At the same, though, I shouldn't be too picky about technicalities like that, so let's just get into yet another six games that appeared on consoles so unlikely that the only natural reaction is to ask either "What?" or "WHY?!". Also, half of this list is first-person shooters, which is totally just by freak accident, I swear. Anyway, speaking of Quake...
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| Got to love how the cover is literally just the PC release, but with an Amiga sticker slapped on the back. |
Making video games for personal computers is a veritable minefield, and that was only all the more true prior to this decade, especially during the 80s & 90s. Back before your choice was between "PC, Mac, or Linux", you had IBM, Apple, Tandy, Atari, & Commodore (to name only a small few) all releasing seemingly countless variants of personal computers, all of which likely using their own proprietary hardware & software; in fact, even computers from the same company were likely to be incompatible with each other! In Europe, Commodore was effectively "King of the 80s" with both its cost-effective Commodore 64 & its more robust Commodore Amiga line. Debuting with the Amiga 1000 in 1985, the latter line would continue to be officially updated & supported up until 1998, even outliving Commodore itself; later Amigas after the 4000T are just modern PCs using the Amiga name & its own OS. Therefore, it's not surprising that computer games would continue to get ported over to the Amiga line during the 90s... But you just know that there's a limit to what even the Amiga 4000 was capable of, right?
Well, tell that to a company called clickBOOM.
"Who's clickBOOM?", you ask? Good question, honestly, and normally I'd say that there's little to no information about such a short-lived company, as it only lasted during the mid-90s... But one Serbian programmer named Djordje Djurdjevic hid "The Whole Truth about clickBOOM" within the code he single-handedly wrote for the Amiga port of Myst in 1997, which clickBOOM was for the publisher for, but never actually credited Djurdjevic for. In short, the head of the company was an egotistical & selfish man who apparently never paid anyone for the work they did for him, while also spending way more than necessary, which in turn likely made it impossible for him to make his money back, even though he managed to get the rights to publish gigantic PC hits for the Amiga. This includes id Software's Quake, the 1996 icon that absolutely changed the industry with its fully-textured 3D polygons & (with the right hardware) silky smooth gameplay. Yes, Quake for the Amiga! This is a game that required a Pentium processor on PC, something that Intel didn't make until 1993's P5, yet here's clickBOOM saying that a mere Motorola 68020, something that came out back in 1984 & had only half the clock rate as the P5 (at best!), could run this game; to be fair, the 68060 that was recommended was a better fit, though still not as powerful as Pentiums were in 1996. This port was done by PXL Computers, the same studio that ported Myst, so it's just as likely that clickBOOM never paid the people who ported Quake, either. That'd be a shame, too, because PXL looked to have done an a rather outstanding job with the port, as even an Amiga 1200, the low-end counterpart to the 4000, actually plays a surprisingly decent game of Quake. Sure, it's not exactly a looker, but I highly doubt Commodore ever really intended for the Amiga to one day see a landmark polygonal first-person shooter get released on it... in 1998, a year AFTER Quake II came out for PC.
Every so often, you'll just come across an iconic video game publisher releasing a game that simply feels like it came not just from left field, but rather from another dimension entirely, and they're almost always ports of other companies' works. Stuff like Capcom publishing the Game Boy Color port of Dragon's Lair, Sega releasing the Wii port of Nancy Drew: The White Wolf of Icicle Creek, or Majesco handling the Xbox release for Guilty Gear XX #Reload. That's the kind of reaction I had when I first heard that Konami, of all companies, released King's Quest V for the NES. Originally released for IBM, Tandy, & MS-DOS compatibles in 1990, King's Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder! is a part of the larger King's Quest series of adventure games designed by Roberta Williams, produced by her husband Ken, & published by Sierra On-Line, and is notable in being the first entry to replace the original text parser interface with a point-&-click one. At the time, & even to this day (for the most part), the adventure genre was mainly known as a computer-exclusive thing, and so the only previous console release was the Master System port of the original King's Quest back in 1989, which was developed by Microsmiths Inc, published by Parker Brothers (as one of only three America-exclusive games for the console), & regarded as notoriously difficult, even more so than the PC original.
Therefore, it's pretty baffling why King's Quest V was decided to be the next game to receive a console port only three years later, and as yet another America-only release. It's especially bizarre because this feels like something Konami would have likely published under its Ultra Games shell company/label, but the game's June 1992 release came just months after Ultra was closed down; one can also wonder why the NES was chosen, instead of the SNES. Anyway, this port was done by Novotrade, a year before Ecco the Dolphin would make the studio a notable name, and in many ways its an admirable port, as there's no possible way a console originally released in Japan almost an entire decade ago should be able to play something even remotely close to a game like this. To no surprise, this results in Novotrade having to completely redraw every single screen so that it could work with the NES' limited color palette & smaller screen resolution, and the point-&-click interface had to be changed into a direct-control scheme; you can easily find comparison images online. Does this mean that King's Quest V for the NES is a good port? From all reports, the simple answer to that is "Oh hell no!", but the simple fact that Novotrade & Konami actually released this port, and that it can be identifiable a King's Quest game, is worthy of admiration, at the very least.
