Adam Ezagouri
TheRetroCritic is a film and game reviewer specialising in all things great and retro. He runs a blog at retrocriticblog.blogspot.com and can be found ranting on Twitter @TheRetroCritic.
The words “classic” and “awesome” are tossed around a lot when people speak about their favourite retro games.
Super Mario World this, Legend Of Zelda that.
How “awesome” is Tetris?
Pac-Man is a true “classic”!
Yeah well all that may be true but it appears that some games are just too good, too special to be mentioned in top 100 lists (or top 1000 lists) of greatest games ever. And that’s just wrong, sad and wrong.
Games like Fisher-Price: Perfect Fit always get left out and I’m personally saddened by that thought on a level so high that Donkey Kong only dreams of ever reaching that kind of vertical distance.
This game’s so good, you guys.
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Seeing as everyone’s favourite (read: most affordable) action heroes are back in the unsurprisingly not very good The Expendables 3, I thought we’d delve into one of the toughest retro games out there.
“Tough” as in big muscles tough, of course.
And no, I’m not talking about that wimpy NES Rambo game where you’re knifing chickens and punching owls in the ear or whatever.
Nope, not even Duke Caribbean: Life’s A Beach.
Make way for Rambo III.
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What do you mean you’ve never heard of Running Battle?
For shame!
It’s like the Sega Master System’s answer to Super Mario Bros 3! If Super Mario Bros 3 was a generic beat ’em up with no real identity, of course.
Actually, to give the inaccurately titled “Running Battle” (it includes very little running) some credit, it’s more enjoyable to play than some of those arcade classics given the shoddy Master System treatment as it mixes in a more appropriate pace and graphics more suited to a console-based side-scrolling action game.
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It’s Review A Bad Game Day time again!
Which means that I get to play and review something that’s either well and truly dire or amusingly so. Which isn’t too far-fetched for me since I tend to play and review tons of those kinds of games so I say: bring it on!
Thinking about the NES, I soon turned to a silly game based on a silly cartoon series based on a silly movie franchise. And no, I’m not talking about that Toxic Crusaders game, though I did consider it. Besides, you know what’s scarier than a radioactive dude?
One of the coolest things to come out of the San Diego Comic Con was arguably that new Mad Max: Fury Road trailer which quickly got me excited for a franchise I really didn’t think was “rebootable.”
Which is why I thought I’d look back at a little game called Mad Max on the NES.
Developed by Mindscape, the game already sets itself up for criticism by calling itself Mad Max when, really, it’s Mad Max 2. That said, many actually prefer the second movie so this was probably a nice surprise for most.
The game opens with the first of many barely decipherable pictures peppered throughout.
Um…
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Originally, I was leaning towards reviewing some kind of Donkey Kong game to coincide with the release of new film Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes but I was soon beaten to it by Joshua Caleb’s fab RetroHate column where he checked out Donkey Kong Land for the Game Boy.
Luckily, the Playstation 1 soon came to my rescue with the simply titled Planet Of The Apes.
Or, as I like to call it, “Ape Raider.”
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I love my Sega Master System, I really do.
It introduced me to so much joy back in the day from Alex Kidd to that Simpsons game where you’re jumping over hats or whatever that one was about.
What it didn’t quite excel at sometimes, though, was transferring arcade games to a console format. Usually, minor changes would occur both with the graphics and the gameplay itself which would either ruin the original or create an ok, if rather different, game.
Quartet was one of those which, luckily, didn’t fatally suffer from that transfer but which certainly ended up looking, sounding and feeling pretty different.
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Sticking with the theme of robots for now, I thought I’d review a Terminator game.
Oh sure I could have picked one of the few Terminator games I grew up with like that classic arcade shoot ’em up or that one on the Sega Genesis with its absurdly hard first level I could never get through.
Hell, I don’t even mind re-reviewing RoboCop vs The Terminator! It’ll give me an excuse to play it again.
Nah, let’s go with what makes the most sense: The Terminator.
The Tiger Electronics game.
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How do you follow a game like J.J. & Jeff?
With robots, that’s how!
And with the new Transformers movie out, it seems fitting to be looking at a silly game in which some well-rendered CGI robots awkwardly punch each other in the face.
Rise Of The Robots is a Street Fighter-style fighting game (I’m being generous) in which you’re a cyborg who goes around fighting various robots who get increasingly more challenging in order to eventually defeat artificially super-intelligent robot antagonist The Supervisor.
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Every so often a game pops up on my radar that’s so ripe for reviewing on the world’s very best retro gaming website that it’s almost my duty to bring it to you good folks.
Forget The Flintstones, it’s ALL about J.J. & Jeff.
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Oh sure, with the World Cup going on I could have easily reviewed a football game.
I did play a whole bunch of those back in the day, after all.
Then I thought: nah, I’ll give the people what they REALLY want.
Flintstones.
Meet the Flintstones.
They’re the modern stone age family… and also a surprisingly decent Sega Genesis game!
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Remember Sonic The Fighters (aka Sonic Championship)?
