If you ever want to strike terror into the hearts of even the most jaded gamer, all you have to say is two simple little words:

“Action 52.”

Just mentioning the name calls to mind all sorts of very vivid images, to be sure.  Images of badly-programmed games with Godawful controls.  Images of half-finished platformers with nigh-impassable jumps stuck in to keep people from accessing crash-prone later levels.  Images of no fewer than five space shooters that are merely graphics hacks of one another, and of games that just flat-out refuse to run at all even on the real hardware.  Images of a contest to complete level 5 of one specific game for a chance to win $104,000… only to discover the game in question could not be played past level 3.  Images of the company that published this putrid pile of pretentious pablum, Active Enterprises, and their hubris in thinking that their ripoffs of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the Cheetahmen, were poised to become the new #1 multimedia franchise; there were more video games, toys, comics, and even a cartoon about them, all supposedly in the pipeline.

I talked about this… thing… once before here on the site.  I, along with many other reviewers over the years, concluded that Action 52 on the NES was quite possibly the single lowest point in the history of that storied console.  Fifty-two games, all horrible, retailing for approximately five times what the typical NES cartridge was selling for at the time.  It was, plain and simple, a scam with absolutely no intention other than to separate a fool from his or her money.

Now, get ready for the scariest revelation of all…

Active actually made a Genesis sequel to this festering pile of dreck!

Action 52 (Sega Genesis, 1993): Well, actually… they didn’t, technically.  In a rare moment of common sense, someone at Active decided that since their programmers appeared to be thoroughly incapable of successfully coding “Hello World,” they should instead contract work on the Genny port to an outside studio.  Active merely published the result; the programming was done by a company called FarSight Technologies, which is still around today producing minor games for modern consoles.  Even in 1991, they already had a few Genesis titles on their resumé, so it’s not as if this Action 52 would be made by a group unfamiliar with how to program for the system (as clearly was the case with the NES).

And, you know?  It shows.  The Genny version is, believe it or not, not the total monkey hurlage the NES cart was.  Not only do all of these games work, but some of them are even, dare I say, fun.  To a certain extent, at least.

Take, for instance, the first game on the list, “Bonkers.”  It’s a Breakout clone, but with a somewhat interesting gameplay mechanic; instead of moving a paddle to bounce the ball back, you control the ball as it bounces up and down the screen, trying to steer it into the blocks.  The ball can only destroy blocks that are the same color as itself, and there are blocks that can change the ball’s color to suit the situation.  The catch: You must destroy all the green blocks before you try changing colors, as once you’ve changed to another color you cannot go back to green.  The only way to die is to run into the blocks containing the black + symbol.

“Bonkers” may be relatively simple, but it clearly demonstrates that FarSight had a good idea how to make an actual playable game for this console.  This one game is, by itself, better than all 52 of the NES cart’s titles put together.  So right away, the Genesis Action 52 is several light-years ahead of its 8-bit predacessor.

Unfortunately, the good feeling doesn’t last, and soon you’re reminded that this is in fact still Action 52 you’re playing.  Which means, yes, the sucktitude will soon be piling up like the list of recently-unemployed baseball managers.

Once again, you have extremely basic shooters where the only real difference is in the graphics they use.  You have the most basic racing-type games where the only goal is to avoid crashing into things.  You have platformers with totally broken jumping controls that make it almost impossible to advance.

To be fair, there are a few minor gems here.  ”Bonkers” was one, and another is game #24, “Mousetrap.” I found this one to actually be sort of fun, for what it is; you control a mouse and try to grab all the cheese on the screen while dodging enough cats to have you wondering where Peter Ustinov and the Congressional ruins are hiding.  (Bonus points to anyone who catches that reference.)  Although it’s the simplest “collect-em-up” game you could possibly imagine, the graphics are cute and cartoony and there is something compelling, in that Tetris sort of way, to see if you can get through all nine levels.  It’s not bad as a quick-fix game, the kind of thing you’d play on a coffee break if you had a gaming itch to scratch.

Also interesting is “Freeway,” game #23.  At first glance it’s a Frogger clone where you have to get a dog to cross the street.  Well, that’s pretty much what it is.  However, a twist is that once you get your canine companion across the highway, you have to collect an item and bring it back to where you started.  While even this is not a wholly original concept (a somewhat popular Atari 800 Frogger clone from the early ’80s, Preppie!, featured this mechanic) , it is just different enough to save “Freeway” from the typical “play for thirty seconds then quit in frustration” that generally greets an Action 52 game.

