150 SNES games reviewed

Ok thought I would set myself an interesting little challenge. I am going to play 150 SNES games in 150 days, 1 a day. Now I am not going to try and complete them all but I am going to try and play them at least enough to say a little something, maybe give a quick review.  Now I intend to do all of this on a real snes using real carts. I probably own about 130 so will have to pick a few up along the way.  

ADDED  I actually failed the challange. I got a new job and found it hard to find time for this, I then lost my new job because while I was still in my trial period they decided to make cutbacks.. after this I sat around feeling sorry for myself and then I have continued playing SNES games but at a slower pace.

I have started today by Playing Hook

Hook the game was made for the Snes by Sony Imagesoft (Latter to be known as Sony Computer Entertainment). They took the basic plot of the film, and then went off in their own direction. Hook the video game only shares a very basic level of plot with Hook the movie

Basically Peter Pan grew up had kids and became a chubby business man forgetting all about neverland. Captain Hook kidnaps Peter's two children, Maggie and Jack, and holds them hostage. So Tink the fairy fetches Pan and carries him to neverland. Now in the film there is a whole big long thing of Peter becoming the pan again but in the game tink sprinkles him with fairy dust and bang he is in green tights ready to go. The first level is basically Pan proving he is the Pan to the lostboys by kicking there ass and from there on in he is kicking the arse of anything he can reach while making tricky jumps and avoiding enemies through level after level.



The game is basically your standard 2D platform game but it’s a good one not one of those hastily thrown together cash in’s which is surprising really with it being a movie tie in. The levels are challenging and well designed. The graphics although not stunning suit the game and are filled with nice little touches Peters hair and clothes blowing in the wind being one example, the character of Pan kind of does look like a cartoon  Robin Williams even though they apparently didn’t have the rights to peoples likenesses everyone kind of looks like a simple anime inspired version of their real life counterpart.



The film had a John Williams' orchestral soundtrack and most of this seems to have been converted into digitized 16bit versions which really adds to the feeling that this is a quality production. I won’t say that Hook is perfect though, it has its issue there are some isues with its difficulty balance. As a game that was intended for kids it is just to hard, I remember never seeing very much of this game as a child, as an adult though this is no real problem I have given this game about 2 hours today and I am just a little bit away from the end, really it is a short game which is hiding the issue of its length behind a difficulty wall which would obscure this from its original customer base. I wonder how many kids threw there pads in anger and declared that this game sucked just because it was a touch to difficult, still there parents would have been annoyed if there kids had managed to finish it in 2 hours.

I guess I would give it a 7 out of 10 …. I like it a lot but I don’t think its an all time classic.

I brought this game of a market, just the cart itself, I can’t remember the price but I know it was somewhere between 50pence and £3 now days having a quick look the cart seems to be going for anything from £15 to £25…. If your in to chasing retro games I would say its worth £15 but I personally wouldn’t go spending £25 on it unless it was boxed and in good condition.

aka 150 tl;dr posts in 150 days 

Have you got a copy of Super Metroid? I loved that game.

Yes I have Super Metroid, just the Cart though... I also downloaded it on Wii U when it was on offer for 30pence as I did not have the snes set up... I spent a few days on it and finished it again, brilliant game.

I loved the Hook movie when it came out. It hasn't held up as I've gotten older though. Still, those pictures of the computer game look awful.

I like the idea of this project though, and good luck if you can keep it up.

Great idea, great idea! Looking forward to seeing what games you end up playing.

The game was originally called Bombuzal  and was made by a company called Image Works It was originally released for the Amiga, Atari ST and Commodore 64 but then in 1990 they brought out the Super NES version. For some reason unknown to me the American version which is the one I own was retitled Ka-Blooey.

The whole idea of Kablooey is to try to set off every bomb on a level without killing yourself. At first this seems a little bit easy, you step up to a bomb you hold a button a countdown starts and then you move out of the way just before detonation.  More or less every level either something new is thrown in to the mix or a new problem is made for you to try and overcome which consists of using your grey matter to formulate a plan using everything you have learned up to this point.

