Action 52

"Go to WarioWare. Go directly to WarioWare, do not pass Action 52, do not collect 52 crummy games."

If you're a hardcore gamer you've probably heard the sad story of a tiny forgotten company called Active Enterprises, who thought that they'd take the video game industry by storm with a well-conceived but poorly implemented game bonanza pack called Action 52. Unfortunately, the programmers learned all they knew from designing Atari games, and weren't ready to make games on par with anything else out for the NES, or especially the Genesis. In the end their dreams exploded and the staff disappeared, and who's surprised? While their sole Genesis outing is an improvement over the NES Action 52, that's sort of like being glad you missed stepping in elephant poo only to step in a pile of dog doo.

Graphics-4/10
The graphics in Gen-52 are a clear improvement over its 8-bit cousin, but still look cheap and rushed to completion.

Audio-2/10
Lifeless and forgettable. Thank god for that.

Gameplay-5/10
Simultaneously more and less ambitious than the NES version. More because some thought actually went into the selection instead of making 1/3 of the selection spaceship games and there are far fewer bugs to ruin the experience, but less because even with a somewhat decent selection Active still resorted to rehashing games from the NES version, and elsewhere to fill all the slots, including this very multicart, and for some reason you have to die or make it to the next level to have any idea what your score is. Lay-zee. I should probably give some examples to show you what I mean.

#3, Dyno Tennis-
You and a friend play t-rexes who in turn play ping pong with a caveman. While the controls are sketchy the concept is fun.

#5, Star Ball-
A pinball game. A surprisingly inventive thing for Active to include. I approve of Star Ball.

#9, 15 Puzzle
One of those stupid puzzles where the object is to arrange numbered tiles in order by sliding them around. Can't you buy those things as cheap party favors? Why should you want to buy a Sega cartridge to play it?

#13, Cheetahmen-
That's right, Cheetahmen is the thirteenth game, meaning they're not even pretending it's the big payoff for putting up with all the other crummy games on the cart. Active's flagship characters probably suffer more than anyone--not only are there no boss fights and only one level per Cheetahman, there is only one level, used over and over!

#19, Sharks
No wonder Active went out of business, they recycled one of the worst games from the original Action 52! I suppose it could've been Non-Human instead.

#36, Bombs Away
You're a commando who runs through a village in Vietnam or somewhere and try not to get the hell bombed out of him. If you want to see something really cool, play Sky Avenger where you go through the exact same village the other way!

#51, First Game-
This is Pong. This is how desperate Active was to fill 52 slots.

Replayability-3/10
Most of the games aren't as astoundingly bad as they were on the NES, and since there's so many there's a bit more reason to come back and play it again.

Overall-4/10 (not averaged)
Not as bad as the NES one for sure, but maybe that's why nobody talks about this one. The whole fun of Action 52 is the badness, and this one nearly approaches mediocrity. What a shame.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 12/20/06, Updated 01/25/07