Before EA, official sports titles were more spread out, and used in all kind of ways. Games like NBA Jam are hard to come by these days (barring updates to NBA Jam). Before annual installments of Year of the Same Game, you had crazy sports game ideas that were one and done. These weren’t simulators, like we have today, but imaginitive riffs on the sports to make up for any technical proficiency that hardware
of the time may have had. And that’s what makes them Rad Sports Games. Vinnk and Sean talk about their favorite titles, including the aforementioned NBA Jam, Punch Out, Bases Loaded (and a bunch of other weird baseball games), and even Scotti Pippen’s Slam City! If you’ve never played it before, why… it sure is something else. Will we ever see their like again? Aside from EA picking up the IP for NBA Jam from Midway, that is…

Leave your own voicemail at 608-492-1923, or just share your thoughts in the show notes at FamicomDojo.TV:
http://famicomdojo.tv/podcast/86

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Based on the film of the same name, Terminator 2 the arcade game was an excellent arcade blast-em-up that made good use of the license. Taking control of the T-800, players must make their way to the past in order to protect John and Sarah Connor from the liquid metal T-1000. You’ll play through several levels inspired by the movie as you blast dozens of enemies. The SNES version used both the Super Scope and the Mouse, while the Genesis version used the Sega Menacer. It features a few ‘Ahnold’ sound bytes, but other than that, not much was special about the game. That was okay though, it was still fun, and it did justice to its source material.

This isn’t an actual game per se (although if you’re reading this Capcom, don’t let me stop you from making it), but rather it sums up one of the first North American attempts to make action figures based on Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. These figures made use of Gi-Joe molds. In fact, the original series of Street Fighter action figures were advertised as being part of Gi-Joe, with M. Bison and his Shadowloo grandmasters being part of Cobra.
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In a few days, the ball drops, and the book closes on 2011. No doubt, many of you are planning on having huge New Year’s Eve parties. And many of you will drink during these parties. And for a few of you, this will happen:

(Of course there is a good chance that neither Chris nor Liam Hemsworth will be involved)
2011 was a banner year for the fighting genre. With [Ultimate] Marvel vs Capcom 3, Mortal Kombat 9, Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition, King of Fighters XIII, and Dead of Alive Chronicles all hitting storeshelves this year, the genre has came back in full force. With Dead or Alive 5, Tekken Tag Tournament 2, Skull Girls, Soul Calibur 5, and Street Fighter X Tekken hitting next year, the genre is only moving forward. This sequel to last year’s Christmas beatdowns will take a look back at the best (or at least underrated) and the worst of the fighting genre’s golden era. So without further ado, lets get to the beatdowns!

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With all the new media flooding the internet regarding Mortal Kombat (2011), which has a release date in April, it seems Warner Bros. (who took over intellectual property of Midway last year) has been jumping on top of the merchandise wagon. Mortal Kombat Online reports that toy manufacturers Jazwares will be releasing a line based on the upcoming Mortal Kombat game. Jazwares had also done a line of figures based of past MK games, Deception and Shaolin Monks.

No other details have been officially confirmed as of yet, though MKO reports that Multiplayer.com is sporting an order page with the above graphic, supposedly being used as references to the figures coming out. Whether this is legit or not has yet to be determined.

Tonight, Saint Nick will go about his rounds and deliver presents to all the good boys and girls. Tomorrow however, you’ll most likely be getting together with family. And we all know how much families hate each other, to the point where they want to beat the ever living shit out of one another. So instead of beating down your loved ones in real life, why not check out these games that let you do it in the video game world?
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Forget about Nancy Regan’s “Just Say No” campaign. This is how you fight the war on drugs. You, bad ass DEA enforcer/SWAT Power Ranger agent Max Force and your buddy, the equally bad ass DEA agent/SWAT Team Power Ranger Hit Man grab your machine guns and rocket launchers, and arrest every dope fiend, d-boy, thug, and even dog (yes, dogs can be arrested) you come across, and if they refuse to come quietly, then use your rocket launcher to blow the ever living shit out of them, and watch as they explode in a shower of blood and guts. You’ll visit seedy places such as the K.R.A.K. stop, which believe it or not, is a drug lab. Wow, these cats are so flagrant that they’ll put it right out there that they’re running a crack den. Along the way, you’ll either blow up, arrest, or arrest AND blow up heroin dealers, killer clowns, super strong retarded dope fiends who dumpsters stuff at you, and guys wearing mullets who throw hypodermic syringes at you, which are presumably full of their product. You even get to get behind the wheel of your car and run criminals over.

It’s obvious that American Gangster Frank Lucas doesn’t run this drug cartel, and your main enemy is a remarkably evil bastard named Mr Big, a huge head in a wheel chair. When you beat him, he turns into a demonic robo-skull-snake thingy which you also have to kill. This was ported to Nintendo thanks to Acclaim. In a hint of irony, the NES version was promoted as the first NES game with a strong anti-drug message…yet all references to drugs were removed. Even the K.R.A.K stop was changed to K.W.A.K stop. Oddly enough, the blood and gore was still retained. Of course this was one of the many games that were re-released on the Midway Arcade Treasures compilations. The main theme is even easy to hum along to as well.

Narc was the first game that bought a real solution to the drug problem facing our nation: dress up like a Power Ranger, grab your guns, get behind the wheel of your corvette, and kill everything that moves, including dogs, hippies, and morbidly obese heads stuck in wheel chairs that turn into giant demon robo-snake skull heads after taking enough damage. It’s just too bad that Midway’s 2005 attempt at a remake was nowhere near as interesting (or original) as this classic.

Fun Fact: Narc’s Max Force was featured in the Power Team animated series, which was Acclaim’s answer to Captain N. The series centered around a teenager named Johnny Arcade as he commands a team of semi-popular characters from Acclaim Video games such as Wizards and Warriors.

By 2002, the Mortal Kombat series had become a running gag of the fighting game world. The last gamers had seen of the series was an awful port of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 and the horrific action game Mortal Kombat Special Forces. Now granted, the fighting game scene was in a slump, but even then there were still quality titles such as Capcom vs SNK 2, King of Fighters, and Dead of Alive 3. Midway knew that they if Mortal Kombat was once again going to be relevant, they would have to go back to the drawing board, and they did just that with Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance.
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