This Christmas morning I made a big mistake, I got out of bed.

Some kids were over for the afternoon and spotted my CRT setup and asked to play something, it was then I subconsciously went to turn on my Sega Genesis and moved the cursor of my MegaEverdrive's menu to Taz-Mania. I could've simply just put on Sonic 2 or even Rocket Knight Adventures as a form of kid friendly entertainment, but somewhere in my mind I was bent on destruction.

The joke was on me however, as after about ten minutes of them floundering about on the second stage not knowing how to traverse Taz-Mania's leap of faith style platforming, the controller found it's way back to it's owner. They had the time of their life after that, watching me immediately get flattened into the ground by the truck boss entering the stage without warning, and bursting into laughter at the hundreds of times I slammed into obstacles on the minecart stage that could potentially get Battletoads to respond to it's cacophonous mating calls that make up it's poor attempt at a dynamic soundtrack. It's a bit hard to describe, it's kind of like if the world's most flaccid digitized slide whistle accompanied your every movement. It's a far cry from Desert Demolition's masterful attempt on the same system.

I felled Taz-Mania this day, but at what cost? My stomach has exploded so many times from mean-spirited bomb placement, I've gotten hypothermia in real life from the amount of times I fell in frozen water, and have been zapped dozens of times by pulling the wrong lever.

Well... at least they had a good time.

If you were Mina, what would you get a guy like Soma for the holidays?

He's got a massive arsenal of weaponry that spans beyond the generations of all legends passed down through history, from a sword with no name to Excalibur to Positron Rifles and Death's own scythe. He has that lovely white furred coat, where he most likely also keeps a purple Game Boy Advance that every cool kid keeps around on their person. On top of all this, he even has the power to rule... a power only he possesses which grants him dominion over every soul he comes across. He is a man who has everything... even dive kicks...

God, he's so cool.

However, cool people will often not know that they are "cool" or perhaps "even cooler". For them, these things are just commonplace. Sure, the materialistic possession of every mythological weapon through the ages and the power to rule will convince oneself that they are cool for the first few weeks that they come across these awesome cool things, but overtime they just become a regular occurrence. These cool things don't come with helpful advice, moral support, or even a pleasant conversation. Maybe Soma could summon an Imp to be his second player, but is that imp really gonna give it to him straight or have anything to say beyond "yeah thanks master, gee you're swell master"?

That is where folks like YOU come in, people who offer their support through thick and thin. Without them, how would you know you're even cool without someone there to tell you that they believe in you before your fight with your own inner demons? That person who doesn't mind when you ask them for a lift to work, because you don't want to garner unwanted attention by using Black Panther soul to dash through everyone on the sidewalk when you're running late. Someone whose gift will be more cherished than any sword made of gold or absurdly powerful holy weapon found in a hidden treasure hoard behind a waterfall in the basement of a floating castle within a total solar eclipse above Japan.

That is how they know they are way past cool, by being friends with you.

Happy holidays.

Maybe this game isn't for me. I spent over 150 hours and I don't get it. Every chore seems tedious, and not fun. My player keeps misclicking stuff, such as pulling out flowers instead of weeds, or digging a hole somewhere else. Don't even get me started on the button mashing fest that is bug catching and fishing. I don't care - stop giving me a wall of text for every single thing I do. I have no clue how people enjoy this game. You need a lot of patience, and I don't have that kind to sink in one game. I kinda started to like my island after those 150 hours, but it is nowhere near what I envisioned, and landscaping/planting/decorating is a time consuming tedious chore.

There was a guy named Marik Ishtar who specifically requested a trade with me in the middle of my playthrough. I had a lot of good 'mons transferred from the older games, so I thought I'd give him something nice.

He flashed a shiny Genesect, so I tried to give him something of equal value, but he rejected the trade. I couldn't figure out if there was anything specific he wanted, so I just quickly ran through 3 of my best pokemon and got them all rejected before realizing he was fucking with me.

I backed out and saw that his profile said "suck my d!ck", then he requested four more trades with me that I had to keep declining. He kept interrupting cutscenes.


Because of him, I give this game an extra star, because that is the closest thing to difficulty I experienced in the entire run.

Completion Criteria: Ending 2

I've been debating whether I should mark this as complete and review it and since the game has told me it's over. I feel like I should, for people confused about what I mean? I can't really be specific without spoilers and I can't even really critique it without spoilers. But I want to provide a review for people who are seeing the high scores and wondering if it's worth it.

I guess I also don't have an answer for you. I don't know. The game is a sokobon intended to be used to provide a detailed and mysterious story, but although the sokobon is servicable (as the genre gets, very standard), and the story itself is serviceable to what I played. They do not gell particularly well. Themes come across and are obvious but for a game that wants to hide secrets from you, it makes it very hard for you to look for secrets. Playing through ostensibly the entire game because I realised a split second too late that the room I was in was the goal of a clue provided earlier does not leave a good taste in your mouth. My gut tells me that the scores for this game may be bloated by those who really put loved it whilest the middling feelings were blasted away by the tedium expected from you. I played the game for a bit over 10 hours and was already not particularly happy with the design choices so when I checked the How Long to Beat Time was over 50 hours, also seeing the recommended reviews on steam reaching upwards of 140 hours, I realized that this game is hitting for people.

