Battletoads in: Battlemaniacs! Review

Well, Faithful Readers, if the name “Rare” puts the fear of the video game gods into your heart, this review will be of some interest to you. This week, the Matts undertake to review Battletoads in: Battlemaniacs! for the Super Nintendo. As Zitz, Rash, and Pimple set out to save the Princess blah-blah-blah from the evil witch whatsername (the names in this game are super lame, sorry, I can’t help it), you journey through the Gamescape, a virtually-generated hell designed to smash you into your component parts. This game is typical of Rare games in many ways, not the least of which is its mind-numbing difficulty. On to the review, then.

Matt #1

Play Control: 6.5

If you’ve played the original Battletoads for the NES, there is absolutely nothing surprising or new about the control scheme for this game. All that Rare did was translate the controller setup from NES to SNES. In fact, that’s pretty much all they did with this entire game, which is good or bad depending on your point of view. The controls are solid, dependable, and pretty much average side-scroller/platformer controls in every sense of the word. No surprises, no let-downs, just Battletoads.

Graphics: 9

The best thing about these graphics is that everything is inspired by some kind of death-metal theme: your characters wear studded wristbands to fight the forces of evil, who are all demon-pigs and evil skeletons, and they have names like Zitz and Pimple. How much more incredibly, lamely, early-90’s metal/faux-punk/skateboarder mashup culture can you get? In all seriousness, though the graphics are really impressive. The character sprites (friend and foe) are very well done, and the backgrounds are appropriately cartoony without being simple or expected. Throwing up the horns and headbanging over these graphics is appropriate, if not mandatory.

Difficulty: 1

Not only do your characters look pretty, they die well, and often. This is another thing that Rare ported directly from the NES version of this game: it is incredibly, often suicidally difficult to get through the first stage. Then it becomes even more incredibly, suicidally diffiulct to get through each successive stage, until finally you are crushed into a withered little speck of pitiful humanity. After that, the game drops your dimly-burning wisp of a soul into a vat of boiling perchloric acid and you are utterly consumed in the… okay, well, you get the idea. And the idea is that this game is really, really way the fuck too hard.

Replay Value: 5

The game, at least its opening stages, is very fun. There’s nothing like knocking a demon-pig into a lake of lava with the huge hammer that grew, as if by magic, from your hands, fueled by the power of rock. However, the soul-crushing, mind-numbing difficulty of the later stages of the game makes it very hard for one to desire to play. You simply cannot derive lasting enjoyment from something so intent on making your entire gameplay experience a living hell. This is a game that I would come back to, yes – but not often.

Overall: 5.375 (wow, scientific, ain’t it?)

It’s worth mentioning that this game is clearly a blatant rip-off of, and capitalization upon, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise, which was enjoying a continually skyrocketing popularity (and its own series of video games) at the time.

 

Matt #2

Play Control: 7

The control scheme doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it works well for this style of the game. You really only use 2 buttons and the directional pad, so it really does a good job of recreating the feel of the NES game. This could be a good or a bad thing, considering that the original Battletoads holds the crown for “most broken controllers and TVs by a video game”. That aside, the second level has some really cool special controls that involve interacting with the sides of the screening, upping this play control score from mediocre to good.

Graphics: 8.5

The graphics in this game are incredibly detailed: the sprites all look really crisp and clear, and the backgrounds do a great job of conveying the feel of each level. The cutscenes are a bit of a let-down, as they re-use the same footage for all of them. But don’t worry, it’s not like you’re going to see the between-level cutscene more than twice anyway. I can tell you that the Continue screen looks really cool, though, so you have that to look forward to.

Difficulty: 1

In case you didn’t get the hint, this game is really hard. As in, “this game is tied with Demon’s Crest for the hardest game of all time” hard. I can’t get past the 3^rd level (excluding the bonus stage) even if I cheat. I was saving after every time I did something difficult, and after over 50 attempts, I just turned the game off. It’s hard enough to even get to the 3^rd level without using continues; when you consider the fact that you get 4 lives and 2 continues, which adds up to a total of 12 lives, it’s not that difficult to see that getting through the 3^rd level is impossible for all but the most stalwart of gamer.

You know what would be an even more accurate description of my feelings on this games difficulty. Replace every word in these two paragraphs with some form of swearing. It doesn’t matter if it makes grammatical sense; most of my outbursts during this game didn’t either.

Replay Value: 4

This game (and the whole Battletoads series, actually) gives you what I like to call “Gamer’s Selective Memory Syndrome”. You remember the really cool parts of the game, and block out the fact that you’re not going to get past the 3^rd level, ever, unless you use a game genie. And seriously, if you do that, you might as well put your training wheels back on your bike, you wimp.

Overall: 5.125

This just leaves me wondering: how did Battletoads end up becoming a semi-popular series of video games? This is essentially an update of the original game for the SNES, and no one seems to be able to beat either of them. Maybe kids were just tougher back in those days. Wait, I was a kid when Battletoads came out. What in the hell?