Retro Gaming Australia

A number of games based on the popular Batman animated series from the early 90s were published in 1994 and 1995. The Game Gear version was developed by Novotrade, best remembered for Ecco the Dolphin, and is a fairly straight forward jump and run game.

For the second episode of Retro Gaming Theatre, we’re taking everybody’s favourite video game dolphin out for a 20th birthday celebration. Revel in my ineptitude at nose bashing blue bottles, along with being bored with the game’s horrible labyrinthine level design.

Ecco the Dolphin was a moderate success for Sega. They ported the original game to the Master System, Game Gear and Mega CD. It also spawned a handful of sequels in Ecco II: The Tides of Time, Ecco. Jr and Ecco the Dolphin: Defender of the Future.

Apart from inclusions in recent Sega collections, Ecco has been absent from the public eye since the PlayStation 2 release of Defender for the Future. Will his next appearance be in a video game, or in a can of John West’s finest?

There was a time, once, where Garfield was actually quite popular, and deserving of that popularity thanks to a quality cartoon show and a still halfway decent comic strip. Sega attempted to cash in on that popularity with Garfield: Caught in the Act, a somewhat average platformer.

Ecco: The Tides of Time is the second game to feature Ecco the Dolphin. It picks up right where the first game left off, but it turns out that the Vortex Queen wasn’t vanished, and she’s travelled to Earth to build a new home for herself – hoping to sell Ecco to John West in the process.