Super Smash TV - SNES

Big money, big prizes, I love it ~Mr Emcee

It's been a long time since I last played this game on the SNES, I remember seeing it on display on an old 24" TV (flat screen? what the hell is that?) and seeing the near-arcade replication and thinking to myself "I must have this game" I wasn't disappointed at the time and in looking back, seeing the game recently again and experiencing it again, I've found that it's one of those that managed to survive the test of time and be almost as incredible as I remember it to be.

 

Secret rooms not listed. (Hint: it's the blank room of the 3x3, approach from left)

The concept is based off The Running Man, a Bachman book that was actually Stephen King, which then was HEAVILY adapted into a film with the ARHNULD, before becoming a free-for-all bloodbath (and thankfully so) with Super Smash TV. The idea being across all of them, that there's a TV show where contestants are allowed to submit themselves to be hunted down and killed LIVE on TV. In the book, it's set in the outside world, in the film it's a game show against specific "gladiators", in the game it's against an army of enemies and huge bosses.

 

Mine, grunts, walking bombs, oh my!

Controls are simple and I'm thankful for that much. The D-Pad moves your character around and the 4 buttons are your attack directions, giving it a bonus over the arcade game in that the twin joystick just wasn't as accurate as this set up. Collect items and weapons by just running into them and they're automatically selected or dismissed as soon as you collect them, particularly weapons as you'll lose what you had and immediately gain your new weapon replete with ammo, at the cost of your previous weapon's armaments. You also can collect landmines, in the 'immediately blowing up your body' sense.

 

He's big, he's bad, he's... immune only to standard bullets, grab the weapons.

Oddly enough, the arcade game gave away free lives if they players could collect them and that's carried over onto the SNES version in that the game has a limit on the number of continues the players can use. Having said that, the rest of the arcades power ups and systems are in place, ranging from the enemies that you'd find in the original from mobs with clubs, to robots with lasers, rolling tanks, turrets, snake trails, snake segments, buffalo, small snakes, snake men (why the snake theme guys?) and including the bosses in all their glory.

You win! But it's not likely you'll live long enough to collect it.

It's a very faithful adaptation, all the powerups are still there from orbiting orbs that double your firepower until they're touched, five shuriken shield, invincible shields, socks/speed up, presents for points, cash for points and finally (as I like to call it) the breath-taker, a nuke or smart bomb that gives you a few moments of peace to take a quick breather. Unless I start to really dig into the game there's very little here that's NOT in the arcade original and in some cases there's MORE than the original arcade had.

 

ORBS! No really, there's orbs coming.

These bonus extras include the secret rooms with their special pickups that can unlock the super secret room later on as part of the pleasure dome to give you the best ending of the game. It's a monster of a room that likely has more fighting going on in that one room than most of the game has to offer. The game really does love to throw everything at you, including the kitchen sink, which it will happily beat you to death with around the head and neck if you're fortunate. If not, it will CONTINUE to beat you around the head and neck long after they're gone and all that remains is a pair of crappy shoes. Yeah I'm not impressed with what you're wearing.

 

See, told you it was in the bottom right.

Key grudges for this game is that it is significantly, undeniably, slower than the arcade original. How this is the case I'm not sure given that once you've beaten the game, you get the 10x speed option to play through and it runs that very well indeed, maybe doubling the normal speed and having 5x speed just wasn't an idea that came to mind for the developers. Oddly as well, nearly all the sounds of the game sound like they were sampled from the arcade rather than converting the files down, nearly every sound effect has a slight, and it is slight, hiss behind the noise that gives away that it's been recorded and re-sample in this manner. Despite this, the third level has its own music rather than the arcade version (which ran the first level music again) and I must say it's well worth hearing.

 

Outnumbered? yes. Out gunned? No.

Two players working together should be able to smash (ha ha... god that was terrible) this game with relative ease and one player, playing diligently, ought to be able to beat the game barring some very unfortunate moments. My advice, stick the game in hard mode and leave it there, playing on easy or normal will stop the game after the first and second level respectively, play it in hard and enjoy it for what it is, fun, mindless, chaos.

Bring on the gore!

C64: Kick-Start 2

Nope, it’s not about a game where you raise cash for an old franchise to try to breathe so-called new life into it while keeping true to the roots and then realise the new game is just shit and you’ll never recapture the nostalgia with hundreds of thousands of other people’s cash. This game is about motorbikes. (Though I might start a kick-starter for that making a kick-starter game)

Back in the early 80s in the UK there was a television show about motorbikes, involving people riding bikes over dirt tracks, up huge barrels and obstacles to compete for the fastest times. Basically an assault course for motorbike riders, much like the last event in Gladiators, Krypton Factor and a whole host of physical based game shows that had people running like pricks through a meat grinder, only on motorbikes.

