Total Carnage (Super NES, 1992)

 

Starring Travis Scott!

........I'll show myself out.

So here we are, the game I mentioned in the previous post. The game teachers thought I was playing as a kid, when it was in fact Maximum Carnage. Not that it mattered, they needed to butt out!

Time to finally check out this horrifying violent video game that has brutally killed 0 people.

But first! It's 1999 (the future, Conan) and there's a war goin' on! Here's BNN to report on it.

Bullshit News Network?

Maybe it's Bodacious Neocon Network? ARE there any bodacious neocons? I'm pretty sure one commonality shared by all neocons is that none are bodacious.

Candy Blitzer (no relation) is here to talk about the bastardly General Akhboob.

General Akhboob is developing advanced nuclear bioweapons at his base.

WAIT A MINUTE, is this game where the news media and the Bush Administration came up with that whole Iraq storyline?

Wait, what? She has uncovered the real identity of General Akhboob!

1992: When mainstream news network "journalists" were actually journalists, and did actual on-the-scene investigative reporting. I don't know when they dropped that and started LARPing.

Oh shit! She was kidnapped by Lucifer!

Wait, Baby Milk Factory? LEMME GET MAH BIB.

Unfortunately, after that the gameplay begins, and...ehhh. It's one of those games where you get attacked from all sides. The four main buttons (ABXY) all fire the gun in the corresponding directions, so you can fire while fleeing for your life. Very useful in 2020 Wisconsin!

The American flag! Yep. There it is. Not sure what it does but I guess you collect them? Does this make the hero more 'murican?

Armored vehicles accost our hero as the battle towards the Baby Milk Factory continues! The game autoscrolls, but at a very slow pace.

I also managed to obtain a blue flamethrower that emits big-ass extreme blasts.

AH! JESUS! WHO SAID THAT

"I'll show you the weasel man!" says our hero while fending off demonic hordes of Blue Man Group extras.

...man, I can't believe teachers got mad at me for playing this hypothetical game they made up. This game is AWESOME.

"Patooie! American peegs!" says General Akhboob.

HOW DOES THIS GAME EXIST

Ya know, trying to play the victim doesn't really fly when you're standing in front of a giant biohazard symbol.

Like, we know you've got WMDs in that baby milk factory, Akhboob!

Fun Fact: Before he got into WMDs, Akhboob was the leading exporter of baby milk.

Things begin to get overwhelming. Like even on full auto I can't shoot fast enough to kill all of these guys. You need two players to survive this thing.

Get to the end of a level and you rescue hostages, seen here fleeing with their hands up. Some of them are in bikinis for some reason. Was...was Akhboob collecting blondes? But why? When I collect ladies, I try to go with redheads.

Player Two is seen here, as our heroes put on the creepiest grins ever. I half-expect a Xenomorph mini-mouth to snap out of one of those grins.

Another vehicle fight! Akhboob's tanks look Russian. I mean I'm not a tank expert but I'm not going out on a limb here either. Russia is the world's number one exporter of tanks to tinpot dictators. However I'll cut them some slack because they also export tall, sassy women.

We arrive at the factory as the battle for the fate of humanity continues. Somebody has to stop the WMD program, and By God, that somebody is me!

....can you imagine if I get to the end of this incredibly difficult journey and discover that there weren't any WMDs? I'd be pissed!

Akhboob wouldn't tell lies like that though. ...He has integrity.

Here we've got enemy minions with swivel gatling guns right outta The Terminator.

The next boss is Orcus. Players of D&D will immediately recognize that name as one of the major demons, pretty much the archrival of the notorious Demogorgon.

Orcus himself. I'm speechless. Tremendous game. It just assaults the senses with bombastic colors and booms. It's all about the booms.

Whittle him down and he starts snorting fire everywhere. I don't wanna talk about it.

Next is Akhboob's Military Parade. This sorta reminds me of Saddam's truck-based SCUD missiles, except those were green.

Our hero sets fire to Akhboob's air force! Now he has no way to deliver the deadly bioweapon. So he's basically rendered obsolete, but we still have to bring him to justice.

In a cutscene, we see the BNN truck getting swallowed whole by a massive demon!

OH NO!

...Anyway

The final boss (yeah we're there already) is a massive multi-stage monstrosity of a fight. First you fight the good General in this flying robot contraption. Unlike Orcus and the various vehicle minibosses, this thing actually has a life meter.

Deplete that life meter and you get Giant Head Akhboob, who looks like M. Bison.

Fun Fact that will get me flagged by Homeland: In the arcade version of the game, Akhboob is literally Hitler.

I was about to commend the game for having the villain just be a straight-up dictator rather than an alien or something, but nope, at the very end he is unmasked as this...thing.

Deplete his life meter yet again and he becomes this...half of a mouth and lots of Akhboob Clones start leaping out all over the screen.

WHAT IS EVEN HAPPENING ANYMORE

Survive THAT and Akhboob is behind bars. Finally...finally the threat to humanity has ended. The WMDs are dismantled and world peace is achieved. Phew, I'm glad we found the WMDs. If they turned out to not exist and I went there and fought for nothing, I'd be pretty fucking upset. I'd probably lob my trusty blue flamethrower at what's left of that BNN van.

We end with Player Uno firing his gun into the air while making an O-Face. Player Dos isn't too impressed...but Unnamed Lady certainly is! "Oh baby" she says when reached for comment.

After that you go to the Pleasure Dome where you have to collect all the gems that Akhboob stole. Get as many of his ill-gotten gains as possible within the short time allotted, and you'll get a better ending.

Wait, what? This takes place in the Smash TV universe? Seriously?

If I may get political for a moment, props to this game for having everyone be scantily-clad regardless of gender. If you're gonna have a bunch of chix in bikinis, have the decency to have the guys also half-disrobed. Most games would have the women in bikinis and the guys in giant poofy suits with massive shoulderpads. It's idiotic.

I don't know if there's plenty to go around. I count 3 chix and 4 bros. There's a reason Craigslist orgies always try to invite more chix than bros.

Unless by "goodies" it means piles of cocaine, which judging from this crew, it probably does.

All this talk of boobs and jerking is quite enough for me. Cool game here, but SUPER difficult, basically requires a second player at all times.

We end with a coked-up Player Uno shooting into the air while his Xeno inner-mouth snaps at the air.

Unnamed Lady: "Oh God! Don't stop!"

...........

Well, now that we've finished this game that gives me horrible goddamn flashbacks to my youth... I mean the teachers outright LIED about me and used the name of this game to do it.

I wonder if they ended up getting jobs at BNN after that. Takes some real jackassery to lie about a kid, doesn't it?

Now that I've looked at it... I think it's time to see how deep the rabbit hole goes. I've never played Smash TV. Back in 2010 I had it planned as one of the very early site posts (specifically, the SNES Super version) but I never got around to it. Probably because I was busy taming some strange, so I think I had a good reason. Now I'd like to take a look at the NES version too.

This is all unexpected, as I had other ideas in mind. But why not, let's see what else this shared universe has in store.