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.

It's just worse Battletoads, and I find that really embarrassing. Only half as many levels with a very poor selection that eliminates the rhythmic pacing of beatemup/platforming/gimmick sections the original game had. And most returning levels are worse and harder than they originally were. This game's equivalent of Clinger Winger is probably the worst level in a videogame I've ever played.

Just bad, totally awful, I know Rare isn't a developer to be trusted, but c'mon, what kind of sequel is this?

Battletoads isn't all that, and this one achieved the feat of being WORSE than its predecessor by having large sprites, which may be ok in the beat em up parts, but in the parts that were already son of a bitch in the original like the snake phase, it's infinitely WORSE in this game because the screen is very small and your character is the size of a refrigerator. I don't recommend it, if you want to play a game from this franchise I only recommend the one with the Double Dragon crossover, the rest you can ignore and incinerate.

the nes game has a lot of things that make it tick. lots of glitches, warps, strategies to make the trip go by a bit funnier, if not easier. this semi-remake has none of that, and half the content. its rendition of ragnarok's canyon and wookie hole and cool and unique. turbo tunnel is turbo tunnel, feeling much stiffer and just as difficult (but i have done it deathless ONCE cuz i am a maniac). then there's the snakes, which suffers hard from screen crunch that the nes game didn't have. the new clinger winger just sucks, you get no feedback from making successful turns and the track is much longer and harder. then there's just "new rat race" and y'know. it's rat race.
it's a very "one way" game. there is ONE WAY to do the levels given to you, with the exception of the first one, and nothing more. still, those first few levels are fun, it has nicely drawn graphics and there's david wise's usual musical legwork. so it's not all for naught.

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.

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.

At this point in 1993, while it was definitely nowhere near the success of other video game franchises, Battletoads was still managing to find its way back into the spotlight on several occasions. Not did were there the original NES and Game Boy games that would introduce plenty to the iconic trio and series (as well as the Tiger Electronic game that we don’t talk about), but they were also given their own pilot for a cartoon series back in late 1992………. which never continued into a full series because it was pretty bad, but hey, at least it was still there. Flash forward to 1993 though, and the Battletoads were going to be coming back with three big game releases, all happening within the same month. The first of these new releases would be with a port of the original Battletoads to the Game Boy known as Battletoads in Ragnarok’s World (even though it should’ve just been called Battletoads, and the original Game Boy Battletoads should’ve been called that, but whatever), but as for the other two games, they would be completely original entries, with the first of them being Battletoads in Battlemaniacs.

Whenever you hear anyone discussing Battletoads online, you will most likely hear people mentioning the original NES game, the arcade game, and the 2020 reboot, with barely any of the other games they have been in being mentioned whatsoever. In terms of this game, this is probably the one that I had heard the least about when going into it, with the exception of the Game Boy title, and I wasn’t quite sure why whenever I was going to play it. I mean, come on, it’s a Battletoads game that was made for the SNES! How can that not be something worth talking about or enjoying? Well, whenever I decided to give the game a shot for myself, I could kinda see why afterwards. While I wouldn’t say the game is that bad, it is pretty lackluster for a Battletoads game, especially one that is being put onto the SNES, and one that does carry a few issues that hold it back from being that good.

The story is pretty much the exact same as the original Battletoads at its core, except this time around, instead of Pimple being the one to get taken by the Dark Queen, it is instead Zitz that is taken!.......... which doesn’t really change that much at all, so not even sure why they needed to change up the toad, the graphics are pretty good, doing a pretty good job of bringing the world of Battletoads into the next generation of consoles, while also still feeling like it is a Battletoads game, the music is good, having that same vibe and feel that you would expect from one of these games, even if there isn’t too much variety throughout the tracks, the control is what you would expect, and it works out well enough for the most part, even though some stages can be pretty finicky, especially the second one, and the gameplay remains true to the original, bringing plenty of variety in what you do in stages, as well as plenty of moments of ball-busting difficulty.

The game is primarily a beat-’em-up, where you take control of either Rash or Pimple, take on a set of six stages where you will be doing various things, such as typical beat-’em-up levels or platforming levels, beat up plenty of big brutes along the way using whatever kind of ridiculous means of attacking that the Battletoads can pull out of their ass along the way, take on several bonus stages to gather more lives that you will DEFINITELY need on your journey, and take on several bosses that will test your skill and might…. or at least, just two of them. As you proceed through the game, you will get plenty of different pieces of gameplay that all harkens back to the original, along with interludes in between each level that are also very similar to the original game, which is all good for the time you have with it, but then you will soon quickly realize something… there isn’t really that much of it here.

That is one of the biggest things holding this game back, at least, in my opinion: the fact that there is barely that much game at all here. Now granted, the game does have six stages, coupled with plenty of bonus stages that you will play in between certain levels, which is a good amount for a game like this, but then you realize that the original game had TWICE that amount of levels to offer the player. This makes the game feel pretty lacking, which is definitely not the type of feeling one should be getting for a new installment of a popular series on a next-gen console. What doesn’t help this at all is that, aside from a few differences here or there, all of the gameplay types here are exactly the same as the ones from the original game, which may not sound like that big of a deal until you realize that the random Game Boy game nobody cared about had new types of gameplay stages there, so why couldn’t this game have anything new?

But hey, that in itself doesn’t really bother me. As long as the game is good, who cares about how long it is or how repeated the content is, right? Well, see, there comes in my next problem with the game, which may sound weird at first, but I hope you get where I am coming from: there is too much variety here. When it came to the original Battletoads, it was well known for having a wide amount of variety with what you would do in the stages, which is something that should be admired, but something else to also consider alongside that is that, while there was usually something new around every corner, there was one central gameplay style that remained consistent throughout the entire game: the beat-’em-up style.

The problem with this game though is that it has no main gameplay style. For each of the stages, you are doing something completely different, with no style of gameplay returning afterwards, with the exception of the beat-’em-up style, which does show up at the end, but only for one last boss fight. Sure, the bonus stages are usually all the same, but they don’t necessarily count, because again, they are bonus stages.Now, of course, I have no problem with variety in a video game, but when you don’t have one central gameplay style holding it all together, then what you end up getting is a jumbled and unfocused mess. That’s not even mentioning the difficulty of the game, which yes, is still very high, to the point where when I reached the fifth stage, which was a repeat of the almost impossible racing stage from the previous game, I just straight up quit, as I had no exploit to get me out of it that time.

Overall, despite the better visuals and while still containing the same spirit of Battletoads, the lack of content when compared to the original game, the lack of focus, and the difficulty that will still make you cry for mercy ultimately make this a pretty weak followup to the original game, one that may give you some fun for a tiny bit, but will end up mainly disappointing by the end of the journey. I don’t recommend it for anyone who is a fan of platformers, or even ones that are known for being extremely difficult, but hey, if you did really enjoy the original Battletoads, you could probably get something out of this game for what little there is. I think it is safe to say that this game isn’t gonna be making me into a Battlemaniac anytime soon………….. hey, look, it was better than most of the other jokes that I have made in the past. Although, now that I think about it, does the hardcore Battletoads fanbase call themselves the Battlemaniacs? I swear, if they actually do…

Game #410