There are 130 levels and they get more and more challenging as you go. The graphics at the time were trying to be all 3D and cool, your sprite is large and has quite a bit of characterization but in this regard the game hasn’t aged well. The water for example is just made up of blue rectangles, sure everything is functional and easy to see so you can never blame the graphics for failure so at least it has that going for it. The music can best be described as what elevator music must sound like to a man on acid.



If I am to be totally honest I rate the game smack down the middle 5 out of 5. If you want to buy retro games there are a lot better games out there to spend your money on. It’s a functional puzzle game which frustrates and rewards in equal measure, at the end of the day though it is deeply forgettable

As far as I can tell this game never got a pal release, so if you want to play it then you’re going to have to buy an American Kablooey cart or a Japanese Bombuzal, there is no real need to read anything for this game so either would probably be fine as long as you have either an import machine, a modified machine or a convertor. The price for this game cart only seems to be around £7  to £10, I got mine years ago when I was in Canada in what can best be described as a giant charity store for about $3 Canadian dollars after tax was added (they add tax after the price of goods not included in it).

Do you use an old CRT TV?

Are all these 150 games your own cartridges, or are you playing them on a PC emulator?

Nope I use a 22Inch Plasma I have the Snes running through a scart cable.. and at the moment I own 130 SNES carts and I am playing them all on one of two Super Nintendos.. I have a super Nintendo which I made alterations on myself so that it runs at 60hz and takes almost all games ...towards the end of the Super Nintendo's run they made some games that dislike modified hardware so I have a normal snes just for those. (also british super fx games can go a little bit crazy when pushed to 60hz)

I am about 20 carts short but I will get my hands on what I can ... the good or bad side of my collection is I own some of the standard Nintendo popular stuff but I also have some weird stuff.

Day 3



Combatribes started off as an arcade game which came out in 1990 it was a beat 'em Up of the walk along variety released by Technos Japan Corp. Now a lot of you might not have heard of Combatribes but most of you are far more likely to have heard of Renegade and Double Dragon. Technos made a game called  Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-kun which Taito converted into the game we know as renegade (basically by removing the Japanese related stuff and changing the theme of the game to one they thought would do better over here) Technos also made double dragon but again Taito distributed it over here.

Combatribes has a lot in common with these games, but you get the feeling that Technos had looked at some of its competitors and picked up a trick or two from them. When I first came across the arcade machine in a local Pizza Parlor I had no idea that it was in any way connected to the above games, what struck me was that it was in a nice big cab and it had 3 joysticks each one was for a different character. This is where it started to remind me of the likes of Final Fight a little bit.

You had the blue player Berserker, a blond-haired man in a blue outfit, he is very much your Mr Average, he has an even split between a speed and strength, so in final fight terms I guess he is the Cody of the piece. Then there was Bullova, a black man in a yellow outfit who is all about strength but is also very slow. The third and final member of the team is Blitz a long-haired man in a red outfit, he is weak but very fast, he is one of those characters who you’re supposed to get the first hit with and just keep peppering away at your enemy so quickly they don’t have the time to strike back.


So I suppose this leaves me with two questions to address one being now I have given you a little history how does the snes game compare to the arcade machine, and the other being which is better Final Fight or Combatribes.

The Super NES version of The Combatribes made a few changes to the game.  Some of them can be seen as attempts to add to the game, some can be seen as ways of getting around some of the machines limitations and then there are the usual Nintendo reasons.

The Snes version features story sequences before and after boss battles, as well as an opening intro explaining the plot; it also has a different ending.  I think all of this is just basically an added layer of polish its nice but its not the important bit.



The gameplay itself remains more or less the same, In the arcade version the characters health was represented by a bunch of numbers here it is represented by the standard life bar method. In the SNES version, the stages are also simpler, there are also missing enemies and the end boss is different.  None of this is really going to matter though unless you’re a big fan of the arcade machine and played it enough to know every little piece of it.

A one-on-one versus mode has been added to the game in it you can perform standard one on one beat em up moves (aka Street Fighter II type stuff fireballs and and the like with some characters.) The game's enemies and bosses can also be used in this mode; you gain passwords by playing the regular mode which you input here to unlock them. It’s no street fighter, the moves are a lot clunkier, and on its own I wouldn’t really rate it, but as a bonus mode a bit of knock around fun you’d have to be a bit of a scrooge to complain about it.

