Action 52

Vince Perri is known for being the boss of Active Enterprises, a game development studio responsible for Action 52 and Cheetahmen II, the sequel to Cheetahmen. History of Active Enterprises began in 1988 when Perri had bought an illegal game compilation with 40 games built-in on the Nintendo Entertainment System from Taiwan for $60 for his son. Impressed by the concept of the cartridge, he began telling his neighbors about the compilation, causing them to apparently go crazy. Seeing their reactions, he obtained plans to make his own game compilation for the aforementioned platform legally in the United States, however without Nintendo's license.

Perri then researched for various investors in foreign regions such as Europe and Saudi Arabia to increase his profits for developing Action 52 under his own company, Active Enterprises, that he would create in 1989. However, at the time development was almost starting, had no knowledge on how to make a game, and took very long to learn how to do so. Because of that, he had to find another investor to make the game for him, but didn't want to spend too much money on them. Suddenly, he didn't actually need to find an investor that knows how to make games for his company, as Perri went into an office in a recording studio, where he did meetings about his new business ventures. He also ended up meeting a man working in the same studio, named Mario Gonzalez, who happened to finish his degree in video and audio production. In 1990, Perri met Gonzalez with proposal, and became informed that Gonzalez and two of his college friends had experience in video game design unlike him. Gonzalez accepted to join Perri's job, after he demonstrated his programming skills with his team consisting of Javier Parez for art and design and Albert Hernandes for programming. as requested by Perri. All three members of Mario's team were working on a Tetris clone, Mega-Tris, using an Amiga home computer (my favorite computer of the 20th century). Perri became again impressed with the build of the game, causing him to give a demonstration of it to his investors who also made positive reactions to it.

But the development team had no experience with making games for the NES at the time, resulting into an anonymous fourth member joining the group (refered to as Dev4 by YouTuber miiyouandmii2,) being surprised to learn that the developers moved on to Utah, U.S. to learn how to make NES games right after he joined. Upon their return, Dev4 decided to visit them as they started developing Action 52. The recording studio then became their base operations, working from around 11:00 AM to 11:00 PM, but normally until 1 AM, or sometimes 6:00 AM. As the company was a recording studio, every wall was soundproof, meaning that it couldn't be heard from other rooms or outside. With no natural light, it was originally called The Cave. The Cave would become the developers' home for 3 months.

For unknown reasons, Perri stated that all 52 games on Action 52 needed to be completed in about 3 months. Around that time, they had a storyboard design, developed the program and would have tested to make sure that all the games on the multicart would work properly. However, 3 months is quite the minimal time to make an NES game, which could mean that Action 52 had been heavily rushed, resulting in glitches, terrible games, and other flaws, giving the evidence that Perri didn't know how big of a task it was, which could become more obvious as development time passed. He was only in the studio very occasionally, entering it with sometimes coffee, and then leave quickly. As Mario himself puts it, the programming of Action 52 started.

At least, Perri's idea of making a legal multicart which came from buying an illegal multicart for his son was great. Sadly, it was executed extremely poorly due to the bad practices he has done to his own company, because, remember, instead of actually finishing the NES version of Action 52, Vince Perri decided to rush it in 3 months of development and much of the programing was outsourced to college students and other amateur programmers. Despite the evidence that the game would not end well becoming more obvious over time, Perri never delayed its release date since then, leading the game into an utter mess.

Active Enterprises was also working on a handheld console, named the "Action GameMaster". According to Active, it would have featured compatibility with the games for the NES, Genesis and SNES, as well as CD-ROM games, via adapters that would retail individually. It was also going to have a video game titled Cheetahmen III, which would have been a sequel to Cheetahmen II, in addition to a SNES version of Action 52and another multicart, Sports 5 (presumably sports games, as its name implies). However, none of them were ever made.

Nowadays, it is unknown where Perri is, and so is what is his current fate. Curiously, a plenty of people have searched for him in various locations due to the infamy of the game, but Perri is still nowhere to be found, so there isn't any pictures of him circulating online. Also, its clearly obvious that Active Enterprises is anything BUT active anymore.

Anyways, this is Action 52, an unlicensed multicart developed and published by Active Enterprises in September 1991 for the NES only in North America. A port of the game for the Sega Genesis was developed by Farsight Technologies and released 20 months later in May 1993. A port for the SNES in late 1993 was planned, but was ultimately cancelled.

