Zesty, Testy Genesis Reviews

A long, long time ago, back when the internet wasn’t a thing and the only way you could share your dumb opinions about video games is by publishing a newsletter, someone told me, “Don’t write angry.” But eh, where’s the fun in that? On a whim, I decided to load up my Genesis Mini with some of the worst games available for the system, and wrote withering descriptions of each. 

Since I haven’t written reviews for Kiblitzing in what seems like a dog’s age, I’ll be sharing them with you now, with added detail for the handful of titles that warranted further discussion. Maybe some of these games aren’t quite as bad as popular opinion would have you believe! Not Action 52, though. That lives up to its status as legendary kusoge and then some.

ACTION 52
ACTIVE ENTERPRISES/FARSIGHT TECHNOLOGIES

Action 52 was offered as a value proposition to unwary gamers. Sure, it’s two hundred dollars, but there are over fifty games in the cartridge, so it evens out, right? Wrong. These fifty two games are some of the worst you’ll experience on the Sega Genesis, a cavalcade of low budget platformers and shooters with the scintillating depth you’d expect from a Tiger handheld. The headliner of the bunch is Cheetahmen, featuring a trio of martial artists based on the world’s most neurotic and inbred wild cat. You’re trying to save the world with felines who need an emotional support animal in zoos to keep them from falling apart. ‘Nuff said.

AERO THE ACRO-BAT
SUNSOFT/IGUANA

Being a winged creature takes all
the suspense out of an acrobatic act,
doesn't it? "Oh no, he fell off the trapeze!
Eh, whatever."

One of the less loved characters from the great furry mascot rush of the early 1990s, Aero the Acro-Bat was the brainchild- er, scratch the brain part- of David Siller, previously known as Sushi-X. He was the guy who never let an issue of EGM go by without dissing the original Game Boy, but he probably shouldn’t have be throwing stones when he’s got the deed to this glass house.

Anyway. Aero the Acro-Bat feels a bit more like Super Mario Bros than Sonic, with less inertia to the player’s movement and flatter, grid-based stages. The game’s nocturnal hero spirals upward and downward to knock out enemies, a method of attack that sometimes works, but sometimes sets you up to take a cheap hit from the insane clown posse roaming each circus-themed stage. Everything in the game has a gaudy big top motif, with Aero diving through flaming hoops, shooting himself out of a cannon, and scarfing down carnival food, making you wonder how he squeezed himself into that leotard. It also makes you glad the sequel has more variety in its level design. Just try not to look directly at his possible love interest and likely betrayer Batasha.

AIR DIVER
SEISMIC/COPYA SYSTEMS

How do you disguise the Genesis’s obvious difficulties with 3D graphics? If you’re Copya Systems, you fill most of the screen with a heads up display and cockpit window panes. Nice try, but the extreme choppiness of the terrain as it jerks past your stealth fighter is still obvious even with a blind spot so massive it would leave even Mister Magoo swearing up a blue storm. If the surprisingly solid port of Afterburner II for the Genesis was just too darned enjoyable for you, play this instead... you’ll find none of that pesky quality and ambition here.

ART ALIVE
SEGA

A picture only says two words in this case,
but they're the only words that are
needed to sum up this disaster.

Okay, so you've heard of Mario Paint, right? Nifty Super NES exclusive that's part toy and part high tech creativity suite? Lets you make all kinds of nifty drawings, animation, and even music without making your parents shell out massive drachma for a new home computer? Maybe it's not Nintendo's most successful innovation, but this could be the secret best idea Miyamoto and company ever had, ranking right up there with the Game Boy Camera that literally puts the player in their video games, and takes the video game characters out of the games as thermal-printed stickers.

Art Alive is Mario Paint, except for the Genesis. And there’s no mouse support, reducing your precision to nil. And instead of bringing joy to players, the developers actively sought to extinguish it. It’s BAD, yo. Bad enough to give you a whole new appreciation for Microsoft Paint, the Etch-A-Sketch, and half-melted crayons. Sure there are Sonic stamps, but there are far better ways to put Sonic on your television set than this.

AWESOME POSSUM
TENGEN

The most subtle sociopolitical commentary
since the heady days of Captain Planet
and the Planeteers.