The game was ‘’cleaned up’’ in lots of ways from its arcade counterpart blood splattering effects were removed, blood was removed from cut screens and both characters and gangs were renamed to less violent names… I am also sure one of the bosses in the arcade had some sort of racist or taboo name but what it was exactly escapes my mind.

As for comparisons to Final fight well the graphics are very different, the characters in Combatribes are a lot smaller, the backgrounds are colourful and there’s a lot going on, the buildings look tiny but then you get to see a lot of them and a lot of neat flashing signs. The first thing people will pick up on is that Combatribes can be played by two players, it also has all 3 of its arcade characters in its Snes port unlike final fight which only managed two of them. Both games have their selling points and I won’t take it further than that or I will give away so much of my opinion on Final Fight that my future review of that will be pointless.



If you like Combatribes or not will all depends on what kind of games you like. If you don’t like walk along beat em ups, well combatribes is not going to change your mind, if you love them then you will most likely eat this up. If you can forgive a game a few flaws and want to smash heads with a buddy then this game gets a hearty recommendation. I would score it 6 out of 10. If my memory is correct reviewers back in the day were a lot harsher some scored it as low as 30%, I think the highest I remember seeing it get was 65%

From a little bit of research it looks like you would be lucky to get a cart of it for about £15, it never came out in Europe to my knowledge so youd have to either get an American or Japanese copy, again meaning that you would need an import or modified machine or to have an import convertor.

Day 4

Ok new day new game, figured I would do something I haven’t done so far; I would do a driving game. I picked the game via a simple method; it was the first driving game I pulled out of my box of SNES carts.



The Duel: Test Drive II is a racing game that was developed by a company called Distinctive Software and published by Accolade a name I am sure most of you have heard of. It came out between 1989 and 1992 on the Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Apple IIGS, Apple Macintosh, Atari ST, Commodore 64, MS-DOS, MSX, SNES, Sega Mega Drive, ZX Spectrum so just about everything you can think of at the time but I will be focusing on my experiences of the SNES version (Which came out in 1992).

The presentation on the game strikes me as a little bare bones, there is very little to choose from and very little you can alter it gives you the impression that this is very shallow for a game people were paying £40 for back in the day. You start the game and you are given a choice of 3 cars, they are basically extremely popular sports cars from back in the day a Lamborghini, a Porsche and a Ferrari (I can’t remember the exact models). Your c choice of difficulty determines whether the car will use an automatic or manual transmission. You get to choose one of 4 courses to race on each being labelled with an indicator of its level of challenge. You then either pick one of the games 3 cars to race against or you pick a stopwatch to merely treat it like a time trial.



You control the car from an internal view, so you can see all of the dashboard and it is different dependant on the car that you pick. Once you start the game you race along a highway stopping for petrol when a big stop indicator tells you to. If you don’t stop for petrol you will run out of gas and lose a life, if you hit another car you will lose a life. Each level also has one or more police cars along the course who I assume also will try to either crash in to you or arrest you causing you to loose life, but I am not sure because in all honesty I was never caught by them (you don’t even seem to see them, if you’re going above the speed limit at a set point you hear a siren noise, but I just kept my finger on the gas until the noise disappeared).

I am going to cut straight to the chase with this game If I had been reviewing it back in 1992 then it might have scored better but as it stands I think I need to give the game a 3 out of 10. Some people hold the SNES as a golden era when everything was great and in some genre’s this might be the case but I don’t think semi realistic racing simulations was one of them. Don’t get me wrong it is not awful to play, it’s just boring. There is no music, the graphics are functional and the choices of cars and tracks are just too limited for me to recommend it.

Ok as for the price you might pay for this now, well copies seem to be quiet thin on the ground, there is currently a boxed UK copy on amazon for £15, and I can’t see any others elsewhere to compare it. I can’t remember what I paid for mine, it’s an NTSC copy cartridge only and I have had it since my childhood. I can’t really recommend anyone spend more than £5 on this game I am afraid. There are a lot better games out there both retro and modern especially in the racing category.

Super Bowling



Super bowling was made by a developer called Kid and was published in Japan by Athena and in America by Technos. Sometimes it is unofficially called Super Turkey Bowling as the game and its cover is full of cartoon humanized turkeys.

