COULD THEY BE ANY MORE NINETIES?

Some games remain timeless classics, aging like fine wine. Some, however, are very much products of their era and time can be a cruel mistress.

Platformers were by far the most popular genre during the early to mid nineties. The sheer amount of 'mascot games' was overwhelming. Very few (if any) saw the success that Sonic and Mario garnered, and there were lots of casualties.

Disclaimer: I'm not saying that any of these games are bad per se, although some of them definitely are. I'm just highlighting how very dated these five 90s relics seem by today's standards.

Normy's Beach Babe-O-Rama

Based on a comic strip, Normy has to rescue a bunch of defenceless girls from aliens, which rather belittles the strides set by Ellen Ripley. It also features time travel and toxic waste, because it was the nineties and they were in everything.

Boogerman

Farting, snot-flinging, burping. These things aren't just included as throwaway toilet humour references, the game was actually built around them. The very definition of a toilet game. It does feature some excellent animation though. Also, pollution and toxic waste.

Earthworm Jim

Snot, toxic waste, kidnapped princess and cows. Ok, that last one wasn't necessarily a staple of the 90s but everything else is firmly stuck in the past. I wanted to like Earthworm Jim far more than I ever liked Earthworm Jim and I don't really know why.

Radical Rex

If an algorithm was tasked with making a game using 'buzz words' and 'on trend' topics from the 90s, this would be the result. 

Global Gladiators

A game about destroying pollutant toxic monsters, with snot-like gooey guns, created entirely as a marketing vehicle for McDonald's, a corporation that's responsible for millions of tonnes of carbon emissions. Irony didn't exist in the 90s.