With all the hype and hoolpa over Tom Gun: Maverick last year, did everyone somehow forget that Top Gun already had a sequel? Released way back in 1989, Top Gun: The Second Mission continues the adventures of ace fighter pilot Maverick as he blasts enemies out of the sky in 8-bit aerial combat on the… Read More 8-Bit Replay – Top Gun: The Second Mission (1989) for NES
By the end of 1987, Top Gun had already been a blockbuster hit in theaters the year before and a bestseller on videocassette that spring. Any self-respecting 13-year-old had already watched it a bunch of times, to the point of wearing out the tape replaying the aerial combat scenes over and over again. With no… Read More 8-Bit Replay – Top Gun (1987) for NES
Even though 1987’s action hit Predator may have technically been rated R, plenty of younger teens and even pre-teens saw and loved the movie, if not in theaters then on VHS or its ubiquitous presence on cable TV for years afterward. Many of those same kids were psyched to play the official video game adaptation… Read More 8-Bit Replay – Predator (1987) for NES
Two of Clive Barker’s most famous creations, the Hellraiser Cenobites and the monsters of Nightbreed, collide – but only in comic book form. While the author/filmmaker’s Hellraiser was successful enough to launch a franchise of sequels, his Nightbreed wasn’t quite as lucky. Nonetheless, Epic Comics (an imprint of Marvel) spun off both properties into comics… Read More Chaos of the Flesh – Hellraiser Nightbreed: Jihad Comic Book (1991)
For as uneven and frequently disappointing as the 1990s Hellraiser comic could be, the book at least managed some pretense of being artistically motivated with ambitions of literary merit (however rarely achieved). In contast, spin-off title The Harrowers was a straight-up embarrassment in all respects. Its short six-issue run was six too many. In the… Read More Hellishly Dumb – Clive Barker’s The Harrowers Comic Book (1993-1994)
The success of both Hellraiser (1987) and Hellraiser II (1988) ensured that further movie sequels would of course get moved into development, but the next one wouldn’t show up on theater screens until 1992. In the meantime, Clive Barker’s horror franchise found additional life on the printed page as a comic book published by Epic… Read More Hell Illustrated – Clive Barker’s Hellraiser Comic Books (1989-1994)
Because Tim Burton’s blockbuster Batman had spawned a video game spinoff that was very popular in its own right, his sequel of course needed its own game adaptation as well. In fact, it got several different adaptations spread out among a host of gaming consoles. Unfortunately, the NES version of Batman Returns was a huge… Read More 8-Bit Replay – Batman Returns (1993) for NES
The history of video games based on movies is littered with poorly conceived duds that were quickly rushed to market to capitalize on publicity for their source material. That was especially true in the 8-bit era, which inflicted numerous outright unplayable disasters onto naive fans hoping to relive their favorite movies in game form. Somehow,… Read More 8-Bit Replay – Batman: The Video Game (1990) for NES
Of all the comic books Batman has headlined over the decades, perhaps no single title has proven as influential, especially to movie adaptations, as Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. For better or worse, the 1986 graphic novel set the template for every “dark” and “gritty” depiction of the character to follow. The comic was… Read More Read-Only File – The Dark Knight Returns (1986)
By the time I hit high school at the end of the 1980s, the Nintendo Entertainment System was at the peak of its cultural domination. I owned a bunch of games and rented at least two or three more every week from the local video store. The 1991 release of G.I. Joe: A Real American… Read More 8-Bit Replay – G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero (1991) for NES
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