Retro Gaming Australia

To try and differentiate Batman Forever from the other licensed dreck they were churning out, Acclaim Entertainment tried to class the game up by using digitised graphics of actors dressed up as Batman and Robin. Unfortunately, the underlying game is nearly impossible to control – I think it took me a week to figure out how to execute some of the most basic moves back in the day.

Barkley Shut Up and Jam! was Accolade’s attempt to cash in on the popularity of arcade basketball games in the mid 1990s. The game was trounced at retail by NBA Jam, and left a lot of people pissed off that Sir Charles was excluded from the home port of the NBA Jam Tournament Edition (and late run copies/later ports of the original NBA Jam) due to an exclusive licensing arrangement.

Adventure Island has something of a storied history, in that the series started as a licensed adaptation of Wonder Boy – developer Escape (now Westone) retained the IP for the game and characters from Sega’s game, but created new characters for Hudson Soft while keeping the same style of gameplay.

Street Fighter Alpha 2 for the SNES? It happened, thanks to custom hardware (the S-DD1 chip) which allowed on the fly decompression of sprites and some trickery with the way the game handles sound.

Pokemon Stadium 2 allows players to battle their Pokemon in full 3D – this time with Pokemon from the Gold and Silver games. It’s technically the third such game to do so – the very first Pokemon Stadium was a Japanese exclusive which featured only 40 of the initial 151 Pokemon.

Basketball was at the height of its popularity in the mid 1990s – and NBA Jam struck at just the right time to ride the wave of the sport’s success. The home versions were some of Acclaim’s most successful releases in the company’s history.

Phantasy Star IV is, to this day, the last traditional JRPG in the series, with the focus shifting onto online games with the next iteration, Phantasy Star Online. People tend to mourn this decision because Phantasy Star IV is arguably the best JRPG on the Mega Drive. A remake was planned as part of the Sega AGES 2500 series (which yielded remakes of the first two games) but was cancelled when Sega altered the direction of the series to focus on perfect ports over 3D remakes.

Tomb Raider Chronicles is kind of an anthology collection of Lara’s early adventures, told by her friends as they share their memories post-Last Revelation, where Lara is thought to be dead (but totally isn’t). Of course, being the fifth Lara Croft adventure in as many years, franchise fatigue led to it being poorly received by critics and the lowest selling PlayStation entry of the series.

Evander Holyfield’s Real Deal Boxing isn’t bad as far as boxing video games go, but it’s a really simplistic interpretation of the sport. The sequel, Greatest Heavyweights of the Ring, is a marked improvement.

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.