CheetahMen II

The Good
At least it was impossible to find.

The Bad
Remember what I said about Action 52? Take that and expand upon it million-fold.

Our favorite basement dweller from Florida, Active Enterprises, thinks that the world needs even MORE crap to choke their NES systems with, thus Cheetahmen II, the AHEM "sequel" (more like 10 more minutes of another kindergarten kid coding while on a massive Kool Aid/Oreo rush) was thrown in our faces.

The game begins with a little storyline involving some evil guy named Dr. Morbis creating an Ape Man, one of many in his line of Sub-Humans, to beat the Cheetahmen once and for all. That's what the game says, anyway. To me, it looks like some reject performance artist with a goofy mustache and the worst fashion sense ever (just HOW hard did he try ripping off the costumes of both Electro from Spider-Man AND Kid Flash from the old Superfriends show??) teams up with some other guy with a nose large enough to feed a third world country and sends a Bigfoot he caught in his backyard out to beat up on bipedal cheetah guys who always used to steal his lunch money when he went to Evil Scientist Schools for the Special Children. And so, like the first Cheetahmen, you have six stages, and switch between the CM after two stages.

And like the first game (as well as all the other 51 games on Action 52), you get some of the WORST graphics on the NES (hell, now he's making the old Atari 2600 look pretty damn close to NES levels!!), horrible music, sounds that'll make you think your NES is about to explode from the sheer torture of having the cart shoved into its precious innards, and control and gameplay so asinine that even the kindergarten kid (see above), wouldn't program on his own accord! And of course, don't expect to get very far in the game, because you'll lose all your lives within the first five minutes due to the controls, and at that point the cartridge will too when you rip it from the NES and throw it into the trash compactor.

The Bottom Line
Just be lucky this game wasn't available in stores. If it were, this guy would've been found and executed YEARS ago.

And we never found out what became of our pal, the Ape Man. Legend has it that he decided to gain a lot of weight, dye his fur white, and joined the cast of DarkStalkers...oh wait...wrong guy.

Actually, I last saw the Ape Man living in a cardboard box in an alley in New York...no one wants him for any more video game work...poor Ape Man.

The Good

The Bad

The Bottom Line
The biggest piece of crap I've unfortunately played. It's so hard to even describe just how bad this is...

You can die because you jump off of a platform. Enemies can go through the ground and hit you. Movement is choppy, precision jumps impossible. You have a weapon, but you can't even shoot most enemies using it, and there's no other way that I know of to kill them. The music sucks. The graphics suck and often bugs out. Bah. I'm almost at loss of words here. I just can't describe how awful this is. It needs to be experienced.

That said, by all means, try it out if you have the chance! If nothing else, just so you'll be able to mention this when people think they know what the worst game is (when they mention games like Action 52, E.T., Dr. Jekyll & Mr Hyde, Back to the Future, Nightmare on Elm Street, Superman 64, etc. -- all which have a certain fun factor to them, and some which have decent coding, contrary to this piece of crap). I know this doesn't mean much given the subjectiveness of it, but I've played probably around a thousand games, and most of those have entertained me on some level. This game has not, not ever. I did not enjoy one second of it. It's the only game I've played that's frustrating to just play. Not because of difficulty, it just is. It's so terribly coded that I hate whoever programmed it.

I hate this game. But I love to hate it. And that's the only thing about it I really appreciate.