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.

I don’t think there was anyone out there who had a PC in the mid 1990s who didn’t own some form of shareware compilation CD. Most likely nestled on that CD would have been Jazz Jackrabbit, arguably one of the finer platformers on the PC.

Banjo-Kazooie was one of the most anticipated platformers for the Nintendo 64, though the combination of bear and bird often cops flack for collection focused gameplay, despite being nowhere near as absurd as Donkey Kong 64 in the collection stakes. This ad is from the German Club Nintendo magazine.

Pit Fighter was one of those arcade games that got ported to every system around, regardless of whether they could actually handle the game or not. One such port was to the Sega Master System, whose version of the game is pretty damn lame – but at least it’s better than the Spectrum version.

Want to play the worst versions of Carmageddon around? Play one of these guys. Carmageddon was a smash hit on the PC and a logical conclusion was bringing it to consoles. Unfortunately the rights ended up with Titus, so the end result was a muddy, censored mess which barely resembled the original.

Crystalis is one of, if not the most popular pre-Neo Geo game developed by SNK. It’s a pretty damn solid action-RPG for the NES, sharing a bit in common with Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda. Crystalis is also remembered for being quite heavily censored for its outside-Japan release: heck, the original title was God Slayer.

Sunsoft got their hands on the license to develop Batman games based on the smash hit 1989 movie. While the NES game is the one most remember, the Mega Drive one was no slouch either. I’ll go on the record as saying the soundtrack is vastly underrated, too.

Mad City is the Japanese incarnation of the game we know as The Adventures of Bayou Billy, one of Konami’s lesser NES efforts. Whereas Bayou Billy was bullshit hard, Mad City is far more reasonable – it’s still not that good though.

Sonic Adventure marked the long awaited return of Sega’s mascot and the franchise’s first foray into full 3D. Widely praised at the time, and one of the most successful games on the Dreamcast, critics have been less friendly to the game over time, given that it was the first game to introduce a large number of playable characters who weren’t Sonic.

Today marks 14 years since the Dreamcast launched in North America. The 9.9.99 release date is one that will stick with Sega fans forever – it was a pretty damn magical day. The Dreamcast launch was more successful than many had believed, even with a really hot showing at E3 1999. We all know how the story ends, but it’s nice to remember the times when the Dreamcast was on fire.