Action 52 for Sega Genesis- The Evens

The second half of the best value on the Sega Genesis.

I ended up taking the evens for this one. I pitched this game as a review to Sly Ghost as a joke, and now look at us.Though all the games are bad, they're infinitely more playable than the ones on the NES version, so the Genesis Action 52's got that going for it, I guess.

	Darksyne: This game takes the weird momentum controls from games like Asteroids and Lunar Lander, and then makes it a way bigger pain in the ass by putting you in a cramped metal hellscape with people shooting at you. The main goal is to shoot all of the little things dotting the walls, like turrets and satellites. I tried flying over or shooting the little gold S thing in the screenshot, but it didn't do anything. You've got a shoot button, an accelerator, and a shield. The shield is worthless, because you're going to spend all your time slamming into walls, which it doesn't protect you against. The second level music is surprisingly non-terrible. It kind of reminds me of Castlevania.
	Ooze: The smash-hit sequel to Ooze on the NES Action 52. The title screen music is like Toejam and Earl got their heads slammed in a car door and then went to the circus. One hit from anything kills you, of course. That includes jumping from too high a space. Other than that you just kind of jump around collecting keys until you eventually get annihilated when a bee touches you or something. I got stuck at one point, and noticed that Ooze pops up as a demo if you idle at the Action 52 title screen for long enough. I was dismayed but contented that when the demo player reached the part I got stuck at, he simply paused for a second before jumping off a cliff to his death. I think I beat the game.
	Sidewinder: It's a horrifyingly bad version of After Burner. You just kind of fly through the infinite forever. Every so often, an enemy will appear near the bottom of the screen and very slowly advance upon you.
	15 Puzzle: It's a slider puzzle, and not even a good one. Sometimes slider puzzles have like a picture of a tiger or something that you're working toward, but this one's just numbers. I finished one level to see if anything would happen if you beat it. Nothing happens. The screen blacks out and it sends you to another puzzle. The game gives you five minutes and counts your moves so you can see how bad you are at slider puzzles and reflect on how little that bothers you.
	Star Duel: This one's a two-player game. It plays exactly the same as Darksyde, in terms of the controls. It's kind of odd that instead of a health bar, you have a damage counter that counts up until you hit 9, at which point you die. It's not great, but I could see it being fun if you were trapped in a remote cabin with one other person and a copy of Action 52 with 51 of the games broken. I tried flying around with my shields on for a while to see what happens when you run out of fuel. For me, the game locked up. I don't think that's supposed to happen.
	Alfredo: Alfredo kicks his soup up a notch, which causes it to explode. You spend the game running back and forth and collecting pasta. I wasn't exactly sure what to do at first because all of the food items that get launched out of your witch's cauldron have eyes and arms and legs. I figured since he was handling a pot, you were supposed to catch the foods so they don't run away, but the first thing that happened to me is I caught a... raisin or chunk of meat or something and died. Turns out you're only supposed to catch the pasta items, which I guess makes sense since your name's Alfredo. The C button makes you jump about five times Alfredo's height, which you never have any reason to do.
	Skirmish: Another two player game. It has a full title screen with credits, which is kind of strange. The title screen also has the quote "Only The Dead Have Seen The End Of War," which given the wacky music and cartoony graphics seems a bit incongruously serious. It also attributes the quote to Douglas MacArthur, who I guess did say it, but he attributed it to Plato, which I actually decided to look up for this stupid review. The game itself seems like it actually had some potential, being like kind of like Archon where you move your soldiers across the grid and then go into a real-time top down battle when they collide, but after player 2 ran out of forces, it still went to player 2's turn and wouldn't let me continue playing. I only got to place two units at the beginning and picked two infantries, so I guess I'm an idiot.
	Minds Eye: Title is sic. It's Minesweeper. They could've been really clever and called it Mine's Eye, but they didn't. If you click a mine square, it makes an explosion sound effect and the square turns red, but it resets the level before the sound effect finishes.
	Billy Bob: I don't really think of the name "Billy Bob" when I think Wild West names, but this is a Western-themed stationary shooter. Billy Bob unfortunately suffers from rheumatism, which keeps him from moving his arm faster than extremely slow. The game is bland, but not really offensively so. It just makes you wish you were playing Hogan's Alley or throwing rocks at rats in the street.
	Knockout: Yet another two-player game. It's just a simple boxing game where you have one punch and you try to punch the hell out of your opponent while they do the same to you. Eventually one person falls down and the other one gets a point for winning the round. Like in Alfredo, you can jump several times your height and there's no purpose to doing so.
	Echo: It's Simon, but instead of the pattern building off itself, it just randomly makes a new pattern every time. I played a few rounds and each round was just a four step pattern. I imagine if I kept playing to level two, the patterns would get longer, but I don't really want to do that.