Ok so far so weird.. There are 3 play modes, the first is called Turkey bowl, this is basically the main game and its straight forward bowling. Then there is golf mode which gives you a set situation with certain pins to knock down in a set number of throws(Par) its actually a neat little attempt at something different. The last mode is practice mode which basically allows you to set up whichever pins you would like so you can try and train yourself for the best way to knock down the pins if certain situations arise.

The bad part is that there is no story mode or league mode or AI only characters to play against to give this any real longevity as a single player game, all you can really do is play rounds of bowling again and again to try and get better at it and to try to manage to get a higher score. Where the game shines is in its funny cartoon presentation and in the fun you can have with it as a party game. Get 4 of you around this game laughing and competing and it can become just as good a stable of a multi-player snes party as Bomberman or NBA Jam or street fighter 2.



The game plays not unlike a pad controlled version of Wii sports bowling. You pick your bowler, which hand they will use what weight of ball and then when it comes time to throw you get to control where abouts you throw it from,the power you put in to it and if you want to try to put any kind of spin on it. When you score spares or strikes there are little cartoon animations of little dragons flying over your head or angels shooting devils with a bow and arrow and it really adds to the cartoonish glee of the game

To cut to the chase what would I score this game?  Well I would give it a respectable 7 out of 10... it would score higher if they had added more to the one player game but as it stands its a great piece to play with friends but maybe not that necisery now that Wii sports and Wii sports U are out and so easy to get hold of.

When I did a quick bit of research on Super bowling it seems like you can grab the American version for about £10 if you look around hard enough and I even saw boxed copies for £15.(my version is Japanese cart only and was a gift)... If you want to look for this game make sure you have the friends to play it with.

I was inspired to give Hook a go because of this and quite liking the film when I was younger. I only did a pc emulation of it. It was very tough! I didn't even complete a level before I gave up. I thought for an older film licensed game, though, it wasn't too bad. But I played enough of it as I wanted too really - 5 minutes.

Yeah when you add in the fact it was supposed to be a kids game they really really pumped the difficulty up to hard...   One of the reasons I am so proud to have finished it. The truth is though the game is short and if they had either made it kiddy friendly or added in a save function everyone would have finished it in 2 days max and then obviously parents would have complained etc.

The fact you tried it on emulator is a good point ... People ask me if I am anti emulation owning so many carts.. the simple answer is No... I love emulation it allows people to try things without sinking major money in chasing expensive retro stuff they might not like  ....plus there is stuff that is idiotically out of any reasonable persons price range

I really need to catch up on reading these posts!

Have you thought about compiling them into an ebook once its all said and done?

Strangely I hadn't lol ..... I write a fair few ebooks, but todays a bad day ...I played Super bowling late last night and then wrote the review and then my laptops hard drive died.... I have lost 2 10'000 word books I was working on because I forgot to back them up... The drives dead dead tried it in other machines and it just makes a horrid noise ...so I came on my desktop and redid the review the best I could manage and now Im digging around all my crap for a drive to use to repair my laptop   lol

It could be a very interesting book actually. If you wanted you could write about collecting your 150 carts and stories behind the games alongside your reviews. I think your reviews would need to be padded up a bit though.

Yeah I agree that it would need a lot of padding.

kerr9000 wrote:Strangely I hadn't lol ..... I write a fair few ebooks, but todays a bad day ...I played Super bowling late last night and then wrote the review and then my laptops hard drive died.... I have lost 2 10'000 word books I was working on because I forgot to back them up... The drives dead dead tried it in other machines and it just makes a horrid noise ...so I came on my desktop and redid the review the best I could manage and now Im digging around all my crap for a drive to use to repair my laptop   lol

Always have a backup! 

I had a computer die a few years ago and I lost everything. Loads of game design stuff, writing, early drafts and plans for a book. Gone in an instant. So nowadays I have a standard backup via my Apple Time Capsule (Does everything automatically, every hour, then every day, then every month). A backup of that (every 2-3 months) and a separate direct copy of my various computers' HDDs (2 times a year) as a secondary backup. I also sync key documents through iCloud and Google Drive. I'm also planning on instigating a third backup once a year into my plans that I will give to the in-laws just in case the worst happens and my place burns to the ground.

