights to make video games in a bit of a pickle, since the whole “no weapons” thing in the film kind of screwed up their plans. So they just threw weapons in anyway, and everyone rejoiced. While Probe Software handled most of the Acclaim published versions of the game they vary wildly based on the system, but they’re all generally quite good.

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.

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.

Filling our Mortal Kombat ad requirement for the month.

Mortal Kombat CD is the Mega CD port of the first game in the series. The game is packed with typical early CD game gimmicks – it even opens with a (low quality) version of the “Mortal Monday” commercial. While not quite up to the standard of the arcade game in visual terms, the sound is more than adequate and the gameplay is quite faithful. The load times are absolutely awful, though. This ad is an early teaser – the final version of the game had an MA-17 rating due to the infamous blood code no longer being required.

The bitch is back!

Alien Trilogy was an early 3D era first person shooter developed by Probe Software for Acclaim. The notion of it being based on a trilogy is something of a misnomer, since the game clearly draws the majority of its inspiration from the middle chapter of the trilogy, Aliens (but then just about every first person shooter under the sun does, no?). Pretty cool at the time, but it didn’t really age well. This ad was for the slightly belated Saturn release.

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