"You suck at this game!"
The year is 1999, and the evil General Akhboob closes off his country of "Kookistan" to the rest of the world and captures all of the reporters that went to the scene looking for a story. Also, the general is using his base to create mutants, stockpiling weapons and doing other various nasty things, and it's up to the Doomsday Squad (Captain Carnage and Major Mayhem) to go in, destroy the base and capture General Akhboob.
This video game provides examples of:
- Adaptation Dye-Job: In most versions of the game, the showgirl by the red contestant at the Pleasure Dome wore a blue bikini and slippers. In the SNES version, her attire was changed to red.
- America Saves the Day: Hammered home by the presence of American flags that both heroes can collect. One "hint" in the game tells you to "defend our flag".
- As Long as It Sounds Foreign: General Akhboob's insults during the intermissions. He gives some goofy pseudo-Arabic rant, ending it with "Allbahyu faradallah!"note Also, some of the Gratuitous German present consists of words that are not taunts, like "Schnell!", which just means "quickly".
- Auto-Scrolling Game: For the most part, anyway, except in challenges and bosses.
- Beating A Dead Player: Naturally, they'll do this to you. Deconstructed in some cases that when your character blows up, he takes out some of the mooks beating his carcass.
- Big Bad: General Akhboob — who turns out to be Adolf Hitler.
- Black Blood: In the American version, the blood is changed to a different color for censorship.
- Blatant Lies: Akhboob in the beginning. "ALL WE ARE MAKING IS BABY MILK!" Naturally, the "baby milk factory" is a bio-weapons lab. He also says "I am a peace loving citizen!" while you fight him- as in while he’s trying to kill you in increasingly violent ways.
- Bowdlerization: The SNES port is noticeably censored in comparison to the original arcade version; neither hero has a hole in his chest after stepping on mines, and the blood goes from red to blue. Additionally, General Akhboob is thrown in jail instead of being executed, and one of the forms in his fight, the one that shows him to be Hitler, is removed.
- Brutal Bonus Level: Most warp spirals will send you to bonus screens where you can boost your score, but all of them are loaded with hazards that can still result in death.
- Bullet Hell: Some sections require the player to dodge massive amounts of goo being shot out of Exploding Barrels.
- Call-Back: To Smash TV, since Akhboob will occasionally shout, "I'll buy you for a dollar!"
- Color-Coded Multiplayer: Captain Carnage is a white soldier; Major Mayhem is a black soldier. Both NARC and Smash TV previously had player 1 having light skin and player 2 having dark skin.
- Cutscene Power to the Max: On the electric chair challenge, your supermuscleman can potentially survive 60,000-volt blasts through his cranium. But in-game, he's a One-Hit-Point Wonder.
- Damage-Sponge Boss: Both Orcus' and Akhboob's machine forms can take copious amounts of damage before going down. Expect to spend a long time fighting them. At least Akhboob is kind enough to use a health bar. The bad news is he has a lot of phases to his fight.
- Deadline News: News reporter "Candy Blitzer" is captured by a mutant on live TV just before she exposes Akhboob's real identity.
- Dogpile Of Doom: With copious amounts of enemies swarming throughout, it's inevitable this will happen unless you've mastered the game. Since you're already dead after the first poke, it seems like laughable overkill.
- Dynamic Difficulty: The game is already hard, but it gets even harder if you play well, having less powerups, less functional smart bombs and more enemy smart bombs you have to touch to diffuse and not die instead. Also, after more than five minutes of using just one credit, the game removes your invincibility to bombs.
- Electric Torture: You get one in the electric chair challenge. Fail to escape torture and you get turned into ashes. Also, the good ending has Akhboob getting one as well, with the same results.
- Elite Mooks: Mr. Butane takes many hits to kill and is the only infantryman with good durability.
- Every Car Is a Pinto: As well as every other ground vehicle in General Akhboob's fleet.
- Everything Trying to Kill You: Everything in the game is out to give your supermuscloid the coveted hole-in-one.
- Exploding Barrels: They don't explode when the player shoots them, but they usually explode on their own, and en masse, showering the screen with purple goo that the player has to dodge.
- Expy: Captain Carnage and Major Mayhem are pretty much the more muscled (but equally wimpy) versions of the two unnamed Smash TV contestants.
- Family-Unfriendly Death: General Akhboob is strapped into an electric chair, and each player gets to rampantly mash the bomb button to shock him more and more while he's screaming in agony, until he's reduced to a burnt skeleton. Before you feel bad for him, remember he can do the same to you if you don't mash hard enough in the previous stage.
