Action 52

Following the failure of Action 52 on the NES, the man behind that idea, Vince Perri, somehow found a real developer to make a Sega Genesis version of Action 52. That team was Farsight Technologies, and they had the mighty task of stuffing 52 games in one cartridge. This was an actually decently experienced team, unlike the one that worked on the NES version, but the end result was still not a great one.

I will praise the team for at least understanding that the games were going to have to be simple in order to fill up the cartridge with 52 games. Sadly, the games ended up being simple and not fun.

Simple, like a game called Sketch where you have a white canvas, and you draw with your pencil. That's seriously one of the games. There's a 15 Puzzle game, a simon says game called Echo, a minesweeper game called Minds Eye, a Pong game that is, for some reason, called "1st Game" - this gives me the impression that they were just filling space with the easiest games to program.

There are some side-scrollers and all of them seem to have a problem where the screen doesn't actually scroll until you're going really far to the right. This can be a problem in games like Alien Attack, Cheetahmen and Ninja (among others), where you are moving around and enemies can easily run into you to kill you in one hit. Ooze is another one of those, and it's a game that reminds me of an annoying feature that was brought back from Action 52 on the NES - falling from just a little too high can kill you. Wonderful.

Ooze also suffers from poor level design. You're supposed to collect keys in that game, while doing what seems like simple platforming. That is, until you get to parts where it's not clear whether the game allows you to jump and land on top of certain objects, or whether you can go through tubes. And the level design just gets really annoying with enemies. Once again, you die in one hit.

The deaths with one hit can get really weird in some titles. I understand that it's easier to just program a character to die with one hit than to program a system for a health bar and a character's reaction to hits, but games like Appleseed and Alfredo shouldn't have to deal with this. Alfredo and Appleseed are very similar. Food is falling and you have to catch some of the food. In the case of Alfredo, if you catch something that is not a type of noodle, you lose a life. In Appleseed, if you catch green apples, you lose a life. It's weird, and more importantly, lazy design.

Well, it's either lazy game design, or designs that needed to be simple because there wasn't much time to flesh out these games.

This is very obvious when you play The Boss. In this game, you're a lizard with a machine gun that wears some kind of blue suit. You collect cash and kill other animals in suits, some of which are cops. Every level takes place on one screen, with graphics that look like they belong on a lower-end NES title*, like very simplistic square windows, ladders and fences that have no detail to them whatsoever beyond lines and squares that represent those objects. What's worse is that you'd think something so simple couldn't be screwed up, you just go up and down ladders to different tiers and shoot animals if needed, to get cash, but it happened. Enemies come out at random from the left or the right, so at times, when you're going up a ladder near the left edge of the screen, an enemy can touch you and kill you instantly, leaving you confused because you can't even see what killed you. And the cherry on top is that sometimes, way too many enemies can appear on a tier, and it's not very clear when you can get off a ladder that you're climbing. When there are a lot of enemies on a tier, and there's cash to pick up, you may have to wait a long time until you can finally find room to get up there (or down) and shoot everyone to make room for yourself to move, and pick up the cash.

This sounds like I'm focusing too much on one game, but that's a problem with a lot of the games. Basically, as you get to later levels, you notice that there's just a little too much going on with enemies all over the place. It's like you're witnessing some young programmer's project where the programmer got lazy and just went "ah, just put more enemies, and maybe make them move fast to indicate that this is a higher level."

That's all a lot of these games do. Star Evil may be the best game of the cartridge, but that's not very high praise. This time around, Star Evil is a shooter with a really shitty sound effect for shooting. You CAN die instantly, but you have to willingly move into the gray walls for that. I suppose that's better than putting a block immediately in front of unsuspecting players who won't be able to avoid an instant death. The gimmick with Star Evil is that as you make progress, the vertical scrolling gets faster. That's about it, you can shoot some enemies, but you will only feel like you have to in later levels. And yes, I'm calling that the best game of the cartridge, think about that.

There's a wide variety of games, much wider than the NES version, but they're mostly far too simple to stick with players. If nothing else, check out the soundtrack, because there are some catchy songs here.

You know what else this version does better than the NES version? None of the games crash if you play this on a real console. That's how far I have to look in order to praise Action 52 on the genesis in some way.

There are also some very strange games in this one, I guess that's another Action 52 tradition. Like a game called Paratrooper where you're some soldier with a gun that is trying to collect circuit boards on the ground and moving Dreamcast controllers are trying to kill you. There's also Skater, where you skate through a road filled with beach balls, what looks like radios, and dead cats. Yeah, dead cats. Speaking of cats, there's a game called Mousetrap. You're a rat moving around a single screen filled with swiss cheese to "eat" (in reality, you're just touching the cheese to make it disappear). Eat all the cheese to win, but be careful, cats will come around to try to eat you.

Another Action 52 tradition is having two-player games that you will probably never play with another person.

The 52nd game in this version is a challenge to beat the hardest level in every game to become a gamemaster.

That's about all I have to say. If Action 52 on the NES is shit, then the Genesis version is a polished turd.

* - the graphics in general are terrible in this cart. Some of the characters in certain games have pathetic animations due to the low amount of sprites, and other times, the sprites look like they were drawn by a child.