Free Play Friday - Smash T.V.

Welcome to Free Play Friday. Where I find an arcade game I'm interested in and play thru it. Today we have, Smash T.V. Released in Arcades in 1990. This twin-stick shooter was a game that was the poster child for quarter muncher and developed by the guys who would work on NBA Jam a couple years later. This game was not meant to be easy - it was meant to take your money and keep you wanting to put more quarters in. There is little background for this game. Set in the year 1999 - its the "most violent gameshow of all time." Your goal is to get to the end of the stage after going room to room having a horde of enemies in front of a live studio audience. It's the gameshow that keeps on giving to the crowd, with Huge screen TVs, VCR players and luxury vacations on the line - shoot em up and loot it down! While playing through this - I realized that this game, might be the pre-cursor to rogue like elements in dungeon crawler type games of the genre like Enter The Gungeon. You are in a room, with waves upon waves of enemies, you choose another room to go to and keep fighting waves and waves of enemies until you reach the boss. Also - you lose more than you win. Sounds like every rogue-like i've played. This game had various amounts of success and ports. Originally coming out on the NES, it had an interesting control scheme for console games at the time. In the arcade, you have a twin stick set up. Left stick to move, Right stick to shoot. The NES did not have this kind of control scheme, which didn't exist for home consoles prior to the Sony playstation 1 Analog controller. So what they did to maintain the "arcade feel" you had to use two controllers. One for movement, the other for shooting. But this is a two player game, which was two players on NES. You need a multi-tap to plug in 4 controllers to allow two players to play at the same time. Cumbersome but creative. The game was later ported to the SNES, which had a more favorable control scheme considering the SNES controller had four face buttons that you could use to shoot and the D-pad to move and did not require a multi tap for two player action. Game also came out during the playstation 2 era with Midway Arcade Classics, and again in the xbox 360 Xbox Live Arcade. By then, twin sticks were common on controllers so you could have a more realistic arcade play. Support this house http://www.hanzohoney.com 0:00 - Attract screen 3:09 - Insert Coins 3:22 - Stage 1 Room 1 4:05 - Stage 1 Room 2 5:24 - Stage 1 Room 3 7:15 - Stage 1 Room 4 8:04 - Stage 1 Room 5 10:25 - Stage 1 Room 6 11:52 - Vs. Mutoid Man 15:02 - Stage 1 Finish 16:10 - Stage 2 Start 16:20 - Stage 2 Room 1 17:33 - Stage 2 Room 2 19:47 - Stage 2 Room 3 22:10 - Stage 2 Room 4 23:05 - Stage 2 Room 5 25:15 - Stage 2 Room 6 29:00 - Stage 2 Room 7 32:25 - Vs. Scarface 37:21 - Stage 2 Finish 38:08 - Stage 3 Start 38:20 - Stage 3 Room 1 39:53 - Stage 3 Room 2 42:10 - Stage 3 Room 3 45:00 - Stage 3 Room 4 51:55 - Stage 3 Room 5 54:45 - Stage 3 Room 6 55:55 - Stage 3 Room 7 1:00:58 - Vs. Twin Cobros 1:04:18 - Stage 3 Room 8 1:06:37 - Stage 3 Room 9 1:15:23 - Vs. Host Tank 1:17:49 - Grand Finale 1:18:51 - Grand Finale End 1:19:38 - Ending #Midway #SmashTV #Freeplayfriday