This is a perfect example of the kinds of things we just don't get with video games anymore, & whether or not that's a good thing is down to personal opinion.
Ah, the Nintendo Wii. In a gaming landscape that was moving into high-definition visuals, the Wii stuck to a max of 480p standard definition, with hardware power to match, effectively making it the last bastion of porting games over that really have no place being on it; yeah, the Switch kind of has that, too, but that's a different kind of situation. At first, this resulted in the Wii receiving straight ports of major game releases, usually with reduced graphical fidelity & maybe some motion control "waggle" added in. Eventually, though, most major publishers went with one of two directions when it came to the Wii: Either just ignore the system or do something completely different to better match the Wii's strengths. For example, when Activision was releasing High Moon Studios' Transformers: War for Cybertron in mid-2010 for HD consoles, it also hired Next Level Games to make Transformers: Cybertron Adventures at the same time for the Wii, a companion game which replaced the third-person shooter gameplay with an on-rails, Time Crisis-esque concept. Speaking of Activision, though, we have Call of Duty: Modern Warfare... 3... on the Wii!
It all started off pretty reasonably with Call of Duty 3, which was a launch date title for the Wii. Then Activision would skip a game & release World at War in 2008. After that, Activision would skip over Modern Warfare 2, instead releasing Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare — Reflex Edition in 2009, which at the same was considered pretty impressive, since this was the first Infinity Ward-developed game to get ported to Wii; CoD3 & WoW were both Treyarch games, who helped port them to Wii. In 2010, Treyarch's Black Ops made it to the Wii, alongside the HD consoles, and then we hit 2011. You see, part of why the Wii could continue receiving Call of Duty ports was because all of them were based on IW engine 3.0, with Modern Warfare 2 being the sole exception because it used IW 4.0. Therefore, it seemed impossible for the Wii to receive any more ports by this time, seeing as IW 4.0 was likely just too powerful for the Wii to handle, let alone the new IW 5.0. However, in August 2011, Activision confirmed that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 for the Wii was indeed going to be a real thing, though until its release alongside the "proper" HD versions that November, little to nothing was known about it, outside of Treyarch handling porting duties. What's the end result? Honestly, Treyarch actually pulled off a bit of a miracle, as while it's obviously cut down compared to what Infinity Ward & Sledgehammer Games had done, it's amazing that something even resembling MW3 is actually completely playable on a Wii... But only barely.
Ask anyone that's actually played this port of MW3, and they'll all tell you about how much your Wii will try killing itself streaming data off the disc as you're playing, showing that Treyarch just barely got the game to work properly in time for release; I have no idea if the Wii U suffers as much, in that regard, since it can play all Wii games. In a world where consoles are now pretty much just gussied up PCs in one way or another, making them immensely similar to each other, I feel confident in saying that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 for the Wii is the last vestige of a bygone era. Again, the Switch is similar in that regard, but you don't hear about how something like Doom [2016] or Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus is literally making the Switch commit suicide just by playing it... Yet.
In the previous B-List we looked at a couple of games that Tec Toy, the Brazilian company that had (& still have) the rights to Sega's products in that country, ported over themselves, so I think it's only fair to include one Brazil-exclusive Tec Toy release in this list... Though this one wasn't actually developed by Tec Toy. The original Battletoads for the NES from 1991 by Rare quickly became well known for its mixture of different genres, like brawler & platformer, as well as its high level of difficulty, sometimes bordering on cruel, & whether the game's famous or infamous is up to you; later ports on the Game Boy (no, not that one), Genesis, & Game Gear did tone down the difficulty, though. It was a successful game nonetheless, so a sequel was only inevitable, and that game would come out in 1993 for the SNES. Released around the same time as bizarre crossover Battletoads/Double Dragon for the NES, Battletoads in Battlemaniacs was a mix of a remake & a sequel, as while the plot did differ somewhat (& giving you a different Toad to play as), it also brought back stages from the original, either enhanced for the stronger hardware or completely remixed.
