For over two decades, Rare Ltd. has created some of the greatest, highest-quality video games on the market. The list of classics and franchises is revolutionary: Goldeneye 007, Perfect Dark, Killer Instinct, Donkey Kong Country, Jet Force Gemini, Conker, Blast Corps, Banjo-Kazooie, Snake Rattle ‘n’ Roll… and the list goes on. When I think back to childhood gaming, a huge percentage of my gameplay time went towards games that Rare released.
Oh. I forgot one of Rare’s franchises, didn’t I? That’s right… those crazy toad guys… yeah… Well, let’s talk about them, then!
The Battletoads were more than just a knock-off of the world’s favorite Amphibian fighting team: they actually held up to the hype. While Konami’s Ninja Turtle games provided some of the finest beat-em-up action of all time, Rare was developing their response: the Battletoads.
Battletoads was centered around progressing through stage, beating up enemies, and then taking down a boss. It didn’t bring a lot of new elements to the table, but it was nonetheless a stand-out among the numerous beat-em-up titles of the 8 and 16 bit era. Gameplay got even better in the sequel, “Battletoads & Double Dragon: The Ultimate Team.” The Double Dragon games were also great beat-em-up action, but when added to the Battletoads style only got better. Game crossovers can be strange but this was pure harmony. Not only did Billy and Jimmy lee show up as playable characters but their classic enemies showed up as Toad fodder: Roper, Abobo, Shadow Boss, and many more.
Rash, Zitz, and Pimple started out as high school nerds that were mutanted into super buff toads that embarked on a crazy mission. While the Turtles were fighting Shredder and the combined forces of the malevolent Foot Clan and Dimension X, the Toads teamed up with a space princess named Angelica and flew around in space in some form of spaceship hotrod. Like every hero team, the Toads needed some outrageous enemies and they came in the form of the Dark Queen, a busty raven-haired warlord; Big Blag, an obese rat monster; Robo-Manus, a freakish cyborg; General Slaughter, a biker pig remiscent of “Mad Max”; and many other truly bizarre and memorable enemies.
Battletoads (NES)
Battletoads was robot-smashing, pig-stomping, giant-boot-to-the-face beat-em-up greatness. Our adventure begins…
Simple and to the point, Battletoads begins with a flying saucer of some sort flying towards a planet.
The title screen appears and the three toad logos fly a the scrreen with excellent animation for NES standards.
After a few moments, we are introduced to our heroes: Rash, Zitz, and Pimple. This screen is actually somewhat erroneous as Pimple was later recolored brown and Zitz was made a light blue-green. However, because both Rash and Zitz were playable characters, the game designers needed their identical sprites to look different, so Zitz was made brown to stand apart from Rash.
Pimple sounds like a pretty slick guy, especially for the burly one.
That’s a nice space ride for a guy named Pimple.
Gasp!
This doesn’t look good…
I knew it. Isn’t that just like a space princess to be captured by a blue spacecraft with a mouth…
She probably should have taken them to a farther away planet.
The Battletoads’ leader then squawks some instructions to them.
I gotta craving for action, too, but I don’t want to press start yet…
The Dark Queen interrupts in a burst of static and we see the horrors that await us: a blue robot, a red rat man, and… a curvaceous woman in some kind of latex bondage outfit? Really?
And thus I was introduced to chesty video game characters for the first time.
As we begin the game, the Vulture (the Toads’ spaceship/base) drops them down to the planet with rappel lines. In this demonstration, I began the game with two players to show you what both toads look like.
As you can see, both Battletoads look the exactly same except that Zitz, a.k.a. player 2, is brown/orange whereas Rash, a.ka.a. player 1, is green.
As you pummel down on enemies, the Toads perform special smash attacks where their body parts transform into massively-comical weapons. These include giant fists (pictured above), giant boot feet (shown later on this page), and a headbutt with ram horns. Just look at how that walker robot exploded… satisfaction.
Not only did I just punch that robot walker so hard that it exploded, but I can also use it’s leg as a weapon to beat up the Dark Queen’s army of pigs! Plus, you can smash walkers’ skulls and get a bonus! It just gets better and better for our amphibious protagonists.
I can even use that other walker’s leg against one of its friends! Poetic justice at its NES best.
The Battletoads can eat flies in many of the levels to restore health. In this level, you have to punch Space Invaders out of the air and grab their yellow health cubes. That makes sense…
Take that, you stupid rat man! Not only can the Battletoads punch these rat men over the head so hard that they get hammered into the ground and get stuck there, but the Battletoads can punt them with massive boot feet. Take that, jawa punting in “The Force Unleashed.”