Wolvieware wrote:It could be a very interesting book actually. If you wanted you could write about collecting your 150 carts and stories behind the games alongside your reviews. I think your reviews would need to be padded up a bit though.

Including how you acquire the games would be a good addition.

I backed up some stuff, but I need to backup more    ...hope we dont see if I learn my lesson any time soon  lol

Day 6



The Rocketeer . So I tried to play the rocketeer and prior to the game starting there were a few screens with drawings and words but with my copy being Japanese they were of very little help... So the game starts and what I am met with is nothing like what I imagined. In my head this game was a 2d rtype style shooting game were I flew from left to right as the rocketer saving the day and instead here I am flying a yellow what looks like a crop dusting plane against a red and a blue plane round and round these pillars in a race.

The controls are clunky at best and things seem to favour the AI controlled planes if I hit them it send me towards the ground if they hit me the same thing happens I head towards the ground. I fail to finish the race time and time again I just can't seem to manage the 10laps but I push myself on with the hope that this is just the start and if I can somehow get through this there will be the glorious treat of seeing my character strap on the rocketeer's rocket pack and I will be flying shooting and doing something much better... Eventually I finish the race but I finish in second, I am shown the same failure screen I have been met with so many times before but I try again and again spurred on by the hope of something better...eventually I finish first I scream to the heavens in triumph rocket pack here I come ....but no I am robbed I am back in the plane racing again but this time I need to complete 15 laps not 10 . An hour passes I get better at managing 10 laps but I can't manage 15 so I am stuck... I press reset and leave the machine in the hope it will play a gameplay demo which will at least show me some future stages, I need to see something worth playing to renew my hope.



So I watch with baited breath the first thing it shows me is what I have just been doing I wait a little longer and there he is the rocketeer.... And he is flying around and around racing with the same bloody planes on the same course.. This is when I simply give in, I decide that the game might change you might finish one more race and get the rocket pack and then one more and fight crime but it doesn't matter because I will never bloody see it.... I got this game in a lot of 4 Japanese
Games for 10 and that kinda seems to expensive.. I won't claim I am the first person to say this that honour goes to  Dara Ó Briain  of mock the week fame but video games are the only form of media which withholds content from its users unless they are good enough at it a book or film has never quizzed anyone or made them pass a test to be allowed to continue reading or watching.. When I first heard him say this it didn't quiet make sense after all its the challenge that makes video games what they are is it not? Now that I have flown around this course 300 times it makes a little more sense... When I talked about hook a fellow movie license I said how good it was that tinkerbell just flew in sprinkled you with fairy dust and got rid of the need for levels which would have featured a boring powerless pan and that by playing fast and loose like that with the source material had led to a better game well this kind of treatment would have been very welcome with the rocketeer just skip the dull plane flying and races and slap him in the suit from stage 1.


The graphics are about as basic as you can get on the SNES and I can say pretty much the same about the sound.. I haven't mentioned them until now as even if this was the best 16 bit game I had ever seen or heard it would not make up for the awful gameplay. Another thing that annoyed me is the two player mode, I foolishly thought that maybe you'd race against each other but no its one of those you watch me play a life then I will watch you. A further annoyance is that despite the two player being of a take turns variety it still expects you to have two joy-pads, if its only one at a time then a pass the pad system would have been a nice little choice. Overall I feel I have to give the game a 2 out of 10 its that blah..

I already mentioned what I paid so now on to how much you would have to pay if you fancy being a video game sadomasochist. Once again there does not appear to be a Pal version as far as I can tell but if you hit ebay you can get a Japanese cart for £5 but again you will need a foreign console, or modified machine or converter and a lack of self preservation.

 I recommend you don't bother in fact I am going to go so far as to recommend a modern game which you can get much cheaper, a game which I think represents the idea of being a rocketeer much better than this piece of excrement despite being its own IP The game I recommend is Dark void sure it didn't get brilliant reviews itself but I really enjoyed it and its now super cheap I saw it in game the other day for £2 and although its never going to be considered a classic I consider it something of a flawed gem of a game


(A friend has messaged me a stage select code so I might have a look at latter parts of the game and comment in a bit)

Ahhh a stage select code! These days that would be a microtransactions .

I found this post on a bad game more interesting than some of the other games you actually liked. Just goes to show there is value in the bad as well as the great.

