Retro Gaming Australia

The Contra series’ darkest hour.

It seemed like a good idea on paper. Give Contra to a competent developer, bring it into 3D, make money. Unfortunately, the first part of this experiment, Contra: Legacy of War was a shameful effort. Yet Appaloosa managed to do worse on its second attempt – C: The Contra Adventure. These games are so bad that Konami refuses to acknowledge them as part of the Contra series. The game ended up being released exclusively in North America.

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The cancellation of this was like a sweep to the last legs of the Dreamcast.

Half-Life was a smash hit on the PC, and plans were quickly brought together to take the game to the Dreamcast. They were even planning to give the Dreamcast version a few exclusive levels in the form of Half-Life: Blue Shift. However, the game was cancelled just days before release, and Blue Shift was redirected for release on the PC.

RIP Ensemble.

Age of Empires was a fantastic real time strategy game that came from one of Microsoft’s many pushes to get people to play games on Windows. Most would argue that the second game in the series is the real gem, though.

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The game which pretty much defined deceptive advertising in the video game industry.

Rise of the Robots is infamous for its pre-release promotional campaign, which feature some pretty amazing (at the time) computer generated graphics. Of course when people actually loaded the game up to play it, they were presented with a smelly and pitifully basic fighting game. This ad, which is quite different to the rest of the campaign, is for the US release of the 3DO version.

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The series’ weakest link.

Streets of Rage 3 is the third and final game (so far) in Sega’s smashing beat ’em up series. Despite packing the same stellar gameplay as the second game, it doesn’t really do anything that improves on it – in fact, some aspects of the game are much worse. It doesn’t help that most of the game’s story was destroyed during localisation, not to mention the other content cuts and censoring that occured.

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One for the inferior console versions, at least.

Quake II was one of the biggest hits of 1997 on the PC, so it was only a matter of time before Activision tried to bring it to consoles as well. The results were mixed – it’s pretty impressive that the games are running on the consoles in the first place, but the compromises made are ultimately too much if you’ve already experienced the PC version – which only got better through patches and mods.

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Lemme tell ya something, Mean Gene!

WWF WrestleMania Steel Cage Challenge was the third and final WWF game published by Acclaim for the NES, but the first and only one to be released on the Master System. It was the first home console wrestling game to feature steel cage matches. The wrestlers featured in the game differ based on the system – Hulk Hogan, Randy Savage, I.R.S., Ted DiBiase, Bret Hart and the Undertaker are in both versions, while Roddy Piper, Jake “The Snake” Roberts, The Mountie and Sid Justice are NES exclusive and Ric Flair, Tatanka, Papa Shango and Shawn Michaels are Master System exclusive.

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So what’s worse, The Simpsons video games, or the actual show post season 9?

The Simpsons: Bart vs. the Space Mutants is the first of some 24 games based on the long running animated series. The game was criticised for being a quick cash in on release, but proved to be one of the better Simpsons video games when many of the ones released after it were far worse.

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…San Dimas High School Football rules!

Another classy LJN and Beam Software collaboration, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Video Game Adventure was loosely based around the storyline of the first film, despite not being released until around the time of the second film’s release.

Bad mullet and moustache were trademarks of the late 80s/early 90s “professional” gamers.

Gaiares is a sidescrolling shooter developed by Telenet Japan. Renovation picked the game up for US distribution. All of the ads for the game feature a “professional” gamer called Jamie Bunker, who we’re told was a video game tester since he was 12 (child labour laws, anyone?). Bunker later admitted that he never beat Gaiares, and wasn’t actually very good at shooters.