Posted by Devin de Gruyl on Jul 24th, 2008
For the readers that’ve stuck with me for this long, don’t worry. This will be the last time I have to talk about everyone’s favorite purveyor of unlicensed NES cartridges, Active Enterprises. That’s because, after discussing the infamous Action 52 duology (including its Genesis port) and the Action Gamemaster, this next game is the only product left of theirs for me to talk about.
And it’s one I really, really didn’t want to have to review.
Not just because the game is bad. Actually, to call this game “bad” doesn’t even begin to say it all. But rather, I’m starting to be concerned about coming off like the Angry Video Game Nerd, or perhaps our very own Big Mean Flash Gamer, in only focusing on the wretched games out there – and the catalog of Active certainly qualifies.
There’s that, and there’s the fact this game is actually physically painful to play.
The things I do for this website.
Cheetahmen II (NES, officially unreleased, 1992): The story behind the creation of this “game” (and you’ll soon understand why I put that word in quotes) is more fascinating than the product itself. Undaunted and unbowed by the critical and commercial flop Action 52 was, Active pressed on in trying to foist off their signature ripoffs characters on an unsuspecting public, this time in the form of a standalone sequel to the “star” game of the NES Action 52 (and the best game on the cartridge, if only because it appeared that about an hour was spent on its development versus about 5-10 minutes for the other 51 games combined).
For the fortunate unaware, the Cheetahmen are, as their name implies, a trio of humanoid cheetahs, the result of genetic experimentation by one Dr. Morbis, your stereotypical mad scientist. Rebelling against his plans for world domination, the three Cheetahmen – Aries, Apollo, and Hercules – find themselves constantly battling Dr. Morbis and his genetically-engineered “Sub-Species” to thwart Morbis’s evil plans.
Now, to be fair, as ridiculous as all that hokum sounds… when you get right down to it, is the concept of three yellow-furred martial artists in white pants and T-shirts, constantly spitting forth inane catchphrases like “Livin’ Large!”, any more preposterous than the notion of four mutated turtles adopting the ways of the ninja in between pizza binges? It’s all a matter of having the right idea in the right place at the right time. (Though it should be noted that Eastman & Laird originally intended the Turtles to be parody…)
Oh, and of course it should have been in the hands of a company actually capable of successfully marketing the franchise. And as we’ve demonstrated in past reviews, Active Enterprises as a whole lacked the ability to successfully pick their own noses, let alone write decent games.
Luckily for all of us, however, even Active realized they were going nowhere at Warp 10 with their video-game operations, and the word had gone out that Action 52 was something to be avoided like your favorite STD. So, even though Cheetahmen II was basically complete (and you’ll soon understand why I threw in the “basically” qualifier) and a run of about 1,000 cartridges was ready for release into the wild, Active announced they were pulling the plug on their video game development effective immediately. The produced Cheetahmen II games sat in a warehouse for years, hopefully sadly never to be played.
Until 1997, when a glutton for punishment an enterprising eBayer somehow came into possession of the unreleased cartridges. The rest, as they say, is history; a copy found its way into the hands of the emulation community, and subsequently a ROM dump of this “lost” NES game found its way onto this wonderful thing called the intartubez.
And once people actually sat down and started to play this thing, it was quickly discovered that some things should stay buried…
To go into everything that’s wrong with Cheetahmen II would fill a book that would give Tolstoy pagecount envy. So I’ll instead hit the high points:
For starters, the ghost of Action 52 is immediately prevalent. Cheetahmen II uses the exact same gameplay engine as the previous game, right down to the same graphics being recycled (and one of the six levels lifted verbatim from the Action 52 Cheethamen game). Code reuse is all well and good (cf. Mega Man), but when this game is a sequel to arguably the most abysmally-programmed video game to ever escape prototype status, it’s definitely not a good foot to start out on.
Let’s talk play control. This is one of those games that reverses the “standard” of NES sidescroller controls; in other words, the B button jumps and the A button attacks. Most of the best NES platformers did it precisely the opposite way. This may not sound like a big deal, and honestly it isn’t when looked at dispassionately, but if you were raised on the likes of Super Mario Bros., Mega Man, and Castlevania the effect is like trying to write with your non-dominant hand; you can do it if you concentrate hard enough, but it’s just too much work for too little effort.