Day 7



Now no TV series is going to make it past 20 series without someone realizing that if the show sells it has the potential to sell a lot of other stuff by association. The Simpsons was a largely adult humored comedy which children seemed to become obsessed with so it was no surprise when the Bart Versus this and that games started to pour on to the NES, it didnt even take the program being around long for it to begin to happen. Bart was the main Simpson character who was focused on when it came to games so when a Krusty the clown game was announced it almost took me by surprise. I cant remember who had it first but it seemed to be one of those games that almost all of the Super Nintendo owning guys at school got a hold of.

What neither I nor the rest of the guys knew back then was that Krusty's Super Fun House originally was not a Simpson's title at all, it was a game called Rat Trap. So whatever you think of the game you cant really call it a rushed cash in on the Simpsons name, as the game was completed in its original form long before the Simpsons were attached to it. Acclaim, brought the finished game and decided that in order to make a large return on it they would make alterations and turn it into a Simpsons vehicle. This made it the first Simpsons game not to feature Bart as the central character (although he does appear in it).



Rat Trap was being made as an Amiga game , and none Simpsons versions of the Rom/disk image can be found for those who are interested in that kind of thing. Whether the game ever saw any kind of limited release in its original Rat Trap form, I have no idea, maybe it was and that's how its Rom's ended up online or maybe it was leaked by someone close to it. What was originally intended to be an Amiga game ended up having the Simpson's license added and then ended up being released for the Amiga, DOS, Game Boy, Game Gear, Master System. Super Nintendo and Sega Mega Drive. From a business stand point I cant say I blame them, the more machines it is on the higher sales potential it has which is something a lot of companies seem to have forgotten nowadays while they try to court exclusivity deals and pay checks from various system owners.

The main goal of the game is to slaughter the rats by leading them to what I can best describe as semi automated killing machines, back then no one saw any wrong in the murder of cartoon rats, I can only imagine what would be said if something like this came out now PETA would have a field day. After all they already think that in order to become raccoon Mario, Mario takes his super knife and slices his way into a live racoon pulling its guts out with his teeth when until they put the idea in to my head I merely thought it was magic, or that he slipped on a raccoon onesie and gained new powers due to mental illness (hey wouldn't you be ill if you saw bullets with talking faces and dinosaurs who could eat things twice there size?)



In order to get the rats to the killing machine Krusty needs to do a bit of puzzling, lifting up block and putting them in the right place for example, the graphics and the way this works has a bit of a lemmings feel to it, which is no bad thing in my opinion.( I just wish it was a little more like lemmings).

Krusty is also armed with a small supply of weapons in the form of custard pies or balls. These have no real use when it comes to the rats but there are other characters around such as snakes which will attack Kruty and he can use these to defeat them. Strangely there are massive pieces of levels that the rats never even go near, that they in fact couldn't even reach if you messed up but you can explore these areas and kill the enemies there for points I guess. To finish a level you need to get all of the rats killed and then return to the starting door to hear a little jingle and then move on to the next one, sometimes the level will be made so you cant just go back you need to go forward and then around in order to get back, beating the enemies in your way to get there.

The Graphics are bright and functional if not amazing, the Krusty sprite looks good but the fact he is constantly smiling seems a little strange given the Krusty we now know and love. I guess this game came out quiet early in the Simpsons run so Krusty was a little more child friendly back then he hadn't been fully characterized as the alcoholic, only in it for the money scum bag we all know and love.

The game is functional and at times fun, but I really believe no one would even bother to play it or look for it now if it was not for the attached Simpons license. I score this game a 5 out of 10. It is just plain average so average that at times it hurts. I am sure I enjoyed this more when I was younger. I rate this game much higher as an example of good business decisions than as a game.

I paid £3 for my NTSC cart of this game not long ago but looking online £8 seems to be about the going rate for it in either Pal or NTSC so for once I am actually showing you a game you can get without needing either a import machine or a wad of cash.


PS.... The rocketeer stage select code wouldn't work for me, so the latter levels might be fucking gold dust and as I will most likely never play any more of that plane flying around in a circle guff I will never ever know...I did hit a few you tube vids up for a look and I will admit on the one hand latter levels look better, they still look like a bunch of rubbish.

