150 SNES games reviewed #33: Battletoads in Battlemaniacs

If I was to say Rare in relation to games to most people then they would probably think about the Nintendo 64 and about Banjo-Kazooie, Conker’s Bad Fur Day, Perfect Dark and Goldeneye 007.

 

To me though Rare are so much more than that. I can remember their NES games and I also remember even further back when it was named Ultimate Play the Game and was bringing corker after corker out on the ZX Spectrum. Atic Atac and Saber Wulf were much talked about in the playgrounds of my youth. This is  where I need to briefly stop the review and say go buy Rare Replay and play the living heck out of all of the games and then when you’re done, grab everything you can that’s missing from it.

My Battletoads Battlemaniacs YouTube SNES review 

Now it’s time to get back to business. The game I am going to talk about today is Battletoads in Battlemaniacs. It is a platforming beat ’em up game from 1993 developed by Rare and published by Tradewest. Tradewest no longer exists and Rare – well, I could write a whole article about its fate. The short of it is it is still around but now it is owned by Microsoft and has spent a lot of time making Kinect-based games and hats for Xbox Avatars. Thankfully it has recently made a real game again so here is hoping it has a brighter future ahead of it.

Battletoads in Battlemaniacs was not the start of the story though. This series began with the original beat ’em up Battletoads which was released for the NES in 1991 (this title was ported to the Mega Drive, Game Gear, Game Boy and Amiga). The Battletoads were largely created with the purpose of trying to be rivals to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and their video games. In fact at the height of Battletoads’ popularity they even managed to get a television cartoon pilot although this – unfortunately or fortunately depending on if you have seen it and what you thought of it – never got spun off into a full series. If you enjoy 80’s television cartoons I recommend you track the pilot down.

The original Battletoads was a very popular game. It was fun but brutally hard. It was a good beat ’em up with a two-player mode, but it also had sections where you rode on hover bikes and these were mercilessly hard. Worse still, if you were playing them in two-player mode and one of you crashed you both had to start that section again, which led to screaming arguments and shattered friendships.

 

Battletoads in Battlemaniacs follows the story of two of the Battletoads, Rash and Pimple, on a quest to stop Silas Volkmire and the evil Dark Queen from ruling over the world while rescuing a princess and their fellow toads. Many of its levels are enhanced or remixed versions of levels from the original Battletoads, so its a sort of semi-sequel, semi-remake.

The first thing you will notice is that the sprites in this game are large and the game in general is very colourful. The soundtrack is kind of basic but the music suits the game well. This game is not just a beat ’em up, it’s a massive mix of things. Yes, you will fight but then there is also hoverboard racing platforming, and much like the original NES version, the game is enjoyable but sections of it might have you tearing your hair out. If you like hard games with a sence of humour then it might be just for you if however if you hate games with challenging pieces that you’re going to be having to try and try again then you’re going to hate Battletoads in Battlemaniacs. This makes it a very hard game to rate because its overall quality depends on the kind of person who is playing it. Therefore a score I give it might in fact be meaningless to you. I have never completed Battletoads in Battlemaniacs, but I have spent a very long time trying in the past. I see it as a challenge which keeps on bringing me back.

Personally I would give the game seven out of 10. it’s fun, there is a fair degree of variety and its a good game to play with friends – as long as they enjoy a challenge. I have to warn again that if you hate games that will see you die again and again on certain segments then this is not for you.

This game was before Rare’s partnership with Nintendo. In fact it was as far as I know the last game it released for the SNES before beginning to work on projects for Nintendo. It had invested its significant profits from games during the NES period to purchase a bunch of very expensive Silicon Graphics workstations. This move made Rare the most technologically advanced developer in the UK, and I think most of us know what this led to.

If you want to purchase Battletoads in Battlemaniacs then you’re looking at anywhere between £13 to £18 for the cart, and if you want a copy in a box in good condition then you will probably need to look at around double that range. I looked at buying it in a shop cartridge only for £18 but instead ended up buying a cart from online for £14 including postage. This is the most money I have spent on a game specifically for this series but I also feel that copies of this will become rarer in the coming years.

My project to review 150 SNES games (plus Hook reviewed)

OK so I have been doing my 150 SNES game project for quiet a long time now, but recently one of the Forums I started it on has unfortunately shut down. So GRcade has become its new home and in order to introduce the whole project I posted up my original review with an explanation of what I was doing, why I was doing it and how long I had been at it. So for those of you who have been reading my reviews on here and haven't seen my early ones here is my first along with the extra explanation I wrote for GRcade  

A few years ago I thought I would set myself an interesting little challenge. I was  going to play 150 SNES games in 150 days – one a day. I wasn’t going to try and to complete them all but I wanted to play enough of each title so that I could give each and every one a nice little review. I figured it would be challenging, but at the time I found myself unemployed and was trying to find things to do which would keep me sane while I tried my best to get a job.

Unfortunately it was not all that long before I actually failed the challenge. Partly this was down to the fact that I got a new job and found it hard to find time for playing games as much, I then lost my new job because while I was still in my trial period they decided to make cutbacks. After this I sat around feeling sorry for myself for a while, found another new job, and then my partner of six years left me and I just didn’t feel much like doing anything at all.