- Fire-Breathing Weapon:
- The heroes have flamethrowers as available weapons. Two kinds, in fact, a weaker red and a stronger blue.
- The mook known as Mr. Butane carries one.
- Orcus blows fire out of his nose.
- Firing in the Air a Lot: After each level, your character does this in a nondescript desert with a hardy YEAHHHHHHH! followed by a goofy grin.
- Foreshadowing: "Can you reach the shocking conclusion?"
- Force Field: Temporarily provided whenever one of the heroes places a bomb. Sometimes.
- General Ripper: General Akhboob is the villain, and he is also ruthless enough to perform genetic mutations and taunt his enemies.
- Good Old Fisticuffs: Mr. Butane punches you if you get too close. Ditto the mooks with flaming fists.
- Gorn: Nearly everything humanoid dies with gratuitous blood and chunks.
- Gratuitous German: The final boss will occasionally yell words like "Blitzkriegen", "Schnell!", and "Braunschweiger!"note
- Hoist by His Own Petard: If you capture Akhboob at the end, you can return the electric chair favor in kind.
- Invincibility Power-Up: A headband.
- Invulnerable Attack: Planting a bomb will provide a temporary force field, but it only lasts until the planted bomb detonates.
- I Shall Taunt You: Another of General Akhboob's specialties."You suck at this game!"
- Kaizo Trap: After you beat Orcus, don't stand around. Orcus' body will bounce around before Akhboob's limo drives across the screen — both of which are capable of turning your supermuscleman into meat sauce.
- Losing Horns: Played when a screen-clearing bomb turns out to be a dud.
- Ludicrous Gibs: Nearly everything that dies gets splattered or turns into gratuitous chunks.
- Macho Masochism: One segment has mooks set themselves on fire on an electrified fence and chase you around swinging flaming fists.
- Made of Iron: Mooks and Bosses, but also...
- Made of Plasticine: You the PC, and most of the humanoid mooks, who can be chunkified or splattered in one hit. Double Subverted in the electric chair minigame, where you can survive if you are good at mashing, but lose all your lives if you don't.
- Man on Fire: Setting fire to certain objects (e.g., vehicles) will turn nearby Mooks into burning men, who charge at you with flaming fists. You're not so lucky — if your super wussy plasticine muscleman touches anything even remotely flaming (like the burning men), you are instant cinders.
- The Many Deaths of You: Clubbed to death; blown up; electrocuted; thrown in the air with a hole in the chest; instant cinders.
- Marathon Boss: Akhboob has seven phases, and all of them are very durable.
- Medium Awareness:
- General Akhboob's "You suck at this game!"
- In a two-player game, at the end of each stage, the player with the lesser score will think to himself about being the inferior of the two soldiers. One such thought bubble reads, "Player 1 is a dork."
- "All Smash TV players should quit now and flee from this machine."
- Muscles Are Meaningless: Boy, howdy! Your character's muscles put even the Hulk to shame. But one touch of anything and you are instant meatsauce. One can say that their super duper muscles are a liability as it only makes them a larger target — far more than their Smash TV counterparts.
- Named by the Adaptation: The Manual for the SNES Port gives Ahkboob the first and middle names Myron & Farley respectively.
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Nintendo Hard: Per arcade standards. This is a LONG (hour-plus) arcade game (most arcade games only take 15-20 minutes tops, depending on genre) in which thousands of enemies, many of which can take hundreds or thousands of hits to kill (especially the bosses) all swarm you. Also, you die in one poke, and it doesn't help that your supermuscles merely make you a larger target. Worse, extra lives and powerups are harder to get the longer you play, and if you go far enough without continuing, your bombs will eventually not give you the standard invulnerability. Noted in this one-credit-clear longplay
, as the player notes that it is "not a game that encourages 1-credit play, due to the fact that you get to keep your score when you continue" and buyins through many continues will get better scores. - Nitro Boost: Sneakers increase the heroes' walking speed as they go "Whoop-whoop-whoop-whoop-whoop".
- No Celebrities Were Harmed: Being a spoof of the Gulf War, General Ahkboob is a clear parody of Saddam Hussein.
- Notice This: The game will very helpfully throw out indicators so you know what you'll need to shoot at. "BLOW THIS UP!" indeed.
- Not-So-Harmless Villain: Akhboob. He is as cartoonishly evil as possible, a Bad Liar and in general hard to take seriously. However, he is deceptively competent, as he has entire swarms of soldiers and mutants under his command, captures you and nearly kills you at least once with an electric chair, some of his atrocities are committed onscreen, and he is actually very hard to take down. He even has an ending where he escapes.