Awesome Possum is most certainly not awesome, and he does not kick anyone’s butt. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before... he runs super fast, like Sonic! He’s an insufferable smart-ass, like Sonic! His arch-enemy is fat, bald, and leaves a carbon footprint larger than Godzilla’s wherever he goes, like Sonic! And his game feels like it was constructed from the random litter “Awesome” picks up on his choppy, irritating, and scratchy quip-filled adventure... quite unlike Sonic, actually. As video game mascots go, this environmentally-conscious critter (who should be beaten unconscious) will almost make you reconsider your opinion of Wild Woody, the Sega CD’s disconcertingly phallic pencil.

BACK TO THE FUTURE III
ARENA/PROBE

Trip on a cattle skull or be impaled by an axe?
It's your choice, but avoiding them both
is out of the question.

Great Scott, Marty! It’s another double-decker turdburger with flies from Probe Software, and yet another disappointing video game stapled to a film series that deserves better. Well, maybe not Back to the Future II, but the crappy games based on that movie are on Nintendo systems. Worry not, though, Sega Genesis owners! There’s more than enough disappointment for you here. Submitted for your disapproval are four mini games, including a borderline impossible race on horseback to save Doc Brown’s future (past...?) wife, a shooting gallery, Marty bringing pie tins to a gun fight, and a final battle aboard a train. Reach the engine before its boiler (and your blood pressure) reaches critical mass and you win. You don’t win much, but the game ends and you no longer have to play it, so I’d call that a victory.

BALLZ 3D
ACCOLADE/PF MAGIC

1994 game concepts generally don't partner
well with 1988 game hardware. This would be
reinforced a year later with Sega's own
Genesis conversion of Virtual Fighter 2.

PF Magic (the magic that happens to your colon after you eat too much PF Chang’s?) gets points for wrongheaded ambition, but a 3D fighting game just wasn’t going to work on a 16-bit system, even with plenty of Gen-X focused, MTV-approved attitude and a mountain of annoying voice samples. Oy! Yeah! Oy! Yeah! Uh huh! Okay, you can shut up now. Ballz 3D gets bonus demerits for combat that’s simplistic (approach an opponent, then hammer the kick button until you win) yet needlessly complicated (every fighter has the ability to morph into any of the other characters, because... uh, reasons), proving that you can defy the laws of physics by making a game that sucks and blows at the same time.

BRUTAL: PAWS OF FURY
GAMETEK

Okay, so there was this animated film released at the end of the 1970s called Animalympics, where critters competed in an international sports competition, complete with abrasive announcers and a marathon ending with an unlikely romance between a goat and a lioness. The comedy works more often than not and the expressive animation is just shy of gorgeous... imagine Hanna-Barbera’s Laff-A-Lympics, but good. Brutal is kind of like that, except a fighting game. And not good at all. I’d describe the gameplay, which forces you to earn special moves your opponents have by default, but I’d much rather talk about Animalympics. If you’ve got Amazon Prime, watch it. You won’t regret it, unlike the time you rented Brutal.

CHAKAN: THE FOREVER MAN
SEGA

Chakan spent a millennium just practicing
his semaphores.

Chaka-kan! Cha-cha-cha-cha-chaka-kan! Chaka-conned a lot of kids out of their hard-earned money in the 1990s. Chakan promises a grim action adventure with tons of weapons, but like the Faustian bargain that inspired the comic, also delivers eternal frustration and a hellish GEMS soundtrack. You've never heard so many annoying noises come out of your Genesis. If Space Invaders '91 or Gauntlet IV was the Genesis soundscape perfected, Chakan is the opposite of that. It's fingers on a chalkboard made of fingernails.

Billytime Games, bless his heart, did his best to polish this turd with a patch that lowers the difficulty and adds SRAM to save your progress... if you manage to make any. Unfortunately, just like Chakan himself, there’s nothing that can save this game from an eternity of mediocrity that spans the vast, cold emptiness of the universe.

CHASE HQ II
TAITO

Chase FU is more like. This misbegotten Taito release somehow shimmies under the low bar of expectations set for first person Genesis racing games, making it an expert at limbo but a miserable failure at everything else. The undeniable excitement of forcing criminals off the road in the arcade game has been denied to Genesis owners, thanks to flat, undetailed graphics, crashes with all the jarring impact of a speed bump, and digitized voice that’s terrible, even by Genesis standards. (Am I supposed to take orders from Nancy, or order a Big Mac and fries?) My advice? Scratch your itch for vehicular homicide with Road Rash II instead.