Still, as much as people associated Battletoads as a "Nintendo property", the original game was ported to Sega hardware, & in 1994 Virgin Interactive announced plans to release a Sega Master System port of the sequel, with porting duties coming from Syrox Developments, a British studio with with some Sega hardware experience. Unfortunately, right before the planned July release, the game was cancelled for unknown reasons, even though some British gaming magazines had already printed reviews; maybe Virgin simply felt that the Master System market was dying out in Europe, which it would in 1996. Speaking of 1996, that's the year when Tec Toy got the rights to the game & released it exclusively in Brazil under a simpler name, resulting in Battlemaniacs for the Master System. While the original European release was reviewed, though, there's no indication that it was ever actually finished, which is shown with the Brazilian release, as there are some graphical glitches & some stages don't have any music playing, if any audio at all. Still, the game that did eventually come out is pretty impressive for the 8-bit hardware it was developed on, if a bit simple in terms of animation; also, the music by Matt Furniss is pretty good. Being a Brazilian-exclusive release, though, this also means that Battlemaniacs is a highly coveted game for Master System collectors, so for most they'll have to rely on emulation to give this a go.
Video games based on the Star Wars franchise are a dime a dozen, so it takes truly memorable games to rise above the rest. During the 90s, the Super Star Wars trilogy were some of those, adapting the three movies that existed at the time into action-platformers that were known for their difficulty. Developed by Sculptured Software, prior to its acquisition by Acclaim, Super Star Wars, Super Empire Strikes Back, & Super Return of the Jedi all became pretty beloved parts of the SNES catalog, though there are some who still decry the high difficulty to this day (& understandably so). JVC was the original publisher for these games, under license from LucasArts, but after JVC left the North American gaming industry the publishing rights went kind of zany. For example, Super Star Wars would get re-released by Nintendo of America on two different occasions (the second of which was in 1998, being one of only a handful of SNES games getting an "E" rating by the ESRB), while THQ got the rights to Super Empire & Super Return. This resulted in those games getting their own reprints on SNES, with a nascent Majesco handling distribution, but it also resulted in the latter game actually receiving ports outside of the SNES.
As mentioned, this trilogy of games were known for being SNES exclusives, but not for a lack of trying, as Super Star Wars did have ports for the PC & Sega Genesis in the works at some point, but neither actually seeing release; prototypes for both have since been leaked online. However, 1995 did see the release of Super Return of the Jedi for the Game Boy & Game Gear, both developed by Realtime Associates & published by Black Pearl Software, a division of THQ that existed from 1993 to 1997 that was most known for developing the cancelled Genesis adaptation of Akira. Similar to Battlemaniacs from the previous entry, both ports are remarkably good looking visually, with the Game Gear version in particular looking shockingly close to the original SNES game, considering the 8-bit hardware, while the Game Boy version is obviously more limited but still looking more than capable, and the music for both versions are decent, if not really good. While Super Star Wars has since seen re-release on the PlayStation 4 & Vita in 2015, its two sequels only ever saw release on the Wii Virtual Console, which is no longer available, while both portable ports have never seen any sort of re-release, with the Game Gear version being the most expensive one of them all, from what I can tell. Still, if you want some mighty impressive mid-90s portable gaming ports, then you can't go wrong with Super Return of the Jedi, regardless of your choice of "Game".
Now, to be fair, it's hard to really call any of these five games direct "ports", at least in relation to their original source... But when the hell will I ever be able to talk about this bizarre & ambitious selection of weirdos? So back in 1987 a small studio called Xanth Software F/X developed a game called MIDI Maze, which got released by Hybrid Arts for the Atari ST line of computers. It was an early example of a first-person shooter taking place in a maze-like environment, predating id Software's earliest works in the genre (1991's Hovertank 3D & Catacomb 3-D) by about a solid four years, and the main appeal was that you could connect up to 16 computers for network deathmatch by daisy-chaining the MIDI ports on each ST, hence why it was called "MIDI Maze". Yes, "deathmatch" was a thing long before Doom, though here everyone played as giant, spherical smileys, so it was totally non-violent. A few years later Bulletproof Software, the company founded by Henk Rogers that both helped bring computer RPGs to Japan with The Black Onyx & was instrumental in getting Nintendo the console rights to Tetris, caught wind of MIDI Maze & hired Xanth to produce a port, while Xanth's founder James Yee decided that said port should be for the most reasonable of systems... the Game Boy.
