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.

Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker (or Batman of the Future for us Commonwealth types) is a tie-in to the direct-to-video movie of the same name based on the cartoon series which was spun off from the popular Batman: The Animated Series. The game is horrible, but the series is worth a look – it’s basically about a guy who takes up the mantle of Batman following Bruce Wayne’s retirement, and is mentored by Wayne.

Battletoads & Double Dragon: The Ultimate Team was an unlikely crossover between characters developed by Rare and Technos respectively, brought together under the one roof by TradeWest. Plays more like the former than the latter, but without the ballbusting difficulty associated with other Battletoads efforts.

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.

Twisted Metal III is generally the most reviled game in the series. Most of the blame is lumped on 989 Studios, who were assigned the game when SingleTrac moved onto other things.

Lemmings was ported to just about every format under the sun, including the Game Boy. While the game would be great for those long train trips, one can’t help but think how the restrictive resolution of the Game Boy might hinder the experience.

I-Ninja is one of those B grade action-platformers that they just don’t make anymore. It was developed by Argonaut, who were arguably the kings of this sort of middling quality 3D platformer.

Akuji the Heartless was one of those subpar Eidos games that the company advertised to death. If you’re ever wondering where those fat Tomb Raider profits went, look no further.

Fur Fighters is a third person shooter developed by Bizarre Creations for the Dreamcast. While it plays like most first person shooters, it tries to hide the ultra-violence behind a set of cutesy anthropomorphised animal characters.

The 90s were pretty dark times for comic book characters, not just in terms of the darker stories and the aftermath of the collector driven market crash, but also the fact that Acclaim Entertainment controlled the Marvel license for most of the decade. Even when some characters escaped the Acclaim brand, they wound up in absolutely terrible games as evidenced by The Incredible Hulk: The Pantheon Saga, which is generally considered to be the worst superhero game before Superman for the Nintendo 64.