The game, much in the same vein as the former, has the player controlling a bike from a side-on view, using the joystick to increase and decrease speed with left and right, wheelie with upwards directions and jump with the fire button. Simple, effective and all that needs to be done in this game. Each level has a selection of ramps, jumps and obstacles the like of which were never in the TV show and thank god for that, we’d have had more dead kids.

For every obstacle the rider must drive over it, jump it, ride it or stay within specific speed limits upon the item. Some obstacles like the wooden bar cannot be ridden over quickly or landed on (but you can jump from it) some items have no speed limit at all but cannot be landed upon, while others cannot be wheelie’d upon (yes that’s a word now). Some items cannot be ridden on slowly or too quickly depending on the item, some will slow you down like mud and rough ground, water always makes you fall if you touch it and fire will make you explode.

Falling off, getting blown up or just crashing will make your rider dismount in an odd but often amusing digitised scream and the faster you bail the further they’ll be launched and the bigger the scream. The game then scrolls the level steadily until there’s a safe enough point to get back upon the bike while the time counter speeds up, effectively incurring a time penalty just like the show would have for riders dismounting or falling off things. So in some respects the game sticks to the TV show but the TV show never had ski jumps over flamethrowers and thankfully the game does.

A little extra variety comes in the guise of ice levels that make accelerations and deceleration more difficult and longer to achieve and night time levels are just hard to identify most things (except fire and you can expect fire on almost all of those levels).

The game is always split screen, whether single player or two player. Two player games are a simple affair of picking levels through selection of keys A-X, one level per letter, or going fully random for 5 levels. The winner will be the player with the fastest overall time of those 5 levels. In single player mode, there will be an AI rider who will travel each and every level in exactly the same way thanks to the algorithms used. They sadly will always balls up on the same place, at the same time, in the same way, they never jump off items earlier than they can so if you can jump over a log that would force you to be slow and land safely past it, do so. The AI never will do that. So there’s easy ways to beat the computer unless the level can be run at full speed from the start and only easy jumps, in which you can only pull a draw as they computer will never screw those ones up. Oh and its transition in speed will be flawless, unlike yours because you’re a berk with slower reflexes than a pixel perfect AI. Some levels you cannot win as a result.

So the real fun is in the 2 player mode you might think. Well yes, and no.

The biggest and best aspect of Kick-start 2, is the custom level designer. A fully functioning level designer is built into the game where players can create their own levels and throw in their own courses and traps. Bunny hops before fire? Do it. Brick ramp up and grass ramp down? Why not. Step jump up 5 steps to a ski jump ramp over water and flamethrowers to bounce on a series of springs before landing on mud just to MAKE the player fail? Laugh your arse off the whole time while you’re setting that up. There are almost limitless possibilities and combinations you can pull off that are not only playable but fit within the game’s maximum course size, you can even add items within items for odd set ups where a ski jump will have gaps in the middle and you’ll have to bunny hop the ski jump ramp just to get to the end of the jump where it leads into a ramp leading to another spring that will bounce you over several barrels (or make you crash.... actually quite likely make you crash but you can still make it).

In fact you can make a whole assortment of tricks and traps that were not in the original levels. Of course you could also make a level that screws up the AI straight away and leaves you to win the game while the AI is forced to travel slowly to the very end for maximum time penalties, if you want to win cheaply.

The key focus of the game of course, is the multiplayer and the level editor. Back in the day most of the levels could be made and used in the main game, over writing the original levels until the game was reloaded but some people could save the files to disc/floppy (5.25” for those with the age and memory, no... not the size of anything else)

The music, does stick rather faithfully to the original show’s theme while playing on the courses/tracks but after a while it gets painfully repetitive and dull though thankfully you can switch the music off and just have the sound of low buzzes for engines, screaming descending riders and the occasional pops of exploding bikes on fire. The other music used in the menu screen and level editor is a rather neat and inspiring composition that doesn’t wane as quickly as the original theme tune does.

As quickly...

For a game programmed back in those days, have multiplayer on screen at the same time AND a fully functioning level editor, was considered a rarity for such games. If you’re not careful, you could end up losing a lot of time tweaking, playing and testing the level you’re making instead of seeing the other levels already on offer or playing with a friend/against the AI. Nowadays though, the potential exists to have online gaming, with file sharing of pre-made levels like most other games of similar ilk.

Sadly though there’s other motorbike based games already doing that, with more elaborate set ups and stunts, in that pseudo 3D they call 2.5D (bullshit, it’s 3D and played on a single plane, let’s not make things complicated) such as The Trials series but if you’re interested in looking back to the very humble origins, you’d do well to re-visit Kick-start 2 and see how it was done right and some 25+ years earlier.

For now, I’m going to ski jump onto a telephone box just to see if I can land it.

Then later play kick-start 2.