And speaking of the amount of effort put into the game, just take a look at these enemies! In the above screenshot, you can see what appears to be an invisible pirate headed your way – one of the most hilariously broken sprites I’ve ever seen in an NES game. That’s not image breakup causing this, friends, this guy looks that way intentionally, for reasons only known to Active. Other foes are pretty decently drawn, I suppose, but they all suffer from what has to be the worst AI in history… no matter what the sprite, all enemies move towards you at the same speed, in the same brain-dead fashion. Adding to the image of incompetence is the fact that you will be attacked by crawling bugs and snakes along the floor – in fact, some will even go right through the floor! - and you cannot attack these enemies, as the Cheetahmen apparently all have broomsticks for legs and haven’t mastered the art of crouching down to attack things below their line-of-sight!
It gets worse. The jumping is terrible, your Cheetahman barely clearing his own height. Precision jumping to avoid unkillable enemies is all but impossible, and the game actually taunts you by putting blocks in mid-air that you could possibly use as a safer route – but thanks to the broken jumping controls, it is impossible to reach that route.
(Yes, that screenshot was taken at the height of my jump! And no, you can’t just jump off that little hill to the left to reach the nearest block, as controlling the direction of your jump with the necessary precision is naught but an exercise in frustration.)
The graphics, true to form, look like they were drawn in about thirty seconds using MS Paint. Nothing appears to have more than two frames of animation at most, and the color scheme has to rank as one of the most boring and pedestrian to ever appear on the NES. At least the Action 52 title had levels in color schemes that at least looked somewhat decent, but there’s only so much of this pastel-colored island of death (or whatever it is) your eyes can take. Sound effects are limited to a simple, droning tune that plays throughout each level, and is interrupted by sound effects that sound like they were lifted directly off an Atari 2600 – or worse, an Odyssey².
And I haven’t even gotten to the worst part of this game yet, because frankly I got so frustrated with playing the game for review that I didn’t even bother trying to get to that point. But I’ve seen it done, and can tell you it’s true. There are six levels in Cheetahmen II (two each for each of the three Cheetahmen), but after the fourth level and second Boss, the game locks up and refuses to go to the next level! The game doesn’t freeze or anything like that; it just won’t advance to Level 5 at all, leaving your Cheetahman forever stranded on an empty Boss-fight screen! And even if you do manage to get to the final two levels (it is possible with cheats, hacked ROMs, and/or a glitch involving the NES power button), you’ll find the same behavior again after beating the final Boss – no ending, not even being dumped back to the title screen!
…I’m sorry, I can’t go on. Bottom line, this thing is the purest form of excrement ever disguised as a video game.
Cheetahmen II has to rank as the single most amateurish programming effort ever to be burned into a production cartridge. It is actually considered a blessing that we never saw this thing hit the streets, and its later discovery is proof positive that not every “lost” game necessarily needs to be “found” again. It’s debatable as to whether this should even be considered a “game,” since it’s clearly not even finished (and yet Active was ready to unleash it on the masses in this form). There are better, more playable games to be found in any first-year programming class.
Sometimes, a game that’s universally despised can have some decent things about it when looked at through different lenses. This is not one of them. Cheetahmen II is exactly as awful as you may have heard, with a grand total of zero redeeming qualities; it would have had one such, but since the game was unearthed and cartridges got out to gamers anyway, that went out the window!
On the other hand, if you’re looking for a game that’ll actually make you say “I’d rather be playing Action 52”… here you go!
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Captain N
August 28, 2008 at 1:08 am
i actually have this cart. I got it from a used game store called Console game Exchange down here in Florida. Price $35. They must have not even tried it because they had it marked as action 52. When it is Cheetha Men II.
you pretty much summed up the game in your review. If anyone has one of these carts they are worth quite a bit. Hang on to it.
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August 28th, 2008 at 1:00 pm
From what I’m given to understand, all 1,000 Cheetahmen II carts that exist are actually labelled for Action 52 instead; only a gold sticker on the bottom of the cart identifies it properly. Talk about cheap…
[Reply]
August 29th, 2008 at 12:17 am
Mine never had the gold sticker. But the chips inside say cheethamen II on them and of course i have tried the cart and it is cheethamen II. My guess is the gold lable must have never been placed on or its lost to the ages
[Reply]
August 29th, 2008 at 12:24 am
to add to to my reply: The cart is labled action 52.
Your post i believe is true. They did indeed pack Cheethamen II in action 52 carts
[Reply]