As the title advertises, this multicart contains 52 games in it, mostly based on action and platformer/vertical shoot'em up genres. Each game is given a short description in Action 52's manual, but some of these descriptions cover games from the early development of Action 52 that were very different from the games of corresponding titles. Speaking of the manual, while it's nice that it's translated into multiple languages, which are English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Arabic, it seems pointless as the game was only released in the United States; however, it could be that some people had inherited those languages as they were still speaking them while living in the United States, immigrant or not.

Here's the NES list of games:

The Cheetahmen (you may have been thinking of them as a ripoff of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) is the featured game on the compilation, and was intended to become a multimedia franchise with an accompanying line of merchandise. A Cheetahmen animated television series, a comic book series and T-shirts were planned. An advertisement for comic figures including concept art came on a comic book packaged with Action 52. According to the instruction manual, the advertisement in the back shows that a whole line of action figures based on the Cheetahmen were planned. However, this was never put into practice. And I'm about to show you why it all ran off.

First of all, the introduction screen is so laughably bad, as it's nothing more than a "lights, camera, action!" type of intro, except that the text is replaced with "Lights! Camera! Action 52." Also, this intro is so poorly animated, and it will glitch up a bit when trying to change backgrounds. In addition, the "Yeah! Woo!" drum break, used for the game's title screen, is taken from the popular 1988 hip-hop song It Takes Two by Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock. Since this is a copyrighted song, this could have resulted in Active Enterprises getting sued by the copyright holders, though this will most likely never happen due to Active Enterprises being defunct since at least 1993 or 1994; and also, several songs were plagiarized from The Music Studio for the Atari ST.

The entire game is riddled with extremely poor games with generic to terrible gameplay, casts of characters, controls, and other countless flaws. Even with the 52nd game of the compilation, The Cheetahmen, which looks decent compared to all other games, is still very atrocious and didn't even make Action 52 for the NES worth it due to having practically the same issues. Ugh. It's worth mentioning that this game was rushed to be finished in just 3 months, which is the minimal time to make a single NES game. The 52 games in Action 52 have generic to terrible gameplay with no effort whatsoever.

• In Star Evil, when starting the game, an obstacle appears near the ship, which gives the player almost no time to dodge and can lose a life.
• In Ooze, the jumping controls are poorly programmed, and if the player holds the B button, it can lock you verticality until you let it go in order to move.
• In Critical Bypass, the controls can be clunky with the seizure inducing backgrounds (more on that below), making it very difficult to complete the levels.
• In Streemerz, trying to touch the power ups like the bag of money or magic wand which turn it into a frowning face, which is misleading.
• In Micro Mike, the player moves too fast, making it difficult to avoid the walls and enemies.
• In Storm Over The Desert, the tank touches anything to make them explode, whenever it's a solider or enemy tank.
• In Dedant, if the enemies make it to the bottom, the player is simply doomed since it can only move left or right.
• In Boss, bombs fall down to the ground, which is highly hard to avoid them.

The game has grammatical errors and typos for some of the individual names, despite being made in the United States; Critical Bypass is misspelled as Crytical Bypass, Alfredo and the Fettucinis is misspelled as Alfred n the Fettuc, Bubblegum Rosie is misspelled as Bubble Gum Rossie/Bublgum Rosy, Storm Over the Desert as Storm Over Desert, and Cheetahmen as Cheetamen.

Additionally, the pathetic manual actually only has very brief descriptions of each game, which most of the time are misleading, like Bits and Pieces, for instance, is described to be a puzzle game when it's actually a side-scroller; also, most of the game names, speaking of which, are very misleading and nonsense, too, and they have nothing to do with the aspect of the games whatsoever (much like how the games made by Ubisoft with Tom Clancy's name have nothing in common with his literature). To quote in James Angry Nintendo Nerd's review for example, "Who would think Boss means a frog running around with a gun being ambushed by falling bombs?"

"Boss" in a video game is the term given to an enemy normally more powerful than the others that the player has to beat in a level, a section, or in another environment, so why give that name to such protagonist of a game like that? Speaking of "boss", in some games, like Star Evil, the boss doesn't show up sometimes, meaning you have to die in order and replay the level from the beginning until the boss will finally decide to show up. This is pretty annoying, especially since you will have to lose a life if you want the boss to appear. If it doesn't, you have to do the same thing again until the boss will finally show up to progress to the next level.

Also, Slashers sounds like it's a horror game, kinda like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Friday the Thirteenth or A Nightmare on Elm Street, but nope it's actually a beat'em up, like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat.

The Cheetahmen recycles characters from the other games to make them into enemies, including Saddam Hussein, the enemies from Ooze but recolored, and the protagonist of Haunted Hills, mostly due to Action 52 being rushed to be finished in only 3 months as proposed by Vince Perri.

