Action 52 Genesis ... Yeah, Not As Exciting

"Disregard...notices." This is challenge or something?

Also, note the Menu Colors. See how this replaced the sheet that came with the NES Action 52? Stupid, huh? Remember how arbitrary it was? This one's even more so!

Seeing these letters bounce around all up-and-down like reminds me of the technical abilities these guys can achieve. It also sets the wrong tone for a game you want to use as a verbal punching bag. How can scathingly hostile remarks about the game's visuals (the extent of most attempts at game humor) be true if these guys are capable of this?

Of course, it's not good or anything, just not as ugly as one might expect from people who are allegedly such big failures.

Analyzation: Action 52 Genesis - Active Enterprise's Final Get Rich Quick Scheme

My first Action 52 feature, published way back in July of 2005, is still the biggest hit here at ArkFullofSorrow.com. Yeah, I've racked my brain thinking of ways to do something new, and I have attempted several of them and will likely attempt several more. But hackneyed actions (ragging on bad games) against unoriginal targets (the NES Action 52 is one of the most reviled games out there) inspired the most amount of popular success. The moral of the story is clear: (attempts at) innovation, or at least original thinking, will get you nowhere.

Because I'm more or less the authority on all things Action 52, I've taken upon myself to become familiar with the Genesis rendition. After all, what kind of authority would I be if I'm ignorant of half of all happenings bearing that name?

I'm going to actually be honest here, tackling the Genesis Action 52 doesn't seem like the best way to utilize my formidable talents. When compared to its NES experiment, it really is a considerably lesser beast all together. It's alot like climbing a small heap of trash after climbing Ayers Rock or having to return to your job of sweeping floors after foiling a heist with that very broom an hour before. It's much like muscling your way out of a near-death encounter with some MS-13 crumb bums and then having to get back to your job of sweeping floors. Wait, what was I talking about again?

Upon experiencing both, I can honestly say the Genesis Action 52 is basically a shadow of its NES counterpart in all areas. Firstly and most obviously, in overall badness, it's the NES version that inspires nightmares and hateful emotions from emotionally unstable and fragile game webmasters and bloggers. The Genesis version is rarely mentioned during such online therapy sessions. I theorize this is largely because of the technical superiority of the Genesis: whereas a title in the NES game might have crashed and the system might have caught fire when you pushed two buttons at a time, a necessary action for passing certain areas in the game, the Genesis had no such limitations. Whereas a game in the NES Action 52 might have abruptly ended eight seconds in, the developers of the Genesis Action were able to make what they always wanted: an auto-scrolling title with a gameplay consisting entirely of pushing left or right.

And of course, utilizing 1/52 of a 16-bit cart means things will have a twice a good chance of looking like the things you think they're supposed to look like as over the days in eight bits, ditto for the rest of the technical sphere. Veterans of the Action 52 world know better than to have hope: doubling those odds don't exactly yield statistically significant gains.

Many of the same reasons we hate the NES version are also present in titles of the Genesis version, but less gaudily bad: the gameplay is pedestrian and repetitive, the sound of the games usually consists of two songs per game, 4-8 measures per song and suffering from the trappings of the hardware (but is nearly always the best aspect of a game and at time legitimately catchy), and the graphics, while improved in areas other than the technical, still look like relics from a generation prior.

Not only is its lore not exactly the stuff of legends, the pack itself isn't a third the collector's item the NES version is.

That's all you get. Quite a bit less than the nine-piece outburst they did for the NES. They didn't even make the cart look cool. This is such a relative collector's dud, I didn't even break the seal on mine knowing what's inside brings only horror, not horror-cum-marketing effort we got with the NES version. My sealed copy was $35 shipped, less than a third of a fully complete, good condition but previously opened NES version.

Motivation is so low that I don't even feel like scouring the web for other juicy bits of gossip regarding the Genesis version, nor do I even feel like seeing if a similar special hasn't already been done - I'll just assume it's not out there. If so, I'll assume it's inferior to this one, and you should assume the same. That is not to say I'm completely unmotivated. I slogged through, likely spending about half as much time playing these games, but twice as much time writing these paragraphs. Yes, I analyze every game on here as well as make snarky remarks about the games' level of boredom, whereas most Action 52-related features out there only feature snarky remarks that make the Angry Video Game Nerd seem comparatively dignified and genius in comparison.

Well, that's about all I have to say to introduce this thing. Click here to see the entry for the first game. Oh and real quick, to recap those final two options, the ones below 52 Challenge, the ones in white: Music Demo and Randomizer are exactly what you think. Randomizer puts you at a random game and Music Demo is a sound test with roughly half the game's 20 songs and 12 sound effects.