Time to start on Season 5 of the Angry Video Game Nerd, and what a game James chose to look at for this episode — Action 52 for the Nintendo Entertainment System.
This game is legendary among gamers for the same reason many games James has covered in the series are: it’s terrible. The difference here is that Action 52 was marketed as something amazing, with a very hefty price tag to boot. Instead, what was sold to the unsuspecting consumer was a pile of 52 half-baked games that barely look or play better than some of the lower quality stuff back on the Atari 2600, all for the hefty price tag of $200. Yep, two hundred dollars in early 90’s dollars, no less.
The episode starts with James showing off the “Nintoaster – an NES modified into an old toaster body. It’s pretty cool, and if memory serves was made by the same person who tried to help with the Jaguar CD back in the Atari Jaguar episodes in Season 4.
After the intro he cuts to the chase, covering the odd nature of Action 52 in and of itself — its strange clear case, how it gets hot during use and the aforementioned price tag. He does place the value of each individual game in the cartridge at $4 each, meaning each single game is cheap, but the package itself is still expensive.
After an opening that rips off the song “It Takes Two” both in sampled music and as a pun in the title sequence, we start the game… or games, I should say here. What comes next is a small marathon of (nearly) every single game on the cartridge. Grab a snack, we’re going to be here for a while.
Starting off we have the single two player only game on the cartridge! Yeah, a terrible start, and it doesn’t get better from there. We move through terrible space shooters with piss poor design, bosses that don’t want to fight, a game where the screen keeps going dark — seriously, who thought that was a good game mechanic, and more garbage.
We hit the first game of note quickly – game 5, OOZE. Not only are the controls backwards to how an NES game normally would be, but they barely work. What’s worse, this game was part of a contest — a reward was to be given out if anyone could complete it which was impossible given the game crashed on level 3. Go figure.
Anyway, The Nerd continues looking at the horror that is Action 52. We have even more terrible shooters, attempts at adventure games, and games that just make no damn sense… or load, for that matter. Yep, some of the games on here refuse to load. As James says, that’s another $4 wasted.
We get the occasional break from the crazy space shooters, like Dam Busters, which happens to have sections you can easily get stuck in, and Haunted Hills which features a Lara Croft esq protagonist who you will see more of in later games on the cartridge.
We continue onward with more of the same old stuff — most of what’s on Action 52 is just arcade-style games done poorly. In a world with Super Mario Bros. 3, this isn’t worth it by a long shot.
Rinse and repeat with even more of the same, each game stranger than the last until Mejong a game which has confused a great many people whom have tried out Action 52. You move along only to randomly explode. It’s crazy, but actually makes sense — it’s just a memory game. A very annoying one.
By the time we hit Space Dream, James is beginning to lose it. He knows the game is going to be a terrible space shooter, and mocks the enemies in the game (like safety pins) in a nice little joke using his C64.
We look at more space shooters and odd mess, like Bubble Gum Rosie and Micro Mike (seriously, what the hell is supposed to be going on with that game?) eventually hitting a primitive fighting / brawling game, Slashers. This is one of those games which features the sprite from Haunted Hills.
The next game of note is Storm over the Desert. Yep, a game based on the then-recent Desert Storm conflict… one where you’re invincible. Wonderful.
Nearing the end, we come across a Prince of Persia styled game, Billy Bob, which still of course sucks, and then, you guessed it, more of the same space shooters, messed up platformers, and just what the fuck even is that goodness of games like Timewarp Tickers. I can’t even tell you what’s going on here.
Nearing the end, we have another game that won’t load (which James welcomes at this point) before coming up to the final game – Cheetahmen. Before trying it, though, James has realized the entire game is a waste of money – of $200 back then, which would have been enough to buy a SNES. He goes on a welcome rant about what you could have done with that money which would have been a better investment than that, finally coming to the conclusion that the creators should have put every bit of their effort on one single game instead of 52 terrible ones.
He then starts up the final game, hoping it may redeem Action 52, and then the episode ends with everyone knowing what’s to come.
Final Rating: 4.5/5
Action 52 had been covered by quite a few people online at this stage — it was infamous even in early 2010, but seeing the Nerd give his take on it was still amazing for its time, and is still a great episode to kill some time with. It’s amazing to take in that the game actually exists — more so that it was actually released in the state it was in, so unfinished, and that the creators had so much hope that it would be the next big thing in gaming.
While at this time the “season” concept still wasn’t a part of AVGN production, it goes without saying that this marked a high point in the series, and was a great starting point for the relatively small set of episodes which would come before production on the Angry Video Game Nerd Movie began in early 2011.
1 Comment
Add a Comment