"Was a portable version of this arcade hit REALLY worth it?"

Ah, the all time classic Smash TV. I remember playing this game for hours upon hours on my SNES, mostly cause I sucked at playing the game without my Game Genie, but the sheer thrill of going from room to room blasting everything in sight was one that will never be forgotten.

Finding myself with a free Game Gear last summer, I decided to pick up some games from the local game shop for the system just to have something to do, and lo and behold there was a copy of Super Smash TV brand new in the box. Remembering the old days and how much fun I had, I decided to drop the 7 bucks on this bad boy and have some fun. Too bad the fun was short lived, and I soon found myself swapping carts with Streets of Rage 2 instead.

Story

It's the future or something, and violent TV game shows are the best thing ever! You are a contestant on the hit show Smash TV. Taking your machine gun with unlimited ammo, you must go kick everything's ass within the four levels of the game in order to win yourself that fancy big screen TV and an assload of cash to pay off that pesky electric bill. Unfortunately there's a catch, since everything the studio has to stop you has been deployed and its either you or them. The simple arcade game wasn't much for story, but its at least reasonable enough to get you into those rooms and give you a reason to start shooting everything in sight.

Game play

This is what kills the Game Gear version. I could understand the graphics and sound quality taking a hit when porting an excellent 16 bit game to a not as great 8 bit hand held, but when guys apparently magically appear in the room with no doors, it becomes a problem. Sure, the Game Gear probably couldn't handle the door's opening and closing animation, but to make them invisible and make you play in a box instead of a room is most unfair. The game tries to compensate for this by giving you 7 lives and 7 continues to start out with, but even these cannot get you too far. The controls are limited to the two button scheme, so the ability to either run backwards and shoot as you're trying to manage your way through the carnage filled boxes is quite difficult to manage. The options menu tries to give you an option to make a button that will lock your character into place and shoot either forward or backwards with the 1 and 2 buttons, or just shoot forward and backwards without locking your character in place, which simply does not work for a game of this nature since you will constantly be needing to shoot in all directions and be able to change at a moments notice. This was the same problem that hurt the upper head levels in Super Contra, since you had absolutely no control over which direction your shots would go in while trying to dodge bullets at the same time.

Another problem is that the game does not tell you when your weapons are about to deplete. The SNES and even the arcade versions both had a small bar under your score that slowly emptied as you used special weapons. Now either they removed this feature from the game or I keep dying too quickly to find out, but without that bar you will not know how much longer you have left with your special weapons, which is especially important during boss fights when you want to know when the appropriate time to swap weapons should be. And since enemies spawn pretty close to the center of the box, it is pretty hard to keep your weapon long enough to find out if it has ammo in the first place.

Sound

Well, there's a little tap-tap-tap sound that passes for your machine gun and whatever else you pick up, other than that there isn't much in the way of sound effects aside from the 'rooms clear' sound. And the title screen music seems to be running constantly, which sucks cause it'll drive you nuts after a while hearing the poor 8-bit quality. It would have been even more bearable had they kept the Host's catchphrases in the game such as "I'd buy that for a dollar!" or "Big money! Big prizes! I love it!". Instead you have to deal with a little pop up of his head instead, which is quite pointless without the voice over.

Replay

Pretty much non-existent unless you want to challenge yourself. And even then, I'd say stick to the superior home console version of the game, or better yet find an arcade that still has the game. Either one has to be better than playing this shoddy port of the game

So.....buy it?

Only if you are desperately in need of playing some Smash TV in the car, and that's a big if. Any more, they're making it so you can play home consoles in your car, so there's pretty much no point in doing this anymore, unless of course you really can't afford much else than a Game Gear. And if that's the case, there are much better games out there to get for the poor thing, so try seeking out one of them first.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 09/10/07

Game Release: Super Smash T.V. (US, 1994)