Super Smash T.V. (SNES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
414A playthough of Acclaim's 1992 arcade shooter for the Super Nintendo, Super Smash T.V.
Played through on the normal difficulty level. I also show two different endings in this video. The first one is the best "proper" ending cinematic, shown if you successfully reach the Pleasure Dome but don't collect all of the question mark boxes. At 1:19:05 is the ending you receive (the mocked-up arcade machine bios sequence) when you reach the Pleasure Dome and collect all five boxes, which ends with the game restarting in "turbo mode."
Super Smash T.V. is an SNES port of Williams' 1990 hit arcade game. Taking obvious inspiration from Schwarzenegger's The Running Man, Super Smash T.V. places you in the role of a contestant on a futuristic, ultra-violent television game show with the aim of killing as many people as possible to win fabulous prizes and mountains of cash.
It's also a blatant but hilarious bit of social commentary on modern consumer culture.
Playing out across three studio sets, each of the stages are played as a series of single-screen rooms that flood with hazards when you enter. You're pit against dudes with clubs, suicide bombers, laser-firing drones, and snakes as you blast your way to the boss arena of each area. Successfully killing the boss (huge monstrosities that have to taken down piecemeal) sends you to the winner's circle where your score is tallied before you head to the next arena. Clear all three arenas and you'll be declared the champion of Smash T.V. Each arena has muliple branching paths that can be taken, and hidden rooms (shown on the map at the beginning of each stage) can be discovered for huge caches of items like VCRs, big screen TVs, and year-supplies of "good meat." I don't really want to know where that meat comes from, to be honest.
In the arcade, Smash T.V. uses a dual-joystick setup similar to what we saw in Robotron 2084 (both games were co-created by Eugene Jarvis) wherein the left-stick controls your movement and the right-stick aims you weapons and autofires. It's a slick and intuitive control scheme, and it translates perfectly to the SNES pad's symmetrically arranged d-pad and face buttons. The controls are fluid and responsive, and their elegant simplicity makes them all but transparent to the player after just a few minutes.
And thanks to the controls, the SNES version is probably the best of all of the 16-bit era conversions of the game. The Genesis version was completely solid, but the system's 3-button controller meant that a strafe button had to be introduced unless you used two controllers, but doing that then meant that only one person could play. It's a reasonable and effective compromise, but it did somewhat compromise the way it played.
The SNES version also looks great, especially for a game released so early in the system's life. The game pushes a ridiculous number of sprites across the screen without slowing down, and though the sprites lack a bit of detail, they're all clearly defined and easy to make out no matter how chaotic the action becomes. A few things have been censored here - the host no longer openly gawks at the girls' chests and the geysers of blood have been trimmed back - but the SNES overall looks very similar to the arcade original. The audio fares just as well: all of the music has been faithfully reproduced, and the classic voice samples are all loud and clear. There's something that's just too awesome about a game screaming "DUDE!" at you when you collect a one-up.
Super Smash T.V. is an excellent conversion, and as long as you like your games super tough, you'll have a great time with it.
Big money! Big prizes! I love it!
If you'd like to see Smash TV's "spiritual successor" Total Carnage, you can find my playthrough of its SNES port here: https://youtu.be/Duq8cv1QVP0
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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