DARK CASTLE
ELECTRONIC ARTS

Like the later Braid, one of the stages
is a tribute to Donkey Kong. Sir, I knew
Donkey Kong. Donkey Kong was a friend
of mine, until he fell to his death after the
machinations of a scheming carpenter.
You sir, are no Donkey Kong.

Dark Castle stars Prince Duncan, one of the biggest weenies to ever stumble into a video game. Painfully clumsy and fragile, Duncan gives even Lester the Unlikely on the Super NES a run for his money. At least Lester overcomes his awkwardness as he progresses, eventually boosting his strength and confidence to become a real hero! Well, maybe a Joxer from Xena: Warrior Princess. Let's not give him too much credit.

Lester may ultimately prove his mettle late in his own game, but Duncan is weak to the last drop in Dark Castle, tripping over stairs, getting knocked down by tiny bats and "nee-nees" (you'll know when you see them...), and wrenching an arthritic arm into place to throw stones; a suitably ineffective weapon for a man who’s barely fit to clean the royal stables. Any kingdom that chooses this putz as its savior is an empire that deserves to fall.

DEADLY MOVES
KANEKO/SYSTEM VISION

Instead of Blanka, your opponent is Baraki,
evidently Ed Asner dressed as an island
native on Gilligan's Island. "Ooga booga!
I hate spunk and coconut cream pie!"

Deadly Moves was the thin gruel Genesis owners had to subsist on while waiting for a legitimate port of Street Fighter II. As one might expect from an early cash grab copy of Capcom’s smash hit, this game is cheesy, contrived, and loaded to bear with dumb ideas, such as a level up system after each fight, and free vertical movement that brings nothing to the gameplay and limits your attacks to a single punch and kick. Considering the acrid stench that hangs in the air when you play it, maybe System Vision (creators of the equally rancid Neo-Geo game Shinoken) should have called this one Silent But Deadly Moves.

EX-MUTANTS
SEGA

When trouble threatens your city, who ‘ya gonna call? Not the X-Men... they’re busy doing something important. Looks like you’re stuck with the Ex-Mutants, the stars of a forgettable Malibu comic in an equally forgettable action platformer. Don’t get this confused with X-Perts... that’s the crummy action adventure title with computer rendered graphics and overly involved mission objectives. Ex-Mutants is more charmingly crappy, with grungy graphics, cheap enemies, and the expected GEMS soundtrack, but vaguely arcade-like gameplay that brings to mind a bargain basement Black Tiger. It’s almost okay. Not really, though.

GADGET TWINS
GAMETEK

This game is a little too twee and British for
its own good. Oh yes, they're a cheeky
lot, these two!

Go go Gadget Twins! Go somewhere else, because your game really sucks. In contrast with other cute ‘em ups, Gadget Twins uses slapstick cartoon props as attacks, each assigned to a different direction. If the Genesis had four buttons on its controller instead of three, it might have almost worked! But it doesn’t, so it doesn’t. As an added, ahem, bonus, there’s no period of invincibility when you’re hit, so you’ll just keep on soaking up damage from the swarms of wind up airplanes and metal marlins until you take a fatal nosedive into the island of misfit toys. Frankly, that’s exactly where Bump and Bop, the stars of this sad-sack shooter, belong.

GALAXY FORCE II
SEGA

Ha ha! HA HA HA!
Oh, you were serious! Let me laugh even harder.

Some things just shouldn’t be. Take for instance this Genesis port of Galaxy Force II. What was an eye-popping special effects extravaganza in arcades is more of a Galaxy Farce on the scaling and rotation deprived Sega Genesis. Instead of racing through craggy caverns on exotic planets, your ship drifts through endless concentric rectangles desperately trying to create an illusion of 3D movement. These in-your-face visuals, so crucial to Sega's success in the arcade market, tend to look pretty shabby on the Genesis. However, next to Chase HQ II, Galaxy Force II is as bad as 3D graphics get on this system.