The difficulty on these games is epic and a playthrough for any amateur will likely be a truly painful experience, especially during the racing stages in “Battletoads.” This game is so difficult that I still have not yet beaten it even after all these years and this section is no exception. The Battletoads grab ahold of a scooter and progress to the right of the screen, dodging pillars and jumping gaps. At first this isn’t too bad, but repeated deaths results in the need to use a continue and the old-school gaming horror of replaying a level from the start.
Uh-oh… it looks like we’re going to be riding these…
Well, I’m dead and have no more lives. Good thing I enjoy replaying this level. Not.
“Battletoads & Double Dragon” toned the difficulty down a bit by removing the frustrating racing levels and making the challenges level-to-level more balanced and enjoyable. This time around, the difficulty came from dealing with enemies and learning how to defeat them rather than frustrating gameplay gimmicks. “Battlemaniacs” on the other hand upped the ante and brought the difficulty back to a higher level.
Battletoads & Double Dragon: The Ultimate Team (SNES)
Now we’re getting into the really good stuff: “Battletoads & Double Dragon: The Ultimate Team.” Two years after the original “Battletoads” was released, Rare released an unusual sequel: a crossover. Rarely do crossovers occur until game franchises have run their course and are looking for new ways to incoprorate old characters, but this crossover is anything but stale. Not only did it bring back the classic Battletoads-style beat-em-up levels but it also added the two main characters from Double Dragon, Billy and Jimmy Lee, each with unique styles. This time around, all three Battletoads were playable characters (albeit that they used the same sprites but with different colors).
The game was released for the Genesis, Super Nintendo, and NES. For the purposes of this review I’ll be using the Super Nintendo edition. Gameplay was very similar across the board with the same levels and almost the same soundtrack.
The 16-bit era brought us higher fidelity music and biographies of the Toads and Dragons:
Crazy, eh? He doesn’t look very crazy to me.
I get a Donatello vibe from Zitz in this game.
It takes a lot of guts to admit that you aren’t smart. At least Pimple’s fists are smarter than his enemies’ fists.
Once mispelled as “Bimmy” in the Double Dragon series, Billy and Jimmy look like they jumped right out of a kickboxing movie. With their typhoon kicks, they could sure lay a smack down on boxes… and enemies!
Jimmy was way cooler than Billy. WAY cooler. Those red jeans are pretty badass if you ask me. And I’m not jut saying that because he doesn’t look like a stereotypical jerk bad guy from an early 1990s movie.
Abobo returns from Double Dragon. I’m not sure who this guy offends more: African-Americans or steroidal video game bosses.
Face it, Blag. You’re still big. You think you can fool me into thinking you’re not an obese rat freak by changing your name from “Big Blag” to “Blag”? Good idea. Also, good idea with all of those apostrophe’d abbreviations in your introduction. I’m really afraid of stepping inside the Colossus, now!
I’m not sure if this guy’s arm is actually a machine gun or if he’s just Megaman’s crazed, shirtless uncle. Wouldn’t that make him Roper Man, then? Nevermind…
Robo-Manus was l33t before l33t was leet. Either that, or his programmer didn’t factor in how Robo-Manus’ drooling problem would factor in to his speech processors.
Shadow Boss steps up as the next-to-last boss. This dude is like Shredder from the Ninja Turtles if Shredder actually tried. Of course, he’s going to end up getting beaten at the end of the game, so I guess he has some more similarities to Shred-Head.
She’s back and she’s still determined on taking over that precious Earth. With all the turmoil here, I’m surprised why any busty alien warlord would even want to come here, let alone own this place. We do have lots of cool giraffes, though.
Now that we know who our heroes and villains are, we all know what is bound to happen here.
Big blips are pretty scary.
When Obi-Wan Kenobi isn’t available in your universe, the Battletoads are your only hope. I guess the Dark Queen is flying a “Ratship” now. You’d think she could afford something with more pizazz.
Whoa. You know something is up when your protagonists are too overwhelmed for the game even before the game even starts.
Waiiiiiit… I thought the Battletoads were the finest warriors Earth had to offer…
Who isn’t ready to kick some evil butt? I’m ready. Maybe I’ll kick some evil hiney and caboose while I’m at it? Also, why are these dudes just hanging out at city hall? Are they involved in government now that they’ve successfully beaten several games of their own franchise? If so, that city government has a lax dress code.
The gameplay itself in this game is virtually similar to the formula established in the first “Battletoads” except now enemies are more complex, the animations are nicer, there are more weapons and attacks, and there are new ways to more around stages including ladders and hanging from the edges of platforms.
