The one thing I love about this website is how its community spreads word of mouth very niche games I've overlooked that ended up becoming some personal favorites of mine. I discovered The Silver Case trilogy, Moon: Remix RPG Adventure, ZeroRanger, Yume Nikki, God Hand among other games all because people here share their passion for these games. Got a very good track record of games that were indirectly recommended to me, so I decided it'd be fun to hop on a trend going around by making a recommendation list to help get some more ideas. What was one of those games I got? Fuckin' Taz-Mania baby! LET'S FUCKING GOOOOOOooOooOoOoOoOoOoO!!!!!!!
Recommended by user @letshugbro I immediately skimmed through the Backloggd page to see an abundance of negative reviews, but more specifically towards the Sega Game Gear version, I knew I was in for the sewer dive of a lifetime. I couldn't turn this one down. I just had to see why this game specifically is a "meme" and I had to join in. So I downloaded not just the ROM for the Game Gear version, but the ROMs for every other version. So here are my bite-sized reviews for every version of this nightmare shovelware franchise. Thanks @letshugbro and I hope you enjoy, because I sure didn't!
Game Gear: "Holy fuck" was the first sentence I murmured to myself upon booting this version up. I was immediately assaulted by ear-piercing sounds regurgitated by the Texas Instruments SN76489 sound chip packaged in the Game Gear to create this title screen """music""". I'm sure parents upon hearing these screeching sounds coming from their Looney Toon-loving little kid's device was the memo that they got ripped off, but this, unfortunately, is not the exception. You as the Tazmanian Devil will hear a variety of these awful sounds for the whole 15 minute 1CC and the gameplay matches with the pain of your ears. You get thrown in and immediately have to run away from a boulder as you pick up items to keep your stamina up because apparently every time Taz does his little spin tornado maneuver he loses years off his miserable life span. Then after that, you realize you don't even get to move Taz for like half the game. He's always in a minecart, snowboarding without his consent, slipping on ice, attempting to fly, etc. The only thing the player really does in this game is press A to avoid an oncoming obstacle as you watch the game try to process your input in a glorious 10 frames per second because this is the cutting edge hardware of the Game Gear, baby! We need all the processing power we can get for those beautiful 4096 colors! All so we can display Taz's miserable existence for the player to experience! It's absolutely fascinating just how much sheer wrath this software produced in me that I was about to go feral just hearing the high-pitched morse codes of the developers call for help while attempting to slog myself through tar-feeling lag. I think the funniest thing this playthrough produced was discovering that Retroarch's Game Gear emulator on stage 8 crashes attempting to load the thing, and the save-state that I created proved the crash was consistent too. I have a gaming PC I bought like 5 years ago, The Game Gear was such a useless footnote in Sega's long history of useless hardware nobody bothered to optimize a half-decent emulator for it to preserve rancid works like this, but I also took it as a message from God telling me to stop and move on with my life because I was hurting myself. So this was my first (and probably last) Game Gear experience. Great start!
Master System: This was the only version of the game that I actually stomached to finish. Don't get me wrong, it's still a boring Sonic the Hedgehog Master System clone where Taz's acceleration and deceleration is so inconsistent from one leap of faith to the next you're bound to suffer a cheap death or two, but everything else is kinda inoffensive. You barely get scratched by the enemies because of your Taz Spin, so the only trouble you will face are the bombs littered about the place that Taz will eat upon contact like a dog attempting to eat whatever non-edible thing you dropped on the floor mistaking it for food. The secret speedrunning gamer trick here is to Taz Spin from one hill to the next and pray you don't fall off and within 10 minutes you will beat Taz-Mania for the Master System and your Dominos pizza will be delivered at your doorstep. Much like the Game Gear version, this was my first Master System game. A boring platformer made by like 5 people to mimic the success of another game made for more successful hardware but with a fucking one-off Looney Toon character. Cool!
Genesis: Unironically as bad as the Game Gear version. This game has the worst collision detection and camera I've ever played in a 2D platformer. Taz's sprite is a large lad meaning the camera is zoomed up into his ugly mug at all times meaning every jump gives you about 5 pixels to react to whatever is next on the screen, and somehow every platform's hitbox is just off in every way. The only novel thing about this game is hearing the little cartoony sound effects everything makes in this game whenever Taz or an enemy interacts with something, but what starts off as slightly endearing became annoying real fast hearing the game mock you with wiggling tongue sounds and other nonsense as you fail another jump with no fault of your own. I turned this one off real fast. Awesome!
SNES: After three failed attempts at making a half-decent platformer for the Tazmanian Devil, the devs at Sunsoft gave up and decided to make this one OutRun but instead of racing, you as the Tazmanian Devil chase birds on the side of the road while dodging incoming traffic like a deer. Actually attempting to grab birds in a camera perspective made for race cars sounds just as janky as you'd think it is, and it's the only gameplay loop Sunsoft offers here. Just a worthless, ill-considered game probably made out of a mixture of obligation and spite. Fuck yeah!!!
After finishing all of these games in a discord call with my friends I realized something. Despite all of these games having different gameplay styles, level design, and even developers, they all shared one common thing: they brought out some kind of anger, malice, or rage within me. If you know the Tazmanian Devil, he is the embodiment of the chaos that ensues with overwhelming anger, so much so that his very well-being is reduced to being nothing more than a feral creature. Any pain he ensues to himself causes him to create one dusty whirlwind to inflict that same pain to others, not by accident, but out of sheer will from the wrath within him. Playing Taz-Mania was like being caught within Taz's pain, and what was left was 4 ROM files I will never touch again and 2 hours of my life wasted. If that isn't conveying the emotions of a character through game design, I dunno what is! Yeah, that's right, fuck you Drakengard! Taz-Mania was made miserable on purpose years before you, where's its 3-hour analysis videos on YouTube!?
