Heavy Nova

"Don't Listen to the Fanboys. ...Oh, Wait, There Aren't Any..."

I'm going to go ahead and describe an experience I'm sure we all share. Browsing through the bargain bin, you find a game you have nothing but fond memories for from your childhood. You remember when you rented it that once, and you and your best friend spent hours just playing it over and over. Let me tell you something; some of the best games on Earth have I rediscovered this way, such as Aero the Acrobat, Ristar, Earthworm Jim and The Lion King. But then there's the flip side to this coin: stinkers like Garfield: Caught in the Act!, Radical Rex and... Heavy Nova.

For some reason, I remember playing this game forever and a day when I was a kid, even bestowing upon it that rarest of honors: renting it twice. (Other games I did this for, just to give you a sense of this honor, include Klonoa: Door to Phantomile, Final Fantasy VII and ECCO the Dolphin). But let me tell you, as often as my memory serves me true, sometimes I'm reminded of just how much kids don't know what quality is.

In short, Heavy Nova is a painful, boring experience meant to harm your Sega Genesis. And in this day and age, let's face it: your Genesis isn't feeling as spry as it once did. The next game you play could be your last. Why not cherish that last game on something like Gunstar Heroes instead of this garbage?

Plus, I'm pretty sure this game is bad enough to give your Genesis an STD. At the least, after it wakes up drunk next to this game and realizes they went all the way, it's likely to strangle itself with the RF adapter, and good luck getting another one of those today.

GRAPHICS - 3/10

Let's not kid ourselves. These graphics are grainy, dark and unimpressive to the max. The cutscenes look about as good as the normal gameplay for the first Sonic the Hedgehog. The gameplay animation itself is just awful. It further suffers from a ridiculously bad animation problem. There are so few frames that you can actually see holes in your character's movement. And I'm not saying, like, every once in a little while. Every time you kick you'll see the three frames they bothered to draw.

So really, with games as sharp as Sonic 3 and High Seas Havoc and Mickey Mania, we KNOW the Genesis can do better. More importantly, even for when it was released the game looks awful. So just mind you that this game has pixels the size of hams and a framerate that makes your solar-powered calculator look like Metal Gear Solid 3.

SOUND - 2/10

Oogly. If there's anything worse than the graphics, it's the sound. They decided to go find the worst sound effects they possibly could, so they spent their whole SFX budget on a bag of rusty nails. They then proceed to use this bag to beat your eardrums relentlessly for the entire five minutes you'll be able to stand having the TV on.

There's music, too. I'll need some more therapy before I'm ready to go to the public with the story of how it hurt me. It's a long healing process.

GAMEPLAY - 0/10

Okay, note that this game has a fatal, game-killing bug. No, it doesn't make the game crash. It's just a design flaw so hideous that you have to wonder if they playtested this monstrosity at all before inflicting it on the public. The bug is this: if you jump, your robot is invincible the entire time it's in the air.

In a fighting game.

A 2-player fighting game.

You can imagine the hours of fun and excitement this brings to the game as your robots... jump. Repeatedly.

So that's 2-player mode. But even without the game-killing bug this game would suck. It's got maybe 3 special moves. And I don't mean per robot. In the GAME. Picking certain robots makes no freakin' sense, inasmuch as they can't jump (and are therefore peons among GODS) or have no special moves, or move incredibly slowly... even more slowly than the other crappy robots. The game's control is horrific. I still wake up in the night, crying myself to sleep over how bad the controls in this game are. If you're unlucky enough to have some desperate soul give this game to you for destruction because they have no holy water and C4 at their place and you're doubly unlucky enough to pop it in and try it, you'll see what I mean. It's terrible.

1-Player mode is 2-Player mode with terrifyingly bad platformer levels in between the fights. It's ridiculous. The levels are about a screen length long and contain nothing but cheap blows and tiny, annoying, impossible to hit enemies that drain your precious energy. Not that you -need- that precious energy to kill the boss, since YOU'RE STILL INVINCIBLE EVERY TIME YOU JUMP.

Plot - ?/10

Plot? In a fighting game? Most importantly, uhhh... your silver robot kills his evil brother, saves Bridget and makes the world safe for Democracy. I think. Or else the colonel is really an AI construct and it turns out your girlfriend is working for the double-secret government that runs the secret government (unbeknownst to the secret government, but knownst to us) that secretly runs the government (unbeknownst to the government, but knownst to us.)

Okay, honestly, they attempt at a plot but it's so weird... it's basically just the child of Cortana and digital Judge Dredd telling you about your missions to, umm... save... something. It's not exactly well translated.

Redeeming Qualities:

There's robots.

FINAL SCORE - 2/10 (not an average, for the mathematically challenged)

Shaq Fu has fanboys. High Seas Havoc has fanboys (I'm one of them.) Do you know how bad a game has to be to not have a single fanboy, anywhere? Look no further.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 12/05/06