Fond, Toady Memories
My mom bought me Battletoads for the same reason that she bought me Kirby’s Adventure: because the box art was something that I liked. I didn’t subscribe to Nintendo magazines back then and had no idea what was in store with me. All that my mom knew was that the game had frogs in it and that I would probably like it because of that. I didn’t just like it: I loved it. A few weeks after receiving the game, I recorded a movie called “Battletoads 90” with my friends where we made up a nonsensical story about the Battletoads and how they were fighting against the evil toads of the Bucky O’Hare universe.
I played the heck out of the game with my friend Erik more times than I can remember. I can recall the days we spent together when we both had chicken pox. We made a fort out of my parent’s sour-orange-colored couch and bunkered down with marathons of “Super Mario Bros. 3,” “Snake Rattle ‘n’ Roll,” and “Battletoads.”
I didn’t get a Super Nintendo until 1995 so I missed out on a lot of games and one of those was “Battletoads in Battlemaniacs,” the Super Nintendo Battletoads release that featured updated graphics and new gameplay challenges. Maybe sometime I’ll do a review of sorts on this title.
The most memorable thing about the series to me is the incredible music. Every time I hear the chugging guitar and banging drums of the opening theme to “Battletoads” I get the urge to rock out along with it. There have been times when I even turned the game on and listened to the opening theme over and over while working out or cleaning. “Battletoads & Double Dragon” had an even better soundtrack that to this day I enjoy in it’s raw, Super Nintendo soundchip style. “Battlemaniacs” had a goodsoundtrack, albeit that it was nowhere as memorable as the offerings in the previous titles.
After “Battlemaniacs,” the Toads more or less dropped off of the face of the earth. I don’t even remember hearing about or seeing anything for “Battlemaniacs” as it seemed like the media machine behind the franchise ceased to exist after the first game and the short-lived Battletoads animated series, which produced the only Battletoads memorabilia that I know of in the form of bendable, posable rubber figures. I’ll showcase these figures in an upcoming “Flashback.”
The most of the Toads that Rare has given us since “Battlemaniacs” was a reference to their trademark spiked gauntlets as an unlockable accessory in Rare’s successful “Viva Pinata” games. The Perfect Dark, Conker, and Banjo-Kazooie franchises have all seen an appearance in one way or another on the Xbox 360 and I believe that it is time that these classic game characters return. The odds are slim-to-nil for Rare games to appear on Nintendo’s Wii Virtual Console since Microsoft holds the rights to these games, hence how we saw Xbox Live Arcade re-releases of both “Banjo-Kazooie” and “Banjo Tooie” with the Nintendo logo replaced by Microsoft’s.
Re-releases, remixes, and re-imaginings are a huge genre in the gaming industry today. Megaman has seen two NES revival releases to tap into the classic feel, “Castlevania Adventure” showed an enhanced remake of a Game Boy title, and countless other franchises have seen enhanced reissues through downloadable content, whether on Xbox Live Arcade, Playstation Network, Nintendo Wii Virtual Console, Steam, or the Nintendo DSi store. Capcom, Konami, Nintendo, and numerous other publishers are bringing back the classics that we loved 20+ years ago and making them just as fun as they were the first time around but in glorious HD by handing off the development to other studios, such as 4J, who ported Rare’s N64 games to Xbox Live Arcade and developed the enhanced reissue of “Perfect Dark.”
The classic Nintendo 64 game “Perfect Dark” saw a re-release on the Xbox Live Arcade earlier this year with high-rez textures, improved frame rate, smoother control, and updated multiplayer. While Rare games have not typically fared well since the severance with Nintendo (“Perfect Dark Zero” and “Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts” come to mind) the classics still can hold their weight against the market saturation of similar, new games.
I downloaded the updated “Perfect Dark” a few months back and truly enjoyed the experience. The only gaping flaw was the horribly-flawed Combat Simulator challenges, which have the most unfair AI I have ever seen. “Dead or Alive 4” on Xbox 360 took a genre that I’m already not very good at (fighting) and put in AI that always knew how to block or counter any move that I threw at it. The Combat Simulator challenges got to be so ridiculously unfair that enemy bots knew exactly where I would respawn and kill me literally two seconds into gameplay. In a game where you don’t start with any weapons other than your fists, this certainly results in a headache… and probably a million swears on behalf of me.
Despite this, these challenges aren’t a core gameplay component. The game itself and custom Combat Simulator matches are just as fun as they were 10 years ago when I was a to-be high school sophomore sitting around all summer blasting away at bots with Erik, the same guy that I had built the chicken pox-inspired sofa fort with. I wasn’t just playing a good game when I downloaded the updated “Perfect Dark”: I was reliving truly memorable and special memories. This is what a return of the Battletoads would be to me and not just because they were great games when they came out.