A Sonic fighting game in which you could fight the likes of Tails, Knuckles and a whole range of characters from the Sonic universe in an arcade setting, Sonic The Fighters was absurd on paper but it really was one of those “let’s give it a go” type of games where the developers clearly just wanted to try it out, not knowing if it would do well or not.
It would be weird if there wasn’t a Sonic fighting game, whether’s this one’s any good or not, let’s put it that way.
One of the characters in the game was Bean The Dynamite, a green duck with a penchant for throwing bombs. He was hardly the best fighter to pick in the game but there was something about him.
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Since an actually good X-Men movie is currently out in cinemas, I thought I’d take a look at an actually good X-Men retro game!
For that, I turned to the good old Sega Genesis for advice and soon found myself re-discovering a really cool X-Men game.
The game is X-Men 2: Clone Wars, the follow-up to the simply titled X-Men. A game which, as much as I enjoyed it back in the day, simply didn’t have the pace and the flow needed to keep you glued to your TV throughout.
Thankfully, this superior sequel sorts all that out.
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Come on, don’t look surprised.
I was BORN to review this!
Now, this might be a controversial review seeing as the common consensus on this game is pretty much that it is terrible and should be stored next to the Ark of the Covenant far away in a big dusty box somewhere. This includes our very own Nintendo Legend who understandably destroyed The Adventures Of Gilligan’s Island (aka Gilligan’s Island) in his review some time ago.
The fact that I kinda like this game in a weird way may possibly make me look insane but also, I think, raises some interesting retro gaming questions: Can a well-meaning game adaptation which captures the spirit of its source material relatively well still be considered a complete failure even if it is extremely flawed? And what should our expectations be when dealing with a TV or film-to-game adaptation so ludicrous in concept that it doesn’t even sound like a real thing that should exist?
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You’d think that making a good Godzilla game would be pretty straight forward: big monsters fighting.
The end.
Why complicate something so pure, so perfect?
It’s the 1998 movie all over again!
The NES did not NOT complicate things, alas, and thus we got Godzilla: Monster Of Monsters!.
The game opens with a text scroll so slow they might as well have played the very first Godzilla movie before finally telling you to press start!
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Originally an Apple II computer game, Choplifter may sound like a lame play on words and look like a typical shooting game upon first glance and yet there’s actually a tad bit more to it than that.
For one thing, the game was on a home system before enjoying some popularity in the arcade and, eventually, on 8 and 16-bit consoles.
Today we’ll be looking at the Sega Master System port.
Again, upon first glance, Choplifter looks like no big deal: a right-to-left shooting game with a helicopter instead of the usual plane and/or spaceship.
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Following the sad passing of actor Bob Hoskins yesterday, I thought it would be cool to look at a game based on one of his movies.
I would have gone for Who Framed Roger Rabbit? on the NES but that game’s a chore to play through and, sadly, there is no Super Mario Bros. The Movie: The Game that I know of.
If there is, I’m totally there, though!
Another film I loved growing up, which happened to star Bob Hoskins, was Hook and, of course, a few games were made based on Steven Spielberg’s schmaltzy but fun fantasy flick.
For our very own Nintendo Legend’s take on the NES game, check out his website, by the way.
The game opens with Tinkerbell (aka “Tink”) kindly blocking our view of the game (and the film’s) plot.
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With the new Spidey film out now in theatres, I decided to go back and check out the other The Amazing Spider-Man 2.
I’m talking about the original Game Boy game released by everyone’s favourite retro gaming company LJN, of course.
You might remember that, a while back, I touched upon this game’s predecessor, simply titled The Amazing Spider-Man, calling it “playable enough” and “pretty straight-forward.” That’s two glowing reviews, right there.
But, seeing as the cinematic sequel is arguably superior (if sillier) than the original, can this 8-bit video game sequel outshine its first attempt?
SPOILERS: nope.
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A lot has been said about the infamous Super Noah’s Ark 3D.
From AVGN to our very own Eric Bailey, who covered the game’s possible re-release some time ago, it’s proven very challenging for most reviewers to not talk about this unofficial Wisdom Tree Super Nintendo game.
I was going to keep it for Review A Bad Game Day (August 8th) but, since I just missed Review A Great Game Day and very few games bring me quite as much joy as Super Noah’s Ark 3D, I think it’s worth reviewing it now and including it in both categories. Besides, there’s a new Noah movie out now AND goats are “in” with the recent release on Steam of that Goat Simulator.
Now, don’t get me wrong, Super Noah’s Ark 3D is dumb. Read More
Long before there was a Jackie Chan animated series (see 2000’s Jackie Chan Adventures), there was the cartoonish game Jackie Chan’s Action Kung Fu.
And loads of Jackie Chan movies, obviously…
The game was first released on the NES back in 1990 then was adapted for the TurboGrafx-16 only a year later. Both games followed the same plots and were altogether pretty similar. That said, the latter version was infinitely more polished and interestingly a tad more challenging.
The story is standard Mario-style fare as Jackie’s sister is kidnapped by a creepy monster and brought to some faraway location where you need to obviously get to in order to save her.
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