GREENDOG
SEGA

Frequently lampooned for its dubious quality in episodes of the YouTube series Game Sack, Greendog was a Sega Genesis pioneer. After all, it was one of the first of many, many crappy American-made platformers on this system. Sure, it’s not as bad as The Little Mermaid or TaleSpin... there’s a certain hokey charm to the laid back soundtrack, the awkward attempts to relate to a teenage audience, and the knobbly-kneed surfer who must have left his face at the beach house. However, you’re not doing so hot if you find yourself in the same sentence with those two duds.

HEAVY NOVA
MICRONET

The opponents in Heavy Nova will make you
their robo-bitch. Remember everything you
learned from SNK and Netherworld bosses,
grasshopper! Find a cheap technique the
CPU isn't programmed to counter, and
milk the absolute hell out of it!

Ah yes, here it is... the grand poobah of miserable Sega Genesis games! A cartridge so bad that even two dollars for a rental seemed like two dollars too much. (It’s not even worth the 1024K it takes up on your Genesis Mini’s slim internal storage... better put this one on a flash drive!) Don’t be fooled by the nifty cinematic introduction straight out of an episode of Gundam... this game comes creaking to a halt the moment the action begins. Or tries... it’s hard to tell with how slow everything is in both the platforming sections and the one-on-one battles with other robots, who have no trouble cleaning your digital clock despite lumbering along as if they haven’t been oiled in seven centuries. The only thing Heavy Nova does quickly is make you reach for another cartridge to replace it.

THE LION KING
VIRGIN

It starts. The player-abusing, controller-smashing
troubles, I mean.

At Disney’s behest, this game was made artificially hard, making what could have been a fun if insubstantial jaunt through the scenes in the film (and admittedly, they’re faithfully reproduced) into a painful test of endurance. After wandering aimlessly through interconnected caves, getting clotheslined by tree limbs on ostrich-back, and leaping for tiny hippo tails, only to plunge into waist-deep yet puzzlingly fatal pools of water, you won’t be in any great rush to be king. I mean, what's at the end of that rainbow, anyway? Eighteen hours of sleep, four hours of actually doing something useful, and two hours of licking your butthole clean? I don't need to be a lion to get that experience; the life of an unemployed writer ain't all that different. (Well, the added feline flexibility would be helpful with that last thing. Since I have a bidet, I just fill those last two hours with Amazon Prime. Again, really not all that different.)

NORMY’S BEACH BABE-O-RAMA
ELECTRONIC ARTS/REALTIME ASSOCIATES

The collectible objects d'jour in Normy's
Beach Babe-A-Rama are beach balls.
Because he's a beach bum, got it.

It almost feels unfair to pick on this one, considering that it was created by Realtime Associates, the masterminds behind the Intellivision. Its hero Normy is actually the cartoon persona of Keith Robinson, the late founder of Intellivision Productions and the closest thing the video game world had to Santa Claus. (He’s quite far removed from the man who took his place as the owner of the Intellivision brand. Fortunately, that didn’t last long... but I digress.) Keith Robinson was by any metric a decent guy. If only his janky and aggravating platformer could live up to his lofty standards. At least the graphics are cute, in a zany, American Greetings Shoebox kind of way.

STARMOBILE
MINDWARE/M2

The worst crime a puzzle game can commit is to leave the player bored and confused, and no game bores and confuses quite like Starmobile, a recent Genesis conversion of a game for the obscure X68000 computer that probably should have remained there. Seriously, Sega and M2... hundreds of great titles were available for the X68K, and THIS is the one you chose to bring to the Genesis?! I mean, Zugya, Cho Ren Sha, and Nemesis ’90 were right there, ripe for the picking, and you went with Starmobile. Good friggin’ grief.

Ugh. Anyway, the object of this game is to put stars of varying weights on either side of a scale, either matching their colors or sandwiching stars of one color between the stars of another. If the scale becomes unbalanced (with the stars whose weights aren’t obvious at a glance), the stars on it tumble, and you lose points, which are essential for advancing to the next stage. Look up “counter-intuitive” in the dictionary, and you’ll find a picture of Starmobile next to it... along with a warning not to play it.

SUPER HYDLIDE
SEISMIC/T&E SOFT

A game this advanced shouldn't be this
ugly. Super Hydlide looks at least a
generation behind the curve visually,
with animation best described as
terminally constipated. You're not
working with a business computer
anymore, T&E Soft! Let me introduce
you to this nifty video game innovation
called SPRITES!