- One-Hit-Point Wonder: Your superdupermuscleman is instant meatsauce if he gets poked by any enemy hazard.
- 1-Up: Dog tags in various segments. And you're definitely going to need as many as you can get!
- Ow, My Body Part!: Orcus, the game's first boss, will scream something like this whenever one of his (its?) body parts is destroyed.Orcus: "My head! My head!"note
- Pistol-Whipping: What some of the grunts do if you get close. Their attacks seem clumsy, but don't laugh — one poke and your supermuscloid is meatsauce.
- Press X to Not Die: A "challenge" that randomly pops up involves Captain Carnage and Major Mayhem being strapped to electric chairs. Each player has to mash their start button as much as possible to prevent them both from seeing the continue screen. This is inverted in the best ending, where General Akhboob is captured and subject to the same punishment, care of the players.
- Putting on the Reich: Fighting Akhboob's giant mutant head eventually results in him donning a Hitler stache and yelling "Schnell!" when shot.
- Ramming Always Works — but only while the hero is invincible. A special note should be made for the very last part of the game: you get a forcefield and have to ram ALL of the Akhboob clones to prevent them from escaping.
- Recycled Soundtrack: The music that plays within the Pleasure Domes is the "Ten Seconds!" (e.g. "continue?") music from Smash TV.
- Schrodinger's Villain: If any of the Akhboob clones escape, the real Akhboob escapes. Thus, the only way to capture him is to catch all the clones. And even then you still have to have unlocked the Pleasure Domes, or else the scrolling epilogue text will claim he escaped anyway.
- Shared Life-Meter: One part of the Final Boss fight (with the two giant mutant faces) uses the second variety.
- Shout-Out:
- Orcus recycles several of his attacks and part of his cybernetic visual style from the final boss of Narc, most famously the stream of severed tongues (the staff of Narc had been bought out by Midway at around the time Narc was hitting the market, so it's probably not a coincidence).
- A few nods to Back to the Future: The electric chairs measure the voltage in gigawatts, and the UN general shouts GREAT SCOTT! when a Red Shirt gets eaten up by a mutant.
- Shows Damage: Orcus has no healthbar, but you will know your progress because it gets more and more mutilated.
- Smart Bomb: Some bombs, when picked up, clear out all the enemies with the TOTAL CARNAGE! scream. But watch out, some of them are duds.
- Spared by the Adaptation: In the SNES version, if Akhboob is captured, he is instead imprisoned rather than electrocuted to death, but not before vowing to return.
- Sore Loser: In a 2-player game, the player who scored lower sulks behind the winning player as he shoots his gun in the air and cheers, folding his arms and making a disparaging comment about him to himself.
- Spread Shot: One powerup gives you a three-way shot, perfect for taking out large groups of mooks.
- Stock Audio Clip:
- The "Bingo!", "I love it", and "Total Carnage!" sounds come directly from Smash TV. As well as Mutoid Man's "NO WAY!" if you pick up a defective smart bomb.
- Orcus' grunts and groans are the same ones used by Mutoid Man.
- Stupid Jetpack Hitler: Akhboob's true identity is Hitler and he has several futuristic forms.
- Take That, Audience!: Fail to collect enough keys to unlock access the Pleasure Domes? "You suck." If Akhboob escapes, the game is even more vicious.
- Taking You with Me: During certain death animations, the player character will drop a primed bomb at his dying feet.
- Title Drop: Occurs whenever a Smart Bomb actually works. Also before the first challenge, you get this caption:YOU ARE SURROUNDED! PREPARE FOR TOTAL CARNAGE!
- Title Scream: Taken directly from a sound bite from Smash TV.
- Top-Heavy Guy: You are, as well as many of the enemies.
- Torso with a View: Stepping on a mine, getting run over, or getting squashed inexplicably bores a hole through their chests. Their bodies are flung skyward, allowing the players to see their bloody cavities.
- Walking Shirtless Scene: Your supermusclemen, along with most mooks, are shirtless, further accentuating the (parodied) manliness of the game.
- Warp Zone: The first spirals can take the heroes further into the game, provided they have a valid four-letter password.
- What the Hell, Player?: If the players let Akhboob escape, the game will not hesitate to tell them how much they suck.
- World of Muscle Men: The players (natch) and even many of the enemies look quite top-heavy. About the only characters that don't look muscular are the prisoners of war.