I don't even like Looney Toons all that much lol.
Recommended by user @letshugbro I immediately skimmed through the Backloggd page to see an abundance of negative reviews, but more specifically towards the Sega Game Gear version, I knew I was in for the sewer dive of a lifetime. I couldn't turn this one down. I just had to see why this game specifically is a "meme" and I had to join in. So I downloaded not just the ROM for the Game Gear version, but the ROMs for every other version. So here are my bite-sized reviews for every version of this nightmare shovelware franchise. Thanks @letshugbro and I hope you enjoy, because I sure didn't!
Game Gear: "Holy fuck" was the first sentence I murmured to myself upon booting this version up. I was immediately assaulted by ear-piercing sounds regurgitated by the Texas Instruments SN76489 sound chip packaged in the Game Gear to create this title screen """music""". I'm sure parents upon hearing these screeching sounds coming from their Looney Toon-loving little kid's device was the memo that they got ripped off, but this, unfortunately, is not the exception. You as the Tazmanian Devil will hear a variety of these awful sounds for the whole 15 minute 1CC and the gameplay matches with the pain of your ears. You get thrown in and immediately have to run away from a boulder as you pick up items to keep your stamina up because apparently every time Taz does his little spin tornado maneuver he loses years off his miserable life span. Then after that, you realize you don't even get to move Taz for like half the game. He's always in a minecart, snowboarding without his consent, slipping on ice, attempting to fly, etc. The only thing the player really does in this game is press A to avoid an oncoming obstacle as you watch the game try to process your input in a glorious 10 frames per second because this is the cutting edge hardware of the Game Gear, baby! We need all the processing power we can get for those beautiful 4096 colors! All so we can display Taz's miserable existence for the player to experience! It's absolutely fascinating just how much sheer wrath this software produced in me that I was about to go feral just hearing the high-pitched morse codes of the developers call for help while attempting to slog myself through tar-feeling lag. I think the funniest thing this playthrough produced was discovering that Retroarch's Game Gear emulator on stage 8 crashes attempting to load the thing, and the save-state that I created proved the crash was consistent too. I have a gaming PC I bought like 5 years ago, The Game Gear was such a useless footnote in Sega's long history of useless hardware nobody bothered to optimize a half-decent emulator for it to preserve rancid works like this, but I also took it as a message from God telling me to stop and move on with my life because I was hurting myself. So this was my first (and probably last) Game Gear experience. Great start!
Master System: This was the only version of the game that I actually stomached to finish. Don't get me wrong, it's still a boring Sonic the Hedgehog Master System clone where Taz's acceleration and deceleration is so inconsistent from one leap of faith to the next you're bound to suffer a cheap death or two, but everything else is kinda inoffensive. You barely get scratched by the enemies because of your Taz Spin, so the only trouble you will face are the bombs littered about the place that Taz will eat upon contact like a dog attempting to eat whatever non-edible thing you dropped on the floor mistaking it for food. The secret speedrunning gamer trick here is to Taz Spin from one hill to the next and pray you don't fall off and within 10 minutes you will beat Taz-Mania for the Master System and your Dominos pizza will be delivered at your doorstep. Much like the Game Gear version, this was my first Master System game. A boring platformer made by like 5 people to mimic the success of another game made for more successful hardware but with a fucking one-off Looney Toon character. Cool!
Genesis: Unironically as bad as the Game Gear version. This game has the worst collision detection and camera I've ever played in a 2D platformer. Taz's sprite is a large lad meaning the camera is zoomed up into his ugly mug at all times meaning every jump gives you about 5 pixels to react to whatever is next on the screen, and somehow every platform's hitbox is just off in every way. The only novel thing about this game is hearing the little cartoony sound effects everything makes in this game whenever Taz or an enemy interacts with something, but what starts off as slightly endearing became annoying real fast hearing the game mock you with wiggling tongue sounds and other nonsense as you fail another jump with no fault of your own. I turned this one off real fast. Awesome!
SNES: After three failed attempts at making a half-decent platformer for the Tazmanian Devil, the devs at Sunsoft gave up and decided to make this one OutRun but instead of racing, you as the Tazmanian Devil chase birds on the side of the road while dodging incoming traffic like a deer. Actually attempting to grab birds in a camera perspective made for race cars sounds just as janky as you'd think it is, and it's the only gameplay loop Sunsoft offers here. Just a worthless, ill-considered game probably made out of a mixture of obligation and spite. Fuck yeah!!!
After finishing all of these games in a discord call with my friends I realized something. Despite all of these games having different gameplay styles, level design, and even developers, they all shared one common thing: they brought out some kind of anger, malice, or rage within me. If you know the Tazmanian Devil, he is the embodiment of the chaos that ensues with overwhelming anger, so much so that his very well-being is reduced to being nothing more than a feral creature. Any pain he ensues to himself causes him to create one dusty whirlwind to inflict that same pain to others, not by accident, but out of sheer will from the wrath within him. Playing Taz-Mania was like being caught within Taz's pain, and what was left was 4 ROM files I will never touch again and 2 hours of my life wasted. If that isn't conveying the emotions of a character through game design, I dunno what is! Yeah, that's right, fuck you Drakengard! Taz-Mania was made miserable on purpose years before you, where's its 3-hour analysis videos on YouTube!?
I don't even like Looney Toons all that much lol.
5 Comments
Delicious.
Playing bad, forgotten games older than you in a discord call. The dream.
yo you need to play the gameboy version
@radicalraisin Funny enough someone told me about it right after I published this. I may consider.
FallenGrace
2 years ago