Action 52

[instantreplay]

Anyone hear of this game? I just saw AVGN's review of it and I can't help but wonder how it sold at all.

[turf]

Anyone hear of this game? I just saw AVGN's review of it and I can't help but wonder how it sold at all.

It's bad.  Real bad.  Most of it's broken and unplayable.  I don't know how someone thought this was good enough to release.

The grocery store I used to rent games at (yeah, that's a real thing) had one.  It was $5 to rent because it had so many more games on it.  When they sold all their NES games, this was sitting in the dollar bin.  I held it in my hand and didn't buy Action 52 for $1.  If I had known then what I know now. 

[badATchaos]

Still don't understand how folks can pay 200 dollars for a unlicensed game. To me being unlicensed puts a game in the same category as homebrew. -Simply unofficial. I would understand if it was a good game.

[argyle]

Anyone hear of this game? I just saw AVGN's review of it and I can't help but wonder how it sold at all.

It's bad.  Real bad.  Most of it's broken and unplayable.  I don't know how someone thought this was good enough to release.

The grocery store I used to rent games at (yeah, that's a real thing) had one.  It was $5 to rent because it had so many more games on it.  When they sold all their NES games, this was sitting in the dollar bin.  I held it in my hand and didn't buy Action 52 for $1.  If I had known then what I know now.

On the bright side, that means you deemed the games to be worth less than .02 each. So you avoided having something absolutely terrible in your collection!

[maximo310]

Still don't understand how folks can pay 200 dollars for a unlicensed game. To me being unlicensed puts a game in the same category as homebrew. -Simply unofficial. I would understand if it was a good game.

I don't think they sold too many copies because although it was advertised in magazines with the option of purchasing it through mail order at $200 back in the day , and no one wanted to take a chance at these cruddy games, even though ironically AVGN's review actually brought the price of the cart near the $300 range. Some people consider it a offical game because it was made by an actual company(Active Enterprises) who had employees( actually 4 college students) work on the game, and the worst part is that they ported it over to the Genesis, and in addition were trying to make a Cheetahmen III and Action 52 port for the SNES. Its like these guys weren't even trying with this, they couldn't make some good games so that they could actually get a license from Nintendo to sell the game, giving them even more money possibly.

[dreama1]

Still don't understand how folks can pay 200 dollars for a unlicensed game. To me being unlicensed puts a game in the same category as homebrew. -Simply unofficial. I would understand if it was a good game.

I don't think they sold too many copies because although it was advertised in magazines with the option of purchasing it through mail order at $200 back in the day , and no one wanted to take a chance at these cruddy games, even though ironically AVGN's review actually brought the price of the cart near the $300 range. Some people consider it a offical game because it was made by an actual company(Active Enterprises) who had employees( actually 4 college students) work on the game, and the worst part is that they ported it over to the Genesis, and in addition were trying to make a Cheetahmen III and Action 52 port for the SNES. Its like these guys weren't even trying with this, they couldn't make some good games so that they could actually get a license from Nintendo to sell the game, giving them even more money possibly.

Good god they wanted to port it to the SNES. Glad that never saw the light of day.

[maximo310]

Still don't understand how folks can pay 200 dollars for a unlicensed game. To me being unlicensed puts a game in the same category as homebrew. -Simply unofficial. I would understand if it was a good game.

I don't think they sold too many copies because although it was advertised in magazines with the option of purchasing it through mail order at $200 back in the day , and no one wanted to take a chance at these cruddy games, even though ironically AVGN's review actually brought the price of the cart near the $300 range. Some people consider it a offical game because it was made by an actual company(Active Enterprises) who had employees( actually 4 college students) work on the game, and the worst part is that they ported it over to the Genesis, and in addition were trying to make a Cheetahmen III and Action 52 port for the SNES. Its like these guys weren't even trying with this, they couldn't make some good games so that they could actually get a license from Nintendo to sell the game, giving them even more money possibly.

Good god they wanted to port it to the SNES. Glad that never saw the light of day.

Well this is coming from the company who made newsletters bashing Nintendo, had their address in the Bahamas, and manged to get a booth a couple of times at the CES trade show in the early 90s. They were also planning to make a sports game for the Genesis and SNES called Sports 5, and also planned a whole line of Cheetahmen items, as well as third party electronic accessories. They even wanted to create a handheld that could play NES, SNES, and Genesis games, as well as their own 16-bit game format on CD-ROMs! This is what it looks like:  http://www.atarihq.com/tsr/special/active11.html

[blipcs76]

I managed to find a Genesis copy last year in a lot of stuff off Craiglist.  CIB even, but I still haven't popped it in to try it out.  The Genesis version is only worth a fraction of what the NES version goes for.

[maximo310]

I managed to find a Genesis copy last year in a lot of stuff off Craiglist.  CIB even, but I still haven't popped it in to try it out.  The Genesis version is only worth a fraction of what the NES version goes for.

That version is also better as well, because many of the controls actually work, and they replaced a lot of the terrible shooters with puzzle games. At the least the genesis version is somewhat playable and is actually worth it to get it and  to test it out to check out the different games compared to the unplayable mess of  many of the games in the NES version. The only downside in the Genesis version is that the Cheetahmen game is worse than the original, but thats all you'd be missing with everything else is improved.