Super Smash TV

"A mad, crazy shooter"

Super Smash TV is a frantic, action packed shoot ‘em up, taking the form of a game show where you have to work your way through dozens of enemy filled arenas in order to win Big Money and Big Prizes.

You start off in a simple arena, with a simple gun and simple enemies to kill. The controls are simple - you use the direction buttons to move and the fire buttons to fire in the corresponding direction, independent of which direction you may be moving in (for example, X would fire up and B would fire down). You can pick up more powerful weapons, from rocket launchers to grenades, some of which are more useful than others in certain situations.

As you move along in the game, you will come up against more difficult enemies, which will come up on you in great numbers (there’s usually an average of 20 enemies on screen at any one time, and some of the later levels will require you to kill, at a guess, over 200 bad guys), and each level is guarded by a nasty end of level boss that can soak up more firepower than, well, something that can soak up a lot of firepower.

You view the action from a top down perspective. Each arena has a simple design, which is very useful considering the number of sprites on screen at any one time. There’s not much slow down either when things get hectic, as they often do. The weapons have a nice selection of sounds and there’s some nice sampled speech. The background music could get annoying after a while though and you could be reaching for the mute button.

This game is very hard to complete. You’ll beat the Easy level quite quickly (it only consists of the first level) but the Normal and Hard will take a while. Some arenas, particularly from the second level onwards, are pretty much impossible to complete without losing a life, and the second end of level boss is the hardest opponent I’ve come up against in any video game, period. There’s a great deal of satisfaction when you advance further than you have done before, and the game is great fun when you play the two player co-operative mode.

It’s certainly worth hunting down this game. While it’s not the greatest game ever made, it’s not bad and very challenging. All that’s left to say is good luck, you’ll need it!

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 12/24/02, Updated 12/24/02