A playthrough of Sunsoft's 1993 license-based action game for the Super Nintendo, Taz-Mania.
That the 16-bit era was not kind to Sunsoft is no secret. After creating a long string of top-tier NES games, the company shifted away from in-house development. They instead focused on publishing titles made by western development houses that were based on popular kids' TV franchises from America. This turned out to be a somewhat less than prudent business decision, as made evident by disasters like their SNES game Road Runner in Death Valley Rally ( • Road Runner's Death Va... ). But that's not to say that everything they put out was terrible. They did occasionally manage to release something worthwhile, and on this particular occasion, fortune smiled on Taz-Mania.
Taz-Mania was a popular Warner Bros. cartoon from the early 1990s based on the Looney Tunes' Tasmanian Devil character, and after starring in a string of well-received Sega games released throughout 1992, he finally made his way to the Super Nintendo in the spring of 1993.
Instead of creating a bog-standard mascot-style platformer, developer Visual Concepts went with something a bit more ambitious: they brought together elements of collect-a-thon platformers and 3D racing games to create something quite unique in its time.
Taz lives to eat, so naturally, that's what he has to do as he carves his way through the Tasmanian bush. The goal of each of the fifteen stages is to gobble down a set number of kiwi birds before the timer runs out, but he has to be careful to not get flattened by cars, snatched up by pteradactyls, shot by aborigines, sexually assaulted by the She-Devil, or worse. There are tons of obstacles and traps, and they all stay nicely in character with the show.
To help even the odds, Taz can eat flying birds to earn bonus seconds on the timer, he can grab special items (like the spring shoes) from a moped-riding dingo, and he can spin himself into a tornado that will instantly demolish anything in his path.
The gameplay is solid and fun. The controls are simple and easy, though a bit slippery at times, and the challenge ramps up nicely over the course of the game. It's not an easy game though - it takes some real practice to be able to reliably grab the kiwis and to avoid running into certain roadside obstacles.
The quality of the graphics is impressive for the platform. The action is fast and smooth, and the road regularly rises and falls to give a solid impression of 3D space, a bit like in the Top Gear games. The characters are all good likenesses for their TV counterparts, and Taz is brought to life with a ton of funny little animations. It's too bad that the stages all start to look the same after awhile, but that's a minor complaint. The sound is excellent, too. The music is light, peppy, and memorable, and Taz's unintelligible grunts and yells are reproduced perfectly.
While I wouldn't call Taz-Mania a classic for the ages, I have always enjoyed playing it. The gameplay is novel and fast-paced and the game does a great job of capturing the look and feel of the cartoon - does a game based on a cartoon really need to do anything else?
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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7 сен 2024