Some games are actually carried over from the NES, but most of them simply take a name and apply it to something entirely different.  The Genesis “Cheetahmen,” for example, bears almost no resemblance to its infamous forebear; in this game, rather than have it be a side-scrolling beat-em-up, you try to rescue baby cheetahs from a forest laden with humanoid monsters.  There’s a game called “Billy Bob” that is a Hogan’s Alley-esque shooter with a Wild West theme, rather than the vaguely Prince of Persia-style adventure seen on the NES.  Other games, however, such as “Shooting Gallery” and “Sharks,” are simply do-overs of their NES Action 52 counterparts with slightly improved graphics and sound.

And then, there are some games that just leave you scratching your head.  ”Dauntless” is a basic side-view shooter in the vein of 1942… but you can’t bloody see anything for all the clouds on the screen!  A two-player boxing game, “Knockout,” is rendered virtually unplayable by the fact there is no onscreen indication of how much damage you’re dealing to your opponent.  There are Genesis ports of such games as Simon, Pong, one of those sliding-tile puzzles, and Minesweeper - yes, Minesweeper! - included in the cartridge.  Clearly, originality wasn’t high on the priority list for these guys.  And just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse… along comes “Sketch,” which is just a rudimentary drawing program (think Mario Paint or Art Alive, only even less capable) and not a game at all!

And truthfully, there are only 51 different games on the cart, not 52.  The fifty-second game, “Challenge,” is merely a gauntlet of the toughest levels from each of the single-player games, coming at you in random order.  Survive them all and be bestowed the title of “Action Gamemaster.”  Easier said than done!  These levels move so fast and are so enemy-laden that you would need to be almost superhuman to get through them (or have a Game Genie handy).  Still, the idea isn’t a bad one, so FarSight gets a few points for the concept at least.  It’s too bad they made those levels virtually impossible for us mere mortals.

I have to single out one thing this game does that gets on your nerves real quick.  Each individual game features a data box at the start of each level (this is the only place where you’ll get a look at your score and remaining lives), accompanied by a droning female voice saying “Level One,” “Level Two,” and so on, along with a “Level Complete” when appropriate.  I cannot emphasize enough how annoying this gets after a while, and when combined with Action 52’s generally obnoxious “techno-bass” soundtrack results in one of the worst-sounding games ever to grace Sega’s 16-bit wonder.  Yes, the Genny’s FM chip is limited in the audio it can produce, but when you compare this to the BGM in games such as Sonic, Phantasy Star II, or Streets of Rage it’s clear that FarSight didn’t even come close to approaching the merest fringes of those limits.

All in all, the Genesis Action 52 is in fact an improvement, albeit a slight one, over the infamous NES version.  Of course, that’s not saying much; give me ten minutes in Flash and I can probably make something better than anything seen on the NES cart!  Still, the Genny port does have its moments, and at least is somewhat playable for a little while, probably entirely the result of Active choosing not to program it themselves.  Unfortunately, the games that are actually semi-decent are still in the minority, and the cart is still loaded with dozens of repetitive, nondescript shooters and twitch games that were better done on those old handheld LED games from the late ’70s.

Hey, what did you expect?  This is, after all, Action 52 we’re talking about!

I mentioned hubris earlier in reference to Active Enterprises, publishers of the Action 52 “franchise” and the geniuses behind the Cheetahmen “phenomenon.”  As many of you know, there was a Cheetahmen II (a sequel to the headline game on the NES Action 52) completed and ready for publication by the time Active pulled out of the video game market (some 1,500 carts were found in a warehouse in the mid-’90s).  And in an earlier Retro-Active article on abandoned prototype consoles, I waxed poetic about their doomed “Action Gamemaster” handheld system, one of the most egregious examples of Kitchen Sink Syndrome ever presented in the wacky world of vaporware.  There were even plans to port Action 52 to the Super NES, as well as a line of themed multicarts - a Sports 5 game was announced - by the time Active shuttered.

The moral of the story:  Aiming high is always a noble goal… but when your target is a B17 bomber, you’d better have more than a cap pistol to bring it down with!

If you liked that, try...

1. Retro-Active: Action 52
2. Retro-Active: Cheetahmen II
3. Retro-Active: Wizard
4. Retro-Active: Consoles That REALLY Never Made It
5. Retro-Active: Top 10 Retro Puzzle Games NOT Called “Tetris”

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