The backstory to this is far more interesting than the cart itself.
There's no use in going over every single game in this cartridge. All you really need to know is that Active Enterprises was a barely professional company run by Vince Perri. He had come across one of those bootleg famicom cartridges that were sold in countries where they didn't have to worry about getting a cease and desist letter, or anything like that. Perry wanted to make something like that...but legally. He didn't know how to program, though, so he had to hire some programmers. Luckily, he didn't have to look far to find a trio of programmers to start working on Action 52. They were joined by one more guy, and thus, a ragtag bunch of developers were set to make a multicart in the time it normally took to make one game.
With the odds stacked against them, and only an advance of $1500 as payment, could they get the job done and get Active Enterprises to be the new big name in the video game industry?
No.
They were simply too inexperienced, and set up to fail* by a boss who was ignorant on how the video game industry worked. This is why the NES version of Action 52 is a complete dumpster fire. I've even heard that the project wasn't actually finished, the guys hit the deadline and had to turn something in. Because of the unfinished nature of this project, if you play this, you will notice:
- An abundance of space shooters because it's easy to just put dots on a black background and call that "space"
- Really shitty platforming
- Games you can't win because they couldn't finish said games
- Games that crash if you play this on a real NES
- Surprisingly decent soundtracks - some of which were plagiarized, others which were composed by Mario Gonzalez before he left the project
- Really questionable decisions, like putting an obstacle right at the start of Star Evil, or making you move too fast without a way to slow down on Micro Mike
- Graphical glitches
- Gameplay glitches
- Really bad level design
- Cheetahmen being far better than the rest of the games, and still being a bad game
All that, and more!
* - For what it's worth, one of the developers, Mario Gonzalez, has said that Perri was actually a nice guy and that Action 52 shouldn't be portrayed as a scam.
