It’s impossible. It’s frustrating. And you can’t stop yourself from trying one more time.
Smash TV is an unapologetically difficult arcade game that was successful despite promising nothing but a gruesome death once a quarter was deposited, again and again.
With roots in Robotron and later inspiring the likes of Geometry Wars, the difficult gameplay of Smash TV was offset by an empowering eight-way direction of movement/ shooting and a regularly-appearing crop of power-ups, but don’t be mistaken: you’ll die, and you’ll cherish every quarter spent enabling your many deaths.
Smash TV properly sets the stage for its audience by giving them one of their own. Taken from the film/book The Running Man, Smash TV likewise adopts the premise of a TV game show that pits its contestants in death matches broadcast live before a cheering crowd.
Because The Running Man is a film, the game show is used as a premise as a way to examine the ethics of entertainment as an opiate of the masses. Because Smash TV is a video game, the theme of the game show is the entire point of the game. It makes us want to succeed. We’re motivated to make it to the next screen where the announcer will encourage us by saying, “Big money!”
Players don’t need to be confronted with overarching themes, not when the second boss Scarface responds to player damage with grotesque facial abrasions. (Very unfortunate name, Scarface; seems like that’s the only thing anyone ever noticed on his C.V.)
It’s then by no means strange that the very enjoyable violence on display here was largely excused in this case, but would come to plague the Manhunt series years later. Both shared the same premise and were extremely violent, but the latter caught a lot of negative attention for packaging itself as a snuff film.
Perhaps Manhunt makers Rockstar was still enjoying its “bad boy” status from the success of Grand Theft Auto III and the criminally-unappreciated State of Emergency, but it could have avoided the bans and outrage if only it used the bright colors, cleavage and gently-recycled Robocop quotes of Smash TV.
Reality television has become mainstream with stars willing to do anything to be famous; meanwhile, the world of Smash TV already here from being set in the far-off year of 1999). As much as I’d enjoy an updated version of this video game, the satire of enjoyable game show violence is just dated by this point.
Where I got to within one hour: Halfway through the third snake level, with countless restarts
Would I play this again: As long as dollars are made out of four quarters, I will
Numbers of days so far in the Year of the Play-a-DayStation: 6
Play-a-Daystation 