All the graphics are absolutely horrendous and really ugly that might even be as ugly as an average pirated game on a Famiclone (no, really, these games are a really hideous eyesore to look at to the point that they are extremely poor, looking like someone would actually draw them in Microsoft Paint(brush); also looking like they come from an old Atari game, rather than the NES). They are so atrocious with ugly colors (such as the one shown above) that you might refuse to look at the game for even more than 2 minutes. Flickering occurs a lot mostly due to 2 sprites appearing on the same screen being on the same layer, and the animations are very ugly and stiff that is made worse by the still horizontal and vertical velocities when you move/jump.

In addition, the backgrounds are mostly solid colors with no style whatsoever, and even the other backgrounds that actually have patterns aren't better.

In games that scroll horizontally and vertically, the colors will change when their respective tiles appear or disappear.

There are even seizure-inducing backgrounds, notably the one that consisted of tiles with random black and white colors in Critical Bypass, as shown here. This can literally cause your eyes to become tired after playing this game for too long, due to being flashy. Just look at the above screenshot and that's what'll happen.

In addition, the sound effects are very crappy and hideously laughable cartoonish sound effects. The jumping sounds mostly sound like buzzes that look like an Atari or Taito game and aren't even fitting, and most of the sounds in this port are really poorly composed. Can I even describe in more detail what they really sound like?

The collision detection is so poorly programmed, as most of the time, you can go through walls in platforming games or sometimes fall through them like in Crybaby. These don't really allow the player to cheat in a game by passing through all platforms and enemies while walking on the ceilings, however.

Many of the games are repetitive. A notable example is that a majority of these games are mediocre space shooters, just with different backgrounds, level design, enemies, music, and other stuff. This is just to prove that Active Enterprises, the developers of the game were just lazy and unoriginal in making new or original games for Action 52, since it contains a lot of space shooters, like if you would say that this should have been called Shooter 52 since there's at least 11 space shooters in it, or around 21% of the games. The changes in those space shooters were just backgrounds, music, enemies, the shooting character, and some other stuff.

None of the games on the compilation allow you to continue playing after getting a Game Over. Many NES games allow players to continue playing from the level they got Game Over'd without having to start from the beginning or use passwords for game checkpoints, but Action 52 doesn't will players to do so. To make it worse, there are even games that are so hard to complete that it requires luck to get past a level sequence, making it irritating as players would have to start from the first level of each game again if they get a Game Over. However, upon completing all levels in a game, instead of giving a congratulations screen, it sends you back to level 1 and the game continues until the player gets a game over or quits the game. This shows a sign of laziness.

I've very frequently noticed that a lot of games crash, usually for stupid reasons. Alfredo and Jigsaw are both impossible to play. This is due to the fact that they always fail to load, even on emulators. This will force you to restart your NES. No matter how much you will restart the console, they will still not work. The only way to slightly lower the chances of a crash are if you have a hard-to-find Rev B cartridge or play in some emulators.

Shooting Gallery crashes the game when you try to quit it by pausing the game and hitting "Select", so you have to painstakingly restart your NES by pressing its Reset button, similar to pausing a game on the Master System that's done by pressing the Pause button which is also situated on the console, which not only makes no sense at all, but is a real bothersome headache. They Came from Outer Space also crashes the game. It crashes if you die, just to force you to restart your NES which quickly becomes annoying.

Ooze also isn't safe from crashing. Every time you will finish level 2, the game crashes, making it impossible to complete. And speaking of Ooze, Active Enterprises held a contest in which there was going to be a reward if someone would beat it with a grand prize totaling $104,000 ($52,000 cash, and a scholarship with the same value), but since it locks up once level 2 is completed, as mentioned, and due to the game's shoddy programming and design, it was impossible to claim the alleged prize. This just proves that the developers have no mercy for people who played Ooze on the NES. Likewise, Streemerz also has the chance of crashing when you reach a certain area of one of the levels.

Even despite the quality of the game, it is very disgustingly overpriced, decidedly at $199, which doesn't offer quality at this price, meaning that each game on the system would cost about $4 on average, and even such a price for a single game in Action 52 isn't worth it. Not to mention, this also literally costs for a video game console, such as the SNES, rather than an actual video game, which had the exact same price than Action 52, especially since Action 52 costed way too much money. In fact, there were even computer games stored in floppy disks that often cost almost less than $3, but still, perform much better than all of Action 52’s games.

Is this worth playing? I should say no. It sounded very interesting at the time, but it was ruined due to the practices of Vince Perri. Perhaps the Genesis version is worth it...