The Untouchables (SNES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
140A playthrough of Ocean's 1994 license-based action game for the SNES, The Untouchables.
The 1987 mobster movie classic The Untouchables, starring Kevin Costner and Robert De Niro, was a huge success in its day. Its star-studded cast, its artful rendering of Prohibition-era inner-city America and the balance that it struck between a meaningful story and graphic violence not only raked in the cash at the box-offices, but still today it remains widely known and respected. It was an awesome movie, and is one of the best period gangster films I've ever seen.
No matter how good it was, though, it seems a bit odd that Ocean's SNES game based on it didn't appear until 1994. Granted, it wasn't as much a port as it was an upgraded, expanded remake of the original game, but I have to wonder who thought that the license was still relevant enough to warrant a game seven full years after the movie came out. And that's not to mention that the game it was based on was already old-news, having been released on computers in 1989 and the NES in 1991.
It vaguely follows the plot of the film by casting you as Elliot Ness, a government agent that is out to end Al Capone's reign over Chicago's criminal underworld. To do this, you are presented with a set of "missions" that you must complete (in any order you wish) before you can go after the big kahuna himself.
Like several other of Ocean's games, the gameplay type varies mission-by-mission in The Untouchables. You'll have shootouts with alleyways of mobsters from a behind-the-back perspective a la Cabal, a search-and-rescue mission from a top-down perspective similar to True Lies, and even a few platformer stages that feel oddly stiff and remind me quite a bit if the action stages in the NES Dick Tracy game.
In all honesty, while the Amiga title was reasonably good in 1989, and the NES port was passably mediocre in 1991, the SNES game was somewhat beyond its shelf life in 1994. The gameplay is incredibly repetitive since stages often repeat in a cheap bid to extend the game's short length, and the controls are awkward and stiff. They're responsive, but the strange button mappings are unintuitive and make the Cabal-style stages unnecessarily awkward to control. It's also unexpectedly easy for an Ocean-made game. You'll need some good reflexes to see the ending, but not much else. There aren't any puzzle-elements to be found, and once you're familiar with the stages, you'll be able to breeze through them effortlessly.
Robocop 3, this is not.
But Ocean is usually known for their games' superior visuals and audio. The graphics in The Untouchables aren't particularly impressive - the photos look nice and the sprites are large, but most of the stages lack detail and the animation is pretty unimpressive. The sound is excellent though, as seems to always be the case with the company's SNES efforts, and is by far the strongest part of the game.
And who are the people in the photos? If they couldn't license the movie's actors' likenesses, why even bother with the digitzed stills at all?
Overall, The Untouchables isn't of untouchable quality, but it's a soulless, underwhelming experience that screams of cut corners, lazy production, and missed opportunity. It's playable, but it's not terribly entertaining.
I actually prefer the NES version based on the PC game, truth be told.
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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