I tried it. While I love how ridiculously 90s looks and feels by the plot and characters, it doesn't hold up well with the controls and how monotonous it gets to defeat the same enemies. I had more fun with other SNES beat'em ups than this...and I really tried to convince me this was better. But no: it's stupidly punishing and also not reliable on the corners, especially when platforms just fall down.

...but other levels (like the second one full of spikes) actually works pretty decently. It's really a mixed bag.

Ok, first of all, it's hard not to respect the sheer amount of gameplay variability / modes Rare managed to pack in to this game. ~ EDIT ~ After letting the almost-playthrough sink in a day and watch the second (optional) bonus stage, and the final towerlevel on YT, it really isn't THAT much of different gameplays. Basically it's much more of a rythm game in many instances. Still though - Rare managed to subvert expectations by shifting between the different playstyles enough ~ EDIT ~. Thought it's short - but hey, which actioner at that time wasn't? - almost every level hits you with new challenges gameplay-wise. In the end it's a mix of brawling, jump'n'agility and racing-kind games. To be fair - each gameplay-bit taken by itself doesn't over much more than navigating and using one (jump) or two (jump and attack) actions. Anyways, all is wrapped in gorgeous graphics, funny and crazy artdesign, beautiful animations and a good feeling to the controls and movements. And almost "forgot" - what krackin', bustlin' rock'n'roll-soundtrack!! BUT - there's this brutal difficulty level which is more than once just trial and error. You have to learn the levels by heart, sometimes splitseconds decide wether you progress or loose a life and go back to the start. Nonetheless - one infamous pearl of a game. Highlight for me, especially graphics-wise: the first bonus level with the pins to collect and mirror-ground you're gliding on, just shiny! But too much for my nerves, so - not going to learn it by heart in order to finish it.

During my super early years of gaming in that fun little in-between period of the 16-bit generation and the oncoming new age of low poly goodness, I managed to be graced by two Battletoads games growing up. One was the crossover game with Double Dragon that I managed to accidentally "borrow" forever from a friend that I enjoyed quite a bit, and the other was Battlemaniacs which I recall renting a few times from my local game place that wasn't either Blockbuster or Hollywood Video.

Battletoads and Double Dragon was a game I had played probably thousands of times just for the music, and to this day I could probably 1-life it with a bit of elbow grease assuming the flying saucers played nice in the fourth stage. Battlemaniacs however, I couldn't tell you what was beyond the first stage, because little me had never beaten it. My lingering memory forever was that this opening stage was longer than longcat and was more impossible than many stages that I later played emulating the NES original. These memories all flooded back like a tsunami of dread after seeing my friend MagneticBurn log this game, and I decided to become the lemming that I am once again, here to throw myself off a cliff and into the jagged rocks below because that's where they went too.

Needless to say, I understand now. I was weak, I was stupid, and didn't know how to analyze when a game was "good" or "bad" and adapt to the so-called "crap factor". This first stage was full of sudden pitfalls, assholes camping the ends of bridges to sucker punch you into the pit, and fireballs raining from the sky in a steady rhythm that I probably stank at dodging. The end of this stage? A giant boss whose hitboxes are mysterious, and is best left to cheesing by knocking him as far away as possible so that he always attempts to squash you with his ohko attack, but be juuuuuust outside of reach so you can repeat this. It was done, the first stage of terror is over. Now to the rest of the game. I can at least rest easy on that front.

Second stage was only mildly hard, and then the third stage was just the Turbo Tunnel again. Huh, wow fellas we sure got some new ideas here. Is this a remake of the first game, or are y'all just trying to pull my leg here? Are the Toads in a neverending flux as to constantly be repeating the same adventure? By George we just can't get enough of doing fuckin' Rat Race and Clinger Winger! Apparently the transition to 16-bit also mandated annihilating the stage count as well? How can the Super Nintendo recover from such a travesty?! It just got broken in half by it's 8-bit ancestor. We sure do have giant sprites though! They look like crusty rat shit, but they sure are big. I bet Sword of Sodan and China Warrior are shaking in their boots knowing that Battlemaniacs is over here nipping at their extraordinarily high quality heels.