Maybe the reason people are so invested are legitimate, maybe they are superficial, maybe they are horny. I don't know. All I can say is as someone who has finished some highly controversial puzzle games like La Mulana, I just feel like they may have attempted to purify their theme and ended up ruining the puzzles of the world (even they kind of mess up there them anyway with <spoilers>

Try it with a word of caution, if you get to a point you think the game asks for too much, don't follow the words of hype. Maybe I'll go back to it but I am definitely not invested in doing so at the moment.

Beaten on 8Mhz (in the M88 emulator) as that is what Japanese consumers would have been playing this on at the time of release. Full disclosure, I did use savestates to act as "extra lives" but beat every level normally in one sitting. I'd like to see if I can beat this with "FF" lives at some point but that will wait for a bit. I'm writing this review basically immediately after beating this game at like 5 in the morning

This game is like genuinely one of the worst games I have ever played, but also incredibly fun if you have the mindset for it. It's extremely difficult. It's just absolutely baffling that it exists at all, a weird Super Mario Bros sequel for a couple of two japanese home computers. It even predates the Lost Levels! There's a bit of a misunderstanding about this game online since I think there's a fair amount of people who just assume it's a port, and some who are just aware of some of its surface level stuff (there's stuff based on the arcade games, the scrolling is messed up etc).

The game just feels like complete shit to play. I'm under the suspicion that the PC-88 port was fairly low effort, and it is incredibly aggressive to play. I will not refer to its aesthetics as while they are pretty ugly I don't think it particularly detracts from the game. The game has some fun ideas like introducing enemies from the Arcade games but most of them are just unkillable and painful to deal with. The additional items introduced are also far too sparse and situational.

Mario controls ridiculously terribly in 8mhz mode (which again, is what PC-88 owners would have been using for videogames) and I frankly think it has to be played to be believed. Every single jump in the game becomes a challenge and you have to be incredibly methodical with your movement, while still being fast due to the strict time limits on the stages. This game even frequently makes you do jumps from 1x1 block to 1x1 block, which is incredibly difficult. Making things worse, the game actually slows down if you have a mushroom, since Super Mario is made from two objects, as opposed to small Mario who is just one. As a result of this, a mushroom is vital due to giving you far better reaction times, given how absurdly fast this game is. The amount of blind jumps in this game that are hidden away by screen transitions insane by the way. I mean like actual blind jumps, no hints. There's even a blind jump from a 1x1 block to another! It's ridiculous!

I don't think people are quite aware that this game is just genuinely broken in a lot of ways. One notable example that walled me for months was when a platform refused to spawn in 4-3. I had assumed that I had emulation issues, or maybe even a bad dump, and I had been searching around ages for a solution. I later discovered that you are supposed to collapse a pair of platforms earlier in the level, because there too many platforms in existence. If you do not, that platform, which is vital for progression, does not spawn. It's insane how consistent this is, given that the game has a pretty frequent issue with just not spawning enemies or powerups sometimes.

It's strange because while I do genuinely think this game is completely awful, and blatantly the worst Mario game ever made, I think it must be played to be believed. I had so much fun progressing through this game over a long time with my friends in calls, it was such a spectacle and the game just kept giving in how obscene it was. I hope more people talk about this game because it's genuinely one of the most fascinating things relating to the Mario series, and another example of how strange third party Mario offerings were (perhaps the most interesting, in my opinion).

Side note, do not play this in Retroarch! 4-4 broke for me in it and lead to me having to switch to M88, which worked flawlessly.

This game made a girl I liked all through high school think that I was gay because my friends and I (who were 14) would refer to this game as Asshole Smashers.

We were obsessed with the game and for the longest time we would refer to hanging out after school as "going to go smash assholes" or "gonna go smash" or " have a gay orgy". The Smashing Assholes activity stuck for the entirety of high school; along with 4 years worth of terrible asshole smashing jokes -- that to a completely normal girl who wasn't in on the joke the whole time, might be convinced we were just openly gay and announcing sexual activities from the energy we were bringing to every conversation that involved hanging out and playing video games.

We refused to talk about video games at school without coded language because we went to a Catholic school and our form of rebellion was being as homosexual as possible. The fun part is like five years out of high school, one of my friends from that group announced they WERE gay, which is probably why he used Pink Knight so much. Hell yeah.

Anyway this is Behemoth's best game. You can tell they are not in the biz entirely for money because they could have made like 5 of these and they would have done well.

I wish they would make another. The couch/online co-op game is weak right now.