While a brand new title would be amazing, I don’t even care if all we get would be re-released “Battletoads” with some updated graphics, re-recorded music, and corrected glitches like the Xbox Live Arcade edition of “Perfect Dark” was. These games are classic and can still hold their weight! I’m thinking of something along the lines of Ubisoft’s “Turtles inTime: Re-Shelled,” an enhanced remake of the classic “Turtles in Time.”
While it is unlikely that this article will hold any power when it comes to a revival of the Battletoads franchise, I felt that it was necessary to share my opinions on the subject so that others out there like me can remember the good times (and the controller-throwingly frustrating) Battletoads pig-stompin’ moments.
Before I end this article, I’d like to thank the development teams behind the Battletoads that made our childhoods more fun with their fast-paced, action-packed games. Not only are the games fantastic but the soundtracks keep me rocking to this day. Just the fact that I’m sitting here right now writing this article shows that, in the worst case scenario, one guy at least would be happy with a revival of the franchise. After seeing several classic franchises reappear this year at E3, I still hold hope that one day in the not-so-distant-future that I’ll be playing a new Battletoads game or even a 3D remake. However, with the disappearance of the Toads from Rare’s website, I get the feeling in the pit of my stomach that they aren’t “in” or even “necessary” anymore considering the huge push for Kinect motion games this year.
While some might argue that holding onto the past and disliking new gaming trends hinders progress, the whole thing just makes me feel a little bit down. It makes me glad that Rare is developing the upcoming “Kinect Sports” and I know that it will be quality because of this, something just makes me wish that I saw more of the classic Rare stuff these days instead of another “Wii Sports”-esque game. Maybe I’m just getting old or cynical. I don’t know.
All images in this article are copyright their respective holder(s), Rare, and are used herein for review, educational, and celebrational purposes. Thanks for the memories.
“Snake Rattle ‘n’ Roll” was developed by Rare and was released in 1990 in the us and 1991 in the UK. It plays out as an immitation 3-D adaptaion of the classic game “Snake” that most people probably remember from cell phones in recent years. The player takes on the role of one of two snakes, Rattle or Roll, and must go from level to level gobbling up colored balls that make the snakes longer. The balls are usually dispensed by yellow objects but they sometimes appear from under manholes. The objective of each level is to eat as many balls as you can so that you can weigh in and top the scale at the end of the level before the time reaches zero.
The first level of a two-player game.
The player controls one of the two snakes.
The enemies in the levels are bizarre. When in water, the “Jaws” theme begins to play and a shark chases after the snakes. Other enemies include stomping feet and toilet seats.
Mmmm… feet…
Yeah… that’s definitely a toilet seat.
Take a trip back to 1993 and revisit “Aero the Acro-Bat.” Personally, I think that an acrobatic bat isn’t all that impressive since they can, you know, fly, but at least he’s got his priorities straight by taking down clowns.
I started out “The Test of Time” with “Snake Wattle ‘n’ Roll,” a relatively-obscure game that would require either a working NES and a copy of the original game or an emulator to play. However, since I’d like these reviews to be of some use to people, I’ve decided that I should probably focus them on old titles that have been brought back to download services like the Wii Virtual Console and Xbox Live Arcade. This review covers the Virtual Console’s Super Nintendo release from July 26.
I get the feeling that somebody had big plans for Aero. He’s cute, he had some nice animations in his game, plus he had that Sonic/Bubsy feel to him. Somehting just didn’t click and our chiropteric friend vanished into obscurity after this game’s sequel, the aptly-titled “Aero the Acro-Bat 2” in 1994 (which will supposedly be coming out later this year on Virtual Console). Aero was the product of the boom of game companies that apparently felt that animal mascots were the way to go to tap into the home market. I can’t blame them: I remember playing a lot of games that starred animals when I was younger because they all seemed to be kid-friendly.
“Aero” plays out like a typical early 1990s platformer. The main objective of the stage is to complete a quasi circus-themed task such as jumping on star platforms or through hoops. Food items can be collected for points and stars can be collected to be used as weapons against Aero’s cirus enemies.
Aero’s primary attack is a tornado-like spin attack that is performed by double jumping. Aero can spin upwards, giving him a boost to his jump distance, or downwards, attacking enemies. This attack is rather difficult to get right, so the throwing stars are a much more effective weapon, albeit that they are scarce and limited
The first level requires Aero to land on blue star platforms. Each jump on these platforms will decrease the total number of stars on the platform from three to zero, resulting in the platform’s disappearance after the last jump.
Aero can also jump through hoops for points. Like the circus, some of the hoops are on fire and can hurt Aero if he touches the fire. It doesn’t look like it, but I actually made it through this hoop without becoming a blackened char!