Anyways, I'm once again skimming over a massive elephant in the room that legitimately made me angry with it's terrible whistling. Something that annoyed me to the point that I almost wanted to raise the volume of my voice a teensie bit.

Let's talk about the Turbo Tunnel, yes it's pretty hard. We know that, however there is a point in this particular version of it where you must, and I repeat MUST jump and drive INTO the ball-infested pit of the stage to hit a ramp and get back onto the road. I can overcome challenge easily, but this is just absolute trollish dickishness that defies all logic and sensibility. I could've played the game for hours constantly getting game over'd at this point, and not know what the hell the game is asking me to do at this particular moment as I watch Pimple fall into Krusty's crust-ladened turbo funtime ball pit for the thousandth time. No, I had to literally watch a longplay on youtube to see if the game was either pulling a fast one or if that was the ending of the game, because Rare legitimately is a stupid enough company to make an unwinnable game. It's happened before. (2P glitch on NES Clinger Winger if you don't know)

I seriously can't get over how amphibian-brained this is. I am skilled, there is no issue here on my end. The issue here is that pre-DKC Rare wouldn't know proper game design even if someone bounced a football off their groin with "proper game design" drawn on it with crayon. Battlemaniacs is constantly changing the rules and is constantly trying to fake you out so it can somehow feel "intelligent" and that you're not good enough to have the patience to smash your skull through it's idiotic pining for attention. "Look at how unbeatable I am! WAAAAH! WAAAH! YOU CAN'T BEAT ME! WAAAH!" A most unpleasant spoiled rotten child of a game that needs it's game designer toys taken away from it. I'm not gonna pretend that NES Battletoads is some kind of beacon of all-timer quality, but at least that game has good breaks in the nonsense where some genuine decency shines through, and that one actually looks impressive for it's system. Battlemaniacs has half the content, and because of that it immediately begins with endless sucker punches and badly plays it's greatest shits album of dumbass trial-and-error gimmicks from the original game.

A game can be a fun challenge, you can make a hard game that is theoretically possible to beat in one go if your timing is impeccable and your reflexes are better than a coked up blue hedgehog. Battlemaniacs is not one of those games, it's a moronic game that comes down to playing a slightly more sadistic version of Simon Says with very little legitimate strategy. You could have the luck of the Irish and the skill of Daigo Umehara, but you'll still find yourself eating shit in Krusty's funtime ball sack pit in the Turbo Tunnel or dying to Karnath's screen crunched lair, because again this isn't a game of skill, it's a game of testing your patience and hoping that your aging memory isn't going out on you, as you attempt to remember where the dive into Krusty's funtime ballsack is about to happen and not faceplant into the side of some Wile E. Coyote-ass slab of bedrock.

It stinks. I don't like it. Before you ask, yes I am playing this on console. I am playing this shit as authentic as New York style pizza cooked by a New York Italian in a New York oven. My console is original, my CRT is a CRT with a coffee stain on it, my composite cables aren't garbage, and I'm using a wired controller. The only way this could be more authentic would be if I got my cousin to come over and scream in my ear for her turn that she doesn't actually want, or to train my dog to come over and nibble on my pad's wire. I ended up finishing this on snes9x, if Mike Matei wants to personally come over to my house and bitch then be my guest, I've got better things to do like drawing dicks in my ipad and assaulting the Byzantines in my RTS games.

The bonus stages suck too, what's the Dark Queen's plan here? To bore me to death before the Turbo Tunnel wipes out the one life I got after an entire medieval dark age of work in a manner of nanoseconds? Absolute nonsense.

Play Battletoads/Double Dragon, you actually fight things in that instead of playing gimmicked up horseshit.