Battletoads in Battlemaniacs

aka: Battlemaniacs
Moby ID: 10128
SNES Specs
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Description official description

The three battletoads Zitz, Rash and Pimple are in Tibet to witness the presentation of the Psicone Gamescape, a virtual reality machine. All of a sudden a monster jumps out of the gameworld, captures both the Psicone CEO's daughter & Zitz and takes them back into the Gamescape. Of course Rash and Pimple will have to enter the Gamescape and rescue them.

Battletoads in Battlemaniacs is another game in the Battletoads series by Rare. Much like its predecessor, it blends fighting game elements (in the style of Double Dragon) with other kinds of gameplay, like racing levels, "snake riding" levels and such. There are some bonus levels between some of the regular ones, where the player can collect extra lives.

Buddies can team up and defeat the opposition together in the two coop-modes available. In mode A, players can hit each other while in mode B, they can't.

Spellings

  • バトルトード イン バトルマニアック - Japanese spelling

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Credits (SNES version)

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Critics

Average score: 66% (based on 15 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.0 out of 5 (based on 28 ratings with 2 reviews)

A masochistic exercise

The Good

  • Music is great
  • Artists did their job well
  • Big, well animated sprites
  • That distinct Battletoads feel


  • The Bad

  • Just reuses themes and level mechanics from the original Battletoads
  • Zoomed-in action, no room for maneuver
  • Game is unfair
  • Too much memorization
  • Very short


  • The Bottom Line
    Being a Battletoads fan (and who isn’t?) I am deeply dissatisfied with this game. There is almost no creativity to the game itself. It only consists of six stages and a bonus stage (reused twice), and from all this content only the bonus stage is original. All other stages reuse themes and gameplay mechanics from the Battletoads game. And it surely is inferior to the original. It is short, it is even more unforgiving, and it is very unfair at certain points. What was the point of this? Why not just make a port of the original game like Rare did for Mega Drive?

    The biggest problem with gameplay is that the action is kind of zoomed in. Huge sprites sure look nice, but you can’t see what’s ahead of you. The whole game, except for the first level, is racing of this or that type (jets, snakes or kamikaze bomber rat), you are required to make hundreds of decisions fast or die. And with sprites so big you just don’t have enough room to react! Your only weapon against this game is memorization. You don’t get many lives and later levels have no checkpoints, so your lives don’t even matter. The best you can do is memorize the whole game, and it is even worse than it was in the original - in that game you could change your tactics here and there...

    And don’t even start on that awful-looking Master System port…(which surprisingly has difficulty settings and overall is easier).

    SNES · by GTramp (81965) · 2013

    The battletoads series goes to the wrong direction

    The Good
    That game has its similarities and its differences from the original Battletoads games. First, the graphics are very different. They are pretty good for a SNES game. All characters were enlarged, they're now a bit too large to my taste, but this isn't a real problem. You can play either Rash (the "cool" toad) or Pimple (the "strong" toad), and both have different sprites and different attacks (they aren't just a palette swap of eachother). The music isn't too bad, while it isn't very good either. I like especially music in level 1, but other levels don't have as good music as found in the original Battletoads game.

    The Bad
    The biggest flaw of the game comes to level design. Level 1 is actually very well designed. But, the programmers seems to grow totally out of imagination once the first level was completed. ALL other levels of the game are just variants of the original game's. There isn't any other beat-em up level after level 1 (final battle aside). You just got clones of various racing or misc levels from the original game. They didn't innovate anything. Additionally, those levels are shorter than the original ones, and there is only six levels instead of twelve, making the game about 4 times shorter than the original one. This is a serious disappoint. While inspiring some levels from the original game isn't a very bad idea (for example the equivalent of the clinger-winger in battlemaniacs is more interesting than the original one), they shouldn't copy all levels. The racing levels from the original Battletoads were cool because they were so unusual and so innovative. But there, you really won't feel the same joy than while discovering the original levels. Also, the lack of beat-em up levels definitely trash the game down. They didn't copy the antarctic caverns, the surf city or whatever. Only racing levels.

    Another bad note is that sound effects are very simplistic and really doesn't sound fair.

    The Bottom Line
    Battletoads in Battlemaniacs is nearly a total failure in the sense of that programmers got out of imagination after the first level. If only the whole game would be like level 1 is, it would be fine. And yeah, the game is by far easier than the original one. It still is hard, but not very impossible like the original was. I think I'd be happy to have more levels with more innovation and the same difficulty.

    SNES · by Bregalad (937) · 2006

    Trivia

    References

    In the ending cutscene, after the player defeats the Dark Queen, she says: "What strength! But don't forget there are many tyrants like me all over the world!", a reference to the message in Capcom's Street Fighter when one defeated opponent says: "What strength! But don't forget that there are many guys like you all over the world!"

    The Master System version of the game was originally going to include 12 levels.

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    Contributors to this Entry

    Game added by Roedie.

    SEGA Master System added by chirinea.

    Additional contributors: chirinea, Lance Boyle, Patrick Bregger, Rik Hideto, Jo ST, Kayburt.

    Game added August 24, 2003. Last modified June 29, 2023.