Smash T.V. (NES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
401A playthrough of Acclaim's 1991 run-and-gun shooter for the NES, Smash T.V.
In the words of Damon Killian, "This is television. That's all it is. It's nothing to do with people, it's to do with the ratings. For fifty years, we've told them what to eat, what to drink, what to wear. For Christ's sake [...] don't you understand? Americans love television. They wean their kids on it. Listen. They love game shows. They love wrestling. They love sports and violence. So what do we do? We give them what they want!"
Created by Eugene Jarvis as a reimagining of his early 80s hit Robotron: 2084 for cutting edge 32-bit arcade hardware, Midway's 1990 arcade game was a thinly veiled love letter to the classic Schwarzenegger film The Running Man. It was a huge hit, and it was ported to pretty much every relevant 8 and 16-bit platform of its time, including the NES.
If you'd like to check out some other versions, here are a couple of related videos I've recorded:
SNES version: https://youtu.be/cXJmx2Q6bi0
PlayStation version: https://youtu.be/Y9gVsBzXG3Q
Total Carnage (SNES): https://youtu.be/Duq8cv1QVP0
The NES's hardware was ancient by 1991 standards, but in the right hands, it was still capable of some extraordinary feats. Beam's conversion of Smash TV was one such feat.
I doubt anyone expected much from it at the time. I certainly didn't. I dismissed it outright after renting the SNES cart, and it wasn't until a couple of years later that I had an opportunity to play it.
The graphics and sound obviously couldn't compete with the 16-bit console ports, but I was amazed by how well it played. It's fast and smooth, there are tons of enemies running around the screen at once with virtually no flicker or slowdown, it offers two-player simultaneous play, and the game allows you to use the d-pad of two controllers to mimic the twin stick layout of the arcade controls (or four controllers for two players through the NES's Satellite and Four Score multitap adapters.)
The difficulty level is a fair bit lower than you'd find in the quarter-hungry coin-op, but it's still very satisfying to blast your way through. Just like its bigger brothers, the NES version requires you to enter a near Zen-like state to successfully navigate the hordes of bad guys, and you'll constantly be on the lookout for grenade launchers, brand new cars, and year supplies of meat. In other words,
"BIG MONEY, BIG PRIZES!"
I'm not exaggerating when I say that it plays just as well as the SNES game does, and the graphics and sound, though hideous, do their jobs well. The sprites are clearly defined against the backgrounds and well animated for how small they are. The compromises made to retain the game's playability on the NES were absolutely worthwhile.
(The Master System, Amiga, and ST versions would've done well to follow suit!)
But that being said, the presentation is hardly barren. It makes a valiant effort to provide as much window dressing as possible, including the TV studio bits and many of the digitized voices.
"I'D BUY THAT FOR A DOLLAR!"
It's clearly not on par with the SNES game, but this NES conversion is so much better than anyone could've reasonably asked for. If you want to be blown away by the NES's ability to somehow still deliver an arcade-class gameplay experience in 1991, here you go.
(This is a brand new playthrough to replace my original 240p upload from 2014. It looks much better this way!)
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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