While you were busy celebrating that Mario Party and GoldenEye 007 will finally be coming to Nintendo Switch Online, our friends over at QuByte have quietly been releasing their own line of retro game compilations. Their newest titles include both the Thunderbolt Collection and the Radical Rex Collection, two very different types of games that epitomize what we loved about the 1990s. It's great that these titles are seeing a second life on modern consoles, but the question remains: Are these games actually worth playing in 2022? To answer that question, I decided to flip through the pages of Electronic Gaming Monthly, Next Generation, Mean Machines Sega and more classic magazines to see what the critics said when these games first came out. We're checking in with the 1990s critics for another exciting episode of QuByte Classics Review Crew.
Radical Rex
Genesis
Activision
1994
Review Scores
| Publication |
Scores |
| GamePro |
3.5/5 |
| Electronic Gaming Monthly |
5.6/10 |
| Mean Machines Sega |
78% |
| Sega Visions |
3/5 |
| Next Generation |
1/5 |
| Nintendo Power |
3.1/5 |
You might not know the name Beam Software, but if you were playing games back in the 1980s and 90s, you definitely know their handiwork. They were the developers responsible for dubious console games based on popular licenses like Back to the Future, Terminator 2, Star Wars, Itchy and Scratchy, The Hunt for Red October and The Punisher. That's not a great list, but Beam wasn't all bad. Those awful licensed games helped to fund original projects like Nightshade and even a few critically-acclaimed titles, such as the Super NES version of Shadowrun. Radical Rex was one of their original titles, giving gamers of all ages a brand-new prehistoric hero with all of the attitude and coolness that you expect from a 16-bit mascot character. Now, thanks to QuByte, both the console version and the handheld port of Radical Rex are back in a just-released compilation for modern consoles.
If you watched our series looking at Next Generation's One-Star Reviews, then you've probably already braced for the worst. After all, they called it a Joe & Mac clone that was “consistently flat, unmotivating, and not up to par with other platform games.” They concluded that “you've seen it before, usually better.”
Yes, that one-star review was harsh, but don't take that to mean that everybody hated Radical Rex. Looking back at the reviews, I found that critics were a lot more mixed than what Next Generation's review would suggest. For example, Electronic Gaming Monthly's review crew gave the game a whole bunch of fives and sixes. “Not quite radical enough for me,” explains Mike. “Radical Rex has a number of good points, like very cute graphics and animation, but the controls could use some work. This game will probably appeal more to younger gamers with its cutesy theme, otherwise, it's more your run-and-smack-enemies-away type action game.”
You saw a lot of these middling scores connected to Radical Rex when it first came out. Sega Visions gave it a 3 out of 5, Nintendo Power went a little higher with a 3.1 out of 5, and GamePro went as high as a 3.5 out 5. In case you're wondering, the highest marks came from Mean Machines Sega, but don't take their 78% as a recommendation. “If dinosaurs were as dull as Radical Rex, then they deserve to die out if you ask me. With very little to differentiate it from the countless other platformers, Rex looks extremely tired and lacks the injection of humor or originality that makes the likes of Earthworm Jim and Pitfall so innovative and playable. Radical Rex is destined for extinction, methinks.”
Overall, the critics felt that it fell way short of the mascot games of the era, but pretty much everybody liked it significantly more than Next Generation.
Thunderbolt Collection (Various)
Beyond reviving Radical Rex, QuByte also released the Thunderbolt Collection, a compilation featuring two slightly different overhead shoot ‘em ups that were originally released in the mid-1990s. Now, before you ask, no, this has nothing to do with Operation Thunderbolt by Taito. It's also completely unrelated to the Thunderbolt games on both the MSX and Commodore 64, as well as A-10 Thunderbolt on the ZX Spectrum. In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you've probably never even heard of these games, as they were released exclusively in Taiwan.
This package features both the 8-bit and 16-bit versions of the game, which were developed by Gamtec Corp., a company best-known for releasing unlicensed Genesis and Nintendo Entertainment System cartridges. What we get are two reasonably fun shooters, neither of which are all that exciting or especially innovative. The 8-bit version is slow with generic enemies and way too many power-ups, while the 16-bit version is definitely an improvement, but still only average, at best. Both games suffer from weird frame rate problems that make swarms of enemies look like they are teleporting across the screen. This really plays with your eyes, especially when paired with some of the more complicated backgrounds.
Seeing as these games are only now coming to America, it probably won't be much of a shock when I tell you that there are no magazine reviews. I mean, there are plenty of reviews of Operation Thunderbolt, but nothing for either of these two shoot ‘em ups. We'll never know what EGM or GamePro would have said, but I have a hunch these Thunderbolt games would have ranked way below the classics of that era. It's cool that we're getting these rarely seen shooters, but the Thunderbolt Collection is far from a must-own compilation.
