They might not be as talented as Nightdive, or work with iconic franchises like M2, but I do appreciate QuByte’s retro remastering efforts quite a lot. If anything, they are doing the unenviable, but absolute necessary job of remastering, and thus preserving, the lesser known titles from the previous generations, the less glamourous and mainstream titlse of the day, such as Zero Tolerance or whatever the hell Breakers was. The only exception being, of course, Top Gear. Their brand new remastered collection takes us back to the early 90s, most specifically the early 90s’ sports gaming scene, with a handful of titles originally developed and published by Accolade.

Yep, it’s the baseball game from Princess Bride.

Accolade is mostly known for being the creator of both Test Drive and Bubsy, but as seen by this collection, they were also fruitful in the sports gaming genre, spending most of their earlier days developing games for MS-DOS, before migrating to the Sega Mega Drive (or Genesis, for the heathens). Accolade Sports Collection covers this very specific timeframe, with one MS-DOS title and four Mega Drive games of completely varied genres.

Two of those games are baseball titles, Hardball and Hardball II. Hardball is better known as “that one baseball game Fred Savage is playing at the beginning of The Princess Bride“. The oldest game in the collection, as well as the only which is a port of a DOS game, it’s a pretty simplistic baseball title with impressive visuals for its time, but really poor controls, badly explained gameplay loop, and godawful music. The sequel, now a Mega Drive ROM, fares a bit better, but I wouldn’t call it a big hit.

Those faux-3D visuals completely nuke both Summer Challenge and Winter Challenge’s framerates.

In fact, neither are the “Olympic sports” compilations, Summer Challenge and Winter Challenge. They get the job done in terms of content and trying to push the Mega Drive’s hardware to its graphical limits (just like Zero Tolerance, it aims for a faux-3D presentation, at the cost of the framerate), but they control poorly. They are quintessential cases of 16-bit games aiming for a 32-bit look and feel… but that means they run like absolute crap. Sadly, neither of them felt interesting, or even fun, and that’s quite a shame – if you stop and think about it, they basically ensure that this Accolade Sports Collection features more than two dozen types of sports you can have fun with.

In theory, the best and most famous game in the collection is Hoops Shut Up and Jam. You may know it for its original licensed name, Barkley Shut Up and Jam. A two-on-two basketball game, it’s a clear competitor to the vastly more famous NBA Jam, with the differences being the lack of an NBA license (Barkley was the only real player included in the game, and he’s not even present in this re-release), the fact you can’t control your teammate, and, well, the fact it’s nowhere near as fun as NBA Jam. It’s a bit too fast for its own good, and the controls aren’t as responsive as they should. The rewind functionality (present in the collection as a whole) helps alleviate this issue, at the very least.

They replaced “Sir Charles” Barkley with this random Joe Hoops schmuck. Sad.

What we have here is a completely functional, somewhat well-remastered and feature-filled collection of sports titles that, sadly, just haven’t aged well at all. Between the ultra dated controls, poor framerate on the ones aiming for a faux-3D effect, or lack of appealing licenses, Accolade Sports Collection is more of an interesting novelty and a way to preserve some lesser-known games to a future generation, than an actual digital sports library worth your time. I appreciate the intent behind it, but those games just aren’t very interesting.

Accolade Sports Collection is available now on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X, PC and Switch.

Reviewed on PS5.

A copy of Accolade Sports Collection was provided by the publisher.