Why did ljn

Who Framed Roger Rabbit : Horrible, slippery driving controls, slow searching, and a time limit to writing down a password after a game over. Sometimes LJN didn't even credit the developers at all. They are also known for forcing the developers who were developing for them, to rush their games to meet their pitiful deadlines to get the game out while the movie's popularity was sky high. Put that all together, you got all the colors of the shit rainbow. Hooray LJN. They made the awesome ThunderCats toyline, the first line of WWF action figures, and the popular but controversial Entertech toyline of water guns.

A few of their games have great music e. Comments Loading comments History Talk 0. Do you like this video? Play Sound. LJN [ Edit ] [ Talk ]. Universal Conquest Wiki. Back to the Future September Beetlejuice May Friday the 13th February The Sport! November The Incredible Crash Dummies August Jaws November The Karate Kid November Major League Baseball April The game really underscored the way LJN enforced its own status as a huckster for the most forgettable aspects of its era's pop culture.

Despite being squarely within the dummies' target demographic, I remember thinking at the time that the Crash Dummies were almost as surreal and creepy as they seem in retrospect.

The plot of this game involves a "junkman" coming alive and trying to turn the dummies into parts for some type of evil machine. The loose controls and jerky, back-and-forth camera made me nauseous enough that, if a tire didn't knock my dummy's head off and doom his friends, I would have thrown up. While it fails to reach the avant-garde highs attained by Pictionary , True Lies is probably the most objectively "good" game LJM ever published.

It combines elements of stealth, action, and puzzle-solving in a creative way while retaining an identifiable connection to the movie it's supposedly about. More importantly, it makes its objectives clear enough to respect the players' time, which makes it a pretty singular entry in the non-sports LJM catalog.

Playing as Arnold Schwarzenegger, I wandered around a mansion either shooting or not shooting armed guards, depending on whether or not I felt like being noticed. I collected a few keys from a few dead bodies and made my way into an important-seeming part of the house before being gunned down. I wonder if this was the first mainstream video game to use the word "modem. Bonus Points: The montage effect that True Lies ' "game over" screen creates strongly suggests that Arnold's body explodes like a nuclear bomb when he dies.

Any lingering positivity that True Lies left in my craw was erased almost instantly by Wolverine: Adamantium Rage. A quick look at a walkthrough suggests that each of the games' areas requires either finding a certain number of items or killing a certain number of enemies, but I very quickly became trapped in the basement of a secret laboratory.

With no items or enemies accessible, and his mutant healing factor increasing his life by the moment, my iteration of Wolverine spent eternity down there, wondering what might have been. Warlock strikes me as the kind of game a well-intentioned but misguided relative might get you for your birthday. I played as a mulleted wizard in a flowing purple trenchcoat, so anyone could be forgiven for mistaking this for a game that's actually fun.

Instead, it's a boring and frustrating slog. Like most games from this era with somewhat realistic graphics, the titular Warlock handles like a shopping cart full of rocks. Eventually, the rival warlock or something vaporized me with a magical beam. This terrible game is based on a terrible-looking movie I had never heard of. Wrestling games tend to be a drag even in the best of times so, with expediency, I wrestled one match in each of LJN's titles. Wrestling as a generic-looking guy billed as "myself," I admit I could have tried a bit harder to win my match against Brutus Beefcake, but the world of WWFWC proved too grim for me.

The wrestler's loudmouth personas were in place, and the "get close to your opponent and hit buttons for violence" gameplay is arguably too simple to mess up. The music is jaunty, and my Ultimate Warrior won his match against a rendition of Ted DiBiase that looked even more like Kris Kristofferson than usual.

As the fidelity of these games increased to the bit era, it occurred to me how hard it must have been to attain both the kid-friendliness and the tuff-man violence that the WWF and its video games demanded. I chose the relatively obscure Typhoon just for the heck of it, but during my match against Earthquake, I realized that every wrestler had the same set of moves. I hammered the punch button while barely looking at the screen and eventually won the match.

The musical soundtrack to this one was strangely minor-key and dirgelike, but, at least, the white noise meant to replicate a crowd's roar prevented the combatants from fighting in eerie silence. The fighting felt more rote than it did in the other titles, and my Hulk Hogan defeated The Mountie simply by pressing "attack" as quickly as I could for the entire match. I could name my wrestler in this one, so I named him "Joe.

It's clear that a year had passed since Steel Cage Challenge had been released because the white noise during fights is almost recognizable as the sound of an actual crowd. Now we're talking. This was the first game thus far that allowed me to take the action outside of the ring.

Throwing people out of the ring is one of the most satisfying aspects of any wrestling game, so I chose Ric Flair and threw Tatanka who was a jerk when I met him at a local clothing store when I was a kid out of the ring as many times as I could before pinning him.

WWF Raw is the culmination of the games that came before it. The wrestling felt like wrestling, the animation on the wrestling moves including actual finishers was of high enough fidelity that I could tell what was going on, and it's almost certainly the first wrestling game to include a female fighter Luna Vachon.

My Doink the Clown defeated Yokozuna in what most would agree was an upset but, more importantly, WWF Raw was the first in the series where it felt like an actual wrestling match instead of the fighting portion of an old hockey game.

In the absence of a normal "game over" scenario, I set out to play one full game of each sports title in the LJN catalog. This did not come to fruition, and instead, I feel like I have received a crash course in how difficult it is to create a playable sports simulation.

My Baltimore Orioles, led by a starting pitcher who threw almost nothing but 60 mile-per-hour hanging sliders. After two extremely long quarters of play, the score was , I had been called for a nonexistent penalty "illegal chuck" , and I had not figured out how to throw a pass. Having completely disgraced the game of football in just one-half of play, Jimmy Johnson and I declined to play a second.

I couldn't resist the team named the "Cincinnati Big Cats," and at more or less random I picked the Los Angeles Apaches as my opponent.

This game does that thing lots of unlicensed sports games did back then, where the player who's obviously supposed to be David Cone, for example, is named "Conehead," and Daryl Strawberry is named "Raspberry.

This game plays out like a half-court, one-on-one version of NBA Jam, with one early-nineties superstar representing their entire team. I chose Larry Bird and exploited Patrick Ewing's understandably lackluster perimeter defense, earning an easy victory. I had allowed myself to get excited to play a basketball game and thus was a bit disappointed in NBA All-Star Challenge , but as far as the LJN canon goes it could have been a lot worse.

This game starts with an excellent photo montage of every circa NFL quarterback, and it felt downright comforting to have the likes of Drew Bledsoe and Jim Kelly flashing on my TV again. Don't have an account? Sign up for free! Topic Archived Page 1 2 3 4 of 4 Next Last. Sign Up for free or Log In if you already have an account to be able to post messages, change how messages are displayed, and view media in posts.

User Info: Synbios User Info: Daemonscharm. Some of the badness of their games is over rated but IMO they had very few good games and several that were awful. The most devastating defeat is the one which comes when you have stood on the edge of victory. User Info: DoubleDare. From on it basically was just Acclaim, just using it to put out more titles on the NES and such since they had a limit to how many games a publisher could have on the system.