The end result of this is 1991's Faceball 2000, a game that, quite frankly, shouldn't possibly exist on the Game Boy. As I mentioned earlier, this is a bit of a cheat, since Faceball 2000 isn't an exact port of MIDI Maze, but rather a bit of a re-imagining, as while the deathmatch option is still there (complete with 4-player support... but we'll get back to that in a bit), there's also a single-player campaign where the objective is to find the glowing wall panel in order to exist each stage. Still, this is a first-person shooter for the original Game Boy, coming out a little under a year before Argonaut Software & Nintendo would release the Japan-exclusive X, which also used a first-person view but utilized wireframes. Meanwhile, the North American-exclusive Faceball 2000 uses flat-shaded polygons, which is pretty mind-blowing, especially since the handheld was barely two years old at the time; another FPS wouldn't get made until Tyrannosaurs Tex for the Game Boy Color, which wouldn't even see official release until 2018! Now, sure, the framerate is insanely slow, but it's not an unplayable game by any means, and Xanth even programmed in 16-player link cable support, but could only work via a proprietary adapter, which never came out. People have since tried to replicate a 16-player game, but the most that's been done so far is 9 players, which is impressive. Still, all the props to Robert Champagne, who programmed this Game Boy game, as well as David Whittaker, who composed an insanely addictive song that was heard during gameplay.
Not simply content with just a handheld game, though, BPS & Xanth would return a little over a year later with Faceball 2000 for the SNES, which was yet another re-imagining of MIDI Maze. This featured the same gameplay options as the Game Boy game, but with some changes. First, multiplayer is restricted to just two-players via split-screen, though now you can at least play the campaign mode cooperatively. Also, enemy smileys now come in more shapes than just spheres, allowing for easier identification of which ones are larger immediate threats. Meanwhile, the music by George "The Fat Man" Sanger, while good, is nothing as addictive as Whittaker's work. Finally, the framerate in this version is much better, allowing for smoother gameplay. Remember, this game was about a good half a year before Star Fox & the Super FX chip released, so Xanth once again made an FPS using nothing more than base hardware, and at a good framerate; Faceball 2000 easily plays better than Doom on the SNES. After this, the series moves from North America to Japan, resulting in two exclusive releases over there, both published by Riverhill Soft (odd, considering that BPS was a Japanese company). First is Faceball for the PC-Engine CD, which came out in late 1993 & shows that the SNES' older competitor was not just as capable, but could also handle four-player split-screen! Then, a month later, there's Faceball 2000 for the Game Gear, which is the only direct port of them all, as it's essentially a colorized version of the Game Boy game, complete with all of the same exits, cheats, & secrets, though multiplayer was reduced to just two-players via link cable (bots could be added, however). Still, considering the hardware, this is just as impressive as the Game Boy game, & David Whittaker's music sounds just as good on the Game Gear as it did on the Game Boy.
Beyond this, there were ports in the works for Windows, DOS, & even Virtual Boy, but none of the ever saw release, though the last (BPS' NikoChan Battle) did eventually get leaked online; like the others, it looks impressive & actually fulfills the "virtual" labeling of the system. As for the fate of MIDI Maze/Faceball, Xanth Software looks to be long defunct, so who knows who the rights lie with today, while Blue Planet Software (the successor to Bullet Proof Software) pretty much has no interest in doing anything with it's own properties, instead helping manage Tetris' life in the world; The Black Onyx hasn't been seen since the Game Boy Color port in 2000, after all.
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And that brings an end to this return to looking at video games that really had no reason to exist on the consoles they were ported to, other than to act as a sort of dare for the development teams behind said ports. Whether it was clickBOOM showing that the Amiga could indeed play a decent game a Quake (even if they didn't actually pay the developers for their work), Konami feeling that releasing a port of a PC adventure game to the NES made sense in the year 1992, Treyarch actively trying to kill each & every Wii that thought it could play Modern Warfare 3, Tec Toy licensing a barely (but not quite?) finished Master System port for Brazilian release, Realtime Associates showing that the Game Boy & Game Gear still had something to prove in 1995, or Xanth Software simply wanting to show everyone that first-person shooters could indeed be done on seemingly any piece of hardware thrown at them, these might not all be "good" games in the long run, but they are deserving of at least a modicum of respect for doing the seeming impossible, to varying extents.
Quake (Amiga) © 1996, 1997, 1998 id Software, Inc.
King's Quest V (NES) © 1990 Sierra On-Line, Inc. (now Activision) © 1992 Konami, Inc.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (Wii) © 2011 Activision Publishing, Inc.
(There is no copyright listing to be seen for Battlemaniacs on Master System, though both Virgin & Tec Toy's logos are on the cover)
Super Return of the Jedi © 1995 Lucasfilm Games
MIDI Maze © 1987 Xanth Software F/X
Faceball 2000 (Game Boy) © 1991 Xanth, BPS
Faceball 2000 (SNES) © 1992 Xanth Software F/X
Faceball 2000 (PC-Engine & Game Gear) © 1993 Riverhill Soft, Inc. (now Althi, Inc.) © 1993 BPS
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