There’s a patch which aspires to make Super Hydlide good, adjusting the difficulty to be more respectful of the player’s time and blood pressure, and trimming down the senseless busywork that made the original so hard to love, even for RPG fans starved for new meat on the Sega Genesis. (There were good RPGs on the Sega Genesis, honest! They just didn’t spring out of the water and slap you in the face like they did on the Super NES. Or was that Asian carp in the Great Lakes? Well, either/or.) The problem is that “Hydlide” and “good” are two words so violently in opposition to each other that combining them is like dropping a Mentos into your Coke. All you’ll get for your trouble is wet, sticky, and deeply ashamed.

Super Hydlide is admittedly better than the crap-riffic NES game released two years earlier, but it’s anything but super in the visuals department. Characters jerk along the grimy backgrounds in eight pixel increments, giving you the impression that the game is running on a Tandy rather than what was at the time a cutting edge console. And by “Tandy,” I don’t mean the low-octane computers sold at Radio Shack in the 1980s, but dead actress Jessica Tandy. It’s also laboriously slow, and complicated, and obtuse, and unfair for the first few experience levels. Step outside the city as a newb and the first hit you take could be your last. 

Having said all that (allllllll of that...), there’s an oddly compelling RPG here with a surprisingly catchy soundtrack, if you’re willing to apply the patch and have the patience of the patron saint of turtles. It’s a fix for adventure lovers... but it’s a really dirty fix. Roll up your sleeve, stick in that used needle, and be faintly amused for a few dozen hours. Then recover from that awful Hydlide addiction at the 16-Bitty Ford Clinic, and transition to the methadone that is Crusader of Centy or Beyond Oasis. I'm going too far with this analogy, aren't I?

THE TICK
FOX INTERACTIVE/SOFTWARE CREATIONS

A little wishful thinking on Ben Edlund's part.
By the way, the vulnerability remains the
same... just grab a bar of green mineral
and you're assured victory against Clark,
ahem, Oppenheimer. Yeah, that's the ticket.
Definitely legally distinct from Kent.

Gag me with a... SPOOOOON! One of the greatest cartoons from a decade bursting with great cartoons becomes one of the most GRATING games on the Sega Genesis. It’s a hopelessly dull beat ‘em up with little of the charm from the show, aside from the faithful animation including The Tick's mighty flick to the forehead that knocks enemies cold. There are also platforming sections with The Tick running on rooftops (gee, just like the show!), but the exhilaration of charging across the city from ten stories above it is gone, replaced with random objects thrown off-screen and aggravating “subplots” (read: mini bosses) that serve as punishment for missed jumps. Maybe this game was intended to work as a parody of horrible video games based on beloved cartoons, like how The Tick is a parody of super hero comics? Nah, that's giving the designers too much credit. Just watch the cartoon while playing through Streets of Rage 2 again... I promise you won’t be missing anything.

X-PERTS
SEGA

If Comix Zone was an inspired farewell performance by the Sega Genesis, X-Perts was its last labored breath while fading away in hospice care. Guide Shadow from Eternal Champions, an apparent escapee from the movie Small Soldiers, and Dot Matrix from Spaceballs through a multi-layer underwater compound. If the computer rendered soldiers (and we all know how well computer rendering works out for the color-handicapped Genesis...) don’t stop you, the tangled mission objectives and the stultifying boredom will!

ZOOP
VIACOM NEW MEDIA

Tiny cups of espresso and poetry sessions
not included.

Viacom New Media desperately wanted Zoop to be “a thing,” releasing it for every game console under the sun and letting players take it home free with any rental at Blockbuster. Even at the low, low cost of free, Zoop was a hard sell for gamers spoiled by Tetris and Puyo Puyo. It’s a cross between Sega’s Columns (itself no great achievement in puzzle games) and the Midway arcade game Space Zap, with shapes of different colors approaching you from four angles. Unfortunately, there’s precious little technique to keep things varied- not even the chain reactions in Columns!- making this one combination that’s less peanut butter and chocolate and more peanut butter and chalk. Even the game’s laid back beatnik vibe and trendy Memphis art design can’t justify its existence. There was time in the 1990s for Klax, but at no point in history could anyone spare a moment for Zoop.