Day 8




Rule number one if you are going to try to make money by copying another game then make sure you get a copy of the game your trying to copy and play the living daylights out of it. Sit and analyze it, try to see why it is so popular, what your game needs to contain in order to attract the same amount of fans.

Why am I talking about this? Well basically because the game I have been playing is Power Athlete one of many of the games which game in the wave of Street Fighter 2. When playing this game though I am reminded far more of the original less famous Street Fighter..

Power Athlete is known outside of Japan as Power Moves (at least on the SNES, the megadrive version was called Deadly Moves) It came out in 1992  and was developed by System Vision and published by Kaneko. It came out towards the end of 1992 many months after Street Fighter 2, which I add because I want everyone to know this key fact.

The one player mode on this game is basically the same as Street Fighter 1, you get no choice of character you are simple made to play as one guy, in this case an almost Americanised looking Ryu clone with the name Joe... Truly no mightier Martial arts name can  there be other than Joe, maybe his last name is blogs, still I digress. You are Joe, you do a move making energy move from your hands out in a straight line we all know it as a fire ball, just like the original Street fighter though the motion to do this is over complex and therefore a pain. There are only 3 buttons one punch one kick and one jump, if you are very close then the kick button also doubles as a throw. I did somehow manage to get Joe to do another move it was sort of a two handed dragon punch which went much more diagonal than the ones we are used to. Even on the middle difficulty the game comes across as being hard and this is where the game has a little flair of originality you don't start with a full life bar you start with a bit and by beating opponents this bar grows in size as do other bars you see which represent your strength, speed and defense. You can choose who you want to fight next out of all of the enemy characters but some over class you by having much longer bars. If you wanted to you could fight and beat an opponent multiple times in order to fill your bars and make your future fights against other enemies. You have a set amount of continues, which I think increase as you win fights or at least it seemed that way to me.



At first I found the game so hard that I was almost going to give in but then it just seemed to click, I got into the rhythm of the game and managed to beat opponent after opponent with very little trouble and this was without repeating fights in order to level up my bars, I only repeated one fight and that was just to see if it would let me. It only took me about 20 minutes though and once you've finished the game nothing changes you can still only be Joe in 1 player and apart from going in to the options and upping the difficulty there is no reason to ever play the one player mode ever again, which is a big disadvantage when you compare this game to other games from this period in time.

In the 2 player mode you can be Joe and any of enemies except for the final boss, which is a bit of a shame as Megadrive owners got the chance to play as him in there version of the game.



The characters in this game are (I haven't listed Joe as I have already talked about him).

Warren - A  wrestler from Hawia who looks just a touch like a grey haired hulk hogan wannabe .

Reayon - The token female, clearly she is ''inspired'' by Chun-Li.

Vagnad - A huge wrestler with an odd color of skin, he looks like he should be the boss of the game to me, he reminds me of a less weird version of the boss from street fighter 4 (Apparently in some of the manuals and information released on the game he was described as a survivor of The Holocaust.)

Buoh - A kabuki-style fighter. He teleports all over the screen and attacks with his hair, earns bonus points in my book for not seeming like a complete street fighter rip off

Gaoluon - An acrobatic Chinese martial artist, who uses a pair of curved blades both to slash you and to throw at you.

Baraki - A tribal warrior who shoots flames like Dahlsim while making noises and spinning across the screen Blanka style.

Nick – A street dancing matador. His fighting style uses a combination of break dancing alongside quick slashes with a knife, clearly he is meant to represent this games Vega

Ranker – is the non-playable final boss character (In the snes version at least) he comes across as being a big army style guy.. imagine a Arnold Schwarzenegger character who can throw energy across the floor and do a punch equivalent of Chun-li's rapid kick move.

To be honest I cant see anyone bothering much with the two player on this not when you could play all manner of other fighting games, its not like we were lacking them back in the day, nor are we now really. I would give this game 4 out of 10, its not an awful game but there are so many other better beat em ups out there..

If you want to try this game I think you will need to import it, I haven't seen an English copy but I am sure the megadrive one came out over here..I have seen lots of American imports for about £10 for the cart, and a few Japanese ones for £5. I was lucky and got my copy recent for £3.50 with free postage. Personally I would invest you money elsewhere.