	Mousetrap: Some careless homeowner has exploded into hundreds of perfect cheese wedges, and it's your job as some mouse wearing a shirt to clean them up. It appears the homeowner died playing Action 52, according to the TV. That's a pretty insane sound system for playing a Sega Genesis on. Cats prowl horizontally back and forth and you try not to bump into them. It reminds me of a crappier version of Jewel Thief on the PC. At least that had mouse control. Not in the way this game does, though.
	Slalom: You're skiing and you dodge trees. Technically speaking I guess the trees are just being launched at you. It would've been nice if the game actually had, like, slalom skiing, given that's the name of the game, but we are playing Action 52 here, so let's be realistic.
	Force One: Don't you hate when shooters do things like give you powerups or have the enemies do anything beyond lazily float into your killing field? Well, then you'll love Force One. I assume it's like Air Force One in that it's the president's private spacecraft. They had to drop the Air from the name, though, cause there ain't no air in space.
	Appleseed: It's kind of like Alfredo in that you run back and forth collecting things in a basket, but instead of all of the things springing from a pot, they just drop from the ceiling on you. If you accidentally catch a crabapple, Mr. Appleseed gets really mad and dumps the bucket on the floor and stomps his feet. That seems a bit extreme to me, but I'm no apple farmer. The screenshot exhibits the average jump height in Action 52 games.
	Sunday Drive: This is a game where you compare yourself to other Sunday Drivers. If you strip it to its core, it's the same game as Slalom except the obstacles are coming from above. Also, if you push the C button, you can honk your horn. Nobody seems to care about the horn.
	Air Command: This is the only vertical shooter I've ever played where you're actually at the top of the screen and the enemies come at you from the bottom. Maybe it's trying to be really deep like Spec Ops: The Line and suggest that maybe you're the bad guy, maybe the real monster is man, et cetera. I'd expect it to be similar to Force One the same way Sunday Drive is similar to Slalom, but the enemies in Air Command actually seem to fly at you with a modicum of violent intent as opposed to just kind of floating there.
	Bombs Away: This was covered well in the AVGN episode, but this screenshot here actually doubles as a strategy guide. Do exactly what I'm doing here in the screenshot, and you'll never lose at Bombs Away. The bombs literally will never hit you if you stay all the way to the right. There's something really unsettling about the music and the parallax scrolling. I mean, it's no Shadow of the Beast, but it's more than I'd expect from Action 52.
	Dedant: This is the same game as Force One, but with an insect theme and your enemies just kind of fade into existence rather than flying in from above the frame. The spiders depicted in the screenshot appear to be unkillable. I riddled them with ant shots to no avail. I have no further comments.
	Man At Arms: It's another basic defense shooter. The king only garrisoned a single crossbowman at this fort, but it appears that's all he really needed because the crossbow rapid fires unlimited bolts. I like that even though the enemies die in a single hit, they keep going UGH every time you shoot them until they disappear. It's far more satisfying to completely riddle them with quarrels than to just stick and move, Mac. Sometimes I'll just get bored and start shooting and end up killing an enemy who's not even in the frame.
	Armor Battle: If you really hated the floatiness of Star Duel or the grid movement part of Skirmish, but otherwise found them somehow irresistible, Armor Battle is the game for you. You drive the tanks around and shoot your opponent (This is another two-player game). The first player to get shot ten times loses. I somehow made it so that my shots went up at like a fifteen degree angle when I got to the second round. I have no idea how I did it or how to undo it, but it happened and now I have to live with it.
	Apache: Another chapter in the legacy of terrible scrolling shooters that made Action 52 a household name. You see those rocks that are on the ground? Yeah, well, your Apache can still crash into them, even though they scroll with the rest of the objects on the ground., while those walls on the right and left scroll faster, suggesting they're actually in the same plane of existence as you. I  dunno, maybe they're just rocks that happen to be floating at a very specific speed.
	Sky Avenger: Action 52 brings horizontal shooters to a whole new dimension by putting you on the wrong side of the screen, just like they did in Air Command. You fly through the town from Bombs Away shooting helicopters. Given the scale of the helicopters compared to the size of the guy in Bombs Away, these are actually RC helicopters and planes, beating Toy Commander to the punch by like 7 years.
	Meteor: You fly left and right shooting a meltbeam of lasers to stop meteors from crushing your city. There's no health meter or damage counter or anything for the city though, so I'm not entirely sure that the meteors actually do anything. I just kind of let them go for a while, and nothing happened until one happened to crash into me.
	The Boss: I guess you're supposed to be like the boss of the crocodile mafia or something. You climb around collecting dollar bills and shooting other reptiles and frogs. You have to be pixel perfect to get off the ladders correctly though, which really cheeses my coffee. I wonder why they picked a crocodile.
	Challenge: The 52nd game is just the rest of the games again? You cheap son of a bitch. YOU CHEATED ME. YOU CHEATED MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

And that's the rest of the Action 52 games on Genesis. The Action 52 games are interesting inasmuch as they were actually released and ostensibly a few poor bastards actually paid real US dollars for copies. Assuming it was 200 bucks like the NES version, that's 322 dollars in today money. I would like to take this time to mention that I bought VVVVVV for 49 cents yesterday.

Check out Sly Ghost's post for the other half of the games