Now, as pretty much anyone who does a long project will learn, it’s hard to set yourself goals which have no room in them for flexibility – especially when life kicks you square in the guts. I found myself at a crossroads where I could do one of several things. I could try and get back on the horse and go back into the project at full tilt boogie, I could give up completely or I could slow down and take my time. I choose the latter, and as a result I have continued playing SNES games but at a slower pace.

There have been many occasions during my life where I have had to deal with mental health issues and to a degree they have come in to play during this project. Both in terms of slowing things down, but also at times talking about some of these games and their place and effect on my life has proved to some degree therapeutic. Unfortunately I have taken such a degree of time with this project that some of the places it originally started have since shut down. The host for my original blog shut down, and two forums who supported me have also come and gone (one of them being SONM). So I wanted to bring this project to a new place, I wanted to bring it to GRview in the hope that I will both see it through to the end with everyone’s support but also so I can repost and look back on everything I have done so far refine and add to it. I would like this chance to thank those who have previously followed my work but also to welcome those who are going to be reading these reviews for the first time.

So lets get down to business The whole idea is for me to play and review 150 SNES games using both real carts and real hardware. I own both a SNES mini and an Everdrive and although I tinker with them and talk about them everything I review will be reviewed on a real SNES using a real cartridge.

When I started the project I owned 130 carts and intended to buy the other 20 along the way, this is something I have done. In fact, I have probably grabbed a whole bunch more than that. I do appreciate recommendations and know certain people probably want to see certain reviews but I am a man with a budget so to speak, so if a game is worth an absolute pile of money I wont be reviewing it. I do use carts from all regions but I try to let people know what particular region I have used, so if I do not mention it then you can assume that review is speaking about the PAL version.  As for my review SNES, I mostly use a European model I have converted to run at 60hz although from time to time I will use a regular PAL machine either due to issues with the games being run at 60hz or for the purpose of comparison.

I have to admit that my reviews can go off in all kinds of directions, sometimes I will compare a game to its Mega Drive counterpart, sometimes I will give historical information on the publisher or developer and sometimes I will end up just talking about the game’s place in my own life and my own experiences. I will always try to give the game a score out of 10, and try to say what I think you should look to pay for them. You might find some of my data to be a little outdated when I say for example a game is regularly available for under £10 but all I can say in response to this is that it was true to the best of my knowledge when the review was originally written. I am always open to questions and look if you don’t agree with me don’t worry these are just my own opinions if you love a game you love it never let anyone change that for you.

Review #1: Hook (Sunday 17 August 2014)

I started this project playing Hook, the game was made for the SNES by Sony Imagesoft (later to be known as Sony Computer Entertainment). They took the basic plot of the film, and then went off in their own direction. Hook the video game only shares a very basic level of plot with Hook the movie. Basically Peter Pan grew up had kids and became a chubby businessman forgetting all about Neverland. Captain Hook kidnaps Peter’s two children, Maggie and Jack, and holds them hostage. So Tink the fairy fetches Pan and carries him to Neverland. In the film there is a whole big thing of Peter becoming the pan again but in the game Tink sprinkles him with fairy dust and bang he is in green tights ready to go. The first level is basically Pan proving he is the pan to the lost boys by kicking their ass and from there on in he is kicking the arse of anything he can reach while making tricky jumps and avoiding enemies through level after level.



The game is basically your standard 2D platform game but it’s a good one, not one of those hastily thrown together cash-ins which is surprising really with it being a movie tie-in. The levels are challenging and well designed. The graphics, although not stunning, suit the game and are filled with nice little touches. Peter’s hair and clothes blowing in the wind being one example. The character of Pan kind of does look like a cartoon Robin Williams even though they apparently didn’t have the rights to peoples’ likenesses, everyone kind of looks like a simple anime inspired version of their real life counterpart.



The film had a John Williams’ orchestral soundtrack and most of this seems to have been converted into digitised 16 bit versions which really adds to the feeling that this is a quality production. I won’t say that Hook is perfect though. There are some issues with its difficulty balance. As a game intended for kids it is just too hard. I remember never seeing very much of this game as a child, as an adult though this is no real problem I have given this game about two hours today and I am just a little bit away from the end, really it is a short game which is hiding the issue of its length behind a difficulty wall which would obscure this from its original customer base. I wonder how many kids threw their pads in anger and declared this game sucked just because it was a touch too difficult. Still their parents would have been annoyed if their kids had managed to finish it in two hours. I guess I would give it a seven out of 10. I like it a lot but I don’t think its an all-time classic.

I brought this game from a market, just the cart itself. I can’t remember the price but I know it was somewhere between 50p and £3. Having taken a quick look the cart now seems to be going for anything from £15 to £25. If you’re into chasing retro games I would say its worth £15, but I personally wouldn’t spend £25 on it unless it was boxed and in good condition.

So obviously I wrote this around four years ago and I would feel bad if I didn’t point out that since I wrote this the great Robin Williams has passed away.  Just like all of us here he was a gamer. In particular he was a great fan of the Legend of Zelda for this and a million other reasons for a lot of people his passing felt like the passing of a friend or a kindred spirit. On reflection I still feel pretty much the same way I did about this game back when I wrote the review. I wouldn’t score it any differently but I guess I hold the game, the film and the whole thing just that little bit closer to my heart since Robin’s death. May he rest in peace and be forever alive in our hearts. So I will end this here with a painting I did of Robin Williams.