Retro Gaming Australia

WWF Rage in the Cage was the third of Acclaim and Sculptured Software’s 16-bit WWF games. It’s very similar to Royal Rumble, which released around the same time, but trades the battle royal for a steel cage match, introductions by Howard Finkel and a bunch of postage stamp sized FMV sequences. It also boasts a few exclusive wrestlers – The Nasty Boyz (Brian Knobbs and Jerry Sags) and the Headshrinkers (Fatu and Samu).

Nothing says Christmas like a bit of ultra violence. Enjoy the day!

Mortal Kombat 3 came out on just about every major platform, including the PC, the version which this ad is pitching. The PC port was actually a remarkably high quality port. The first release was DOS based and was quite possibly the most faithful port of the game. The later Windows based release was based on the PlayStation version, which isn’t quite as good.

Let’s be frank: the Acclaim wrestling games of the 5th generation of consoles were garbage with their bullshit fifty billion button sequences for basic moves. ECW Anarchy Rulz was the last of these games, and copped the brunt of critic’s displeasure for the previous games (which were actually highly rated at the time).

WWF In Your House is what happens when you mix the WWF and over the top fighting games. WWF In Your House a sequel to WWF WrestleMania: The Arcade Game, but was developed by long time WWF game developer Sculptured Software and published by Acclaim – Midway was not involved at all.

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.

This week’s subject for Retro Gaming Theatre is WWF Royal Rumble, arguably the best pre-AKI wrestling game released. We took on the Royal Rumble mode with Hulk Hogan, successfully eliminating 10 of the 11 opponents. The Undertaker ruined my perfect run – the cheeky sod.

Some might argue that the sequel, WWF Raw, was better, but I prefer the wrestler selection and slower pace of Royal Rumble.

Acclaim’s final 16-bit wrestling game got a low profile release on the 32X. It was one of the more maligned 32X games upon release because there’s almost no discernible difference between it and the Mega Drive version beyond a couple of extra animations and a secret character.

So 17 years ago or so, Warner Bros. decided to team Michael Jordan up with the Looney Tunes characters in Space Jam, and Acclaim made a video game tie-in, as Acclaim usually did. You can guess what the quality was like.

Mortal Kombat 3 is probably the most divisive game in the series. Some believe it is the point where everything started to fall apart – too many characters, many of which have ridiculous or stupid designs, and that the story ceased to make sense. Others enjoy the increased speed, variety of new characters and dystopian setting. No matter which camp you come from, I think we can all agree that it was pretty stupid to leave Scorpion out.