This game was stupidly tough, but it was such a great little novelty to even just “be” Spider-Man AND The Uncanny X-Men that nobody really minded.
I just feel kind of sorry for Arcade though. Even back when he first got introduced I thought he was a pretty old-fashioned character and that was back when the Amiga was considered crazy future technology. Time has not been kind to the concept of an arcade, and far less kind to people who wear bow ties.
I used to annoy the local arcade with this game. Sure, people liked playing the basketball bit, but I knew about the hidden Battlezone-esque 3D tank game that was freely accessible if you held down some stick and button combination during attract mode. It was a bit crap but it was FREE and in the arcade you really can’t beat that can you.
OK anyway NBA Jam was a pretty great game, especially when you were playing with other people. The addition of the secret real world characters to the already cool roster – this was back when basketball was cool – was a fun way to keep the interest up. It was pretty obvious that the computer was cheating to hell and back in an effort to keep the games close, but it didn’t really matter that much.
The SNES version was a really great conversion, no two ways about it. The speech made a lot of the difference and the Mode 7-style effect for the basketball court just felt polished and made it a confident home conversion.
I didn’t play much of the later NBA Jam games, but for a while there this was a real cool way to kill a few hours.
Cool Spot! He may have just been a red dot to you, but he was the beginning of a new generation of games – ones that combined slick production values with the slimy world of advertising. I mean we paid actual cash money to watch a four hour advertisement for sugar water. How genius is that!
I liked this game enough when it came out, though it did bug me how large the main sprite was which meant a lot of the platforming was harder than it needed to be. No doubt some advertisement person balked at the idea of the Cool Spot being just a little red dot and insisted it take up, like, the whole screen, just like on TV. It ended up getting converted around the place, including the Amiga which was desperate for console style platformers towards the end of its commercial life.
Oh, and it was one of the earlier games by Dave Perry and Tommy Tallarico, so there you go trivia fans! GORGE ON MY KNOWLEDGE BUFFET.
Now you have the music from Wonderboy in your head, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
I love this era of gaming because random weird stuff happens all the damn time and nobody bats an eyelid. A game starring a fat kid in a grass skirt? Sure, why not. Jumping animations? Don’t need ‘em. Heck let’s make skateboards and tomahawks come out of eggs while we’re at it.
I played the Jabeebus out of this on the Master System, which was a high quality port that featured large characters, smooth scrolling (that was a thing back then) and music so bad that you wanted to chop your ears off with a rusty hacksaw.
Again, a game from an age where any regular daytime activity could be turned into a video game and nobody looked at you weird or nothing.
I can’t say I was ever really in love with this game, but as an artifact of the era it’s quite interesting. And holy cow look at how many machines it was ported to! That’s got to be a record, surely? Maybe Robocod has it beat…
I really feel bad for the artists on that game having to draw everything at that weird forced perspective angle. Ick. This is one of the few classic games where I think a first person perspective would be better.
And don’t get those streets started about what it’s like when those Police cars come tearing through the streets throwing napalm around. No wonder those streets were always so angsty.
Anyway, Streets of Rage 1 was better than Streets of Rage 2, and Streets of Rage 1 was better than Final Fight. YEAH, THAT’S A FACT, WHAT ARE YOU GONNA DO ABOUT IT?
Did you know there are Master System and Game Gear versions of Streets of Rage? It’s true! And they’re actually really good!
Micro Machines was an awesome game and simple and fun and it didn’t have a bunch of cutscenes in fact there was no story at all.
Funny how a game like this is way more memorable than the latest CINEMATIC SNORE FEST.
The PC version was a jolly good port, and I liked it. There were about 400 other versions that were more or less identical though. Even the CDi got one!
This game seemed unnecessarily hard to me when it came out – it didn’t help that I was playing it on someone’s clunky Apple 2 with monochrome monitor and those weird joysticks that didn’t correct themselves. Still! People don’t understand how peanut butter and vegemite could be a good combination, so who am I to judge what turns out popular?
There was no Commodore 64 version, but they ported it to the Sharp X68000? What the hell?
October 2011 Edit: They DID make a Commodore 64 version! IT’S AWESOME!
I keep buying Robocod because they keep re-releasing the darn thing. The MegaDrive version is my favourite, of course, but it’s just so huge and cute and full of hidden surprises that I can’t resist quad dipping.
I bought the DS version when it came out and my wife played it while I was out one day. I came home to her livid. “BAD GAME”, she growled, pointing at the Robocod cartridge like it was a puppy that just messed up the rug.
“VERY BAD GAME.”
Forget finances, politics or religion – Robocod is an issue that really tests a marriage.
And man oh man, I think Robocod wins the prize for being the game that got converted to the most number of machines. It was released in that curious nexus where 8, 16 and 32-bit machines all peacefully coexisted and had new games released for them. I know I spent a fortune of magazines at the time keeping up with it all…and now look where all of it got me!
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