 Ssssssssssssssssssssss That's drunk! In theory, American Gladiators should lend itself well to a video game format. It was a syndicated game show from the late 80s to the mid-90s where regular Joes had to take on these hulking brutes and a series of physical challenges. No, not those physical challenges, there were all sorts of weird inventive games you had to play like rolling around in a giant hamster wheel or, my favorite, dodging tennis balls getting shot out of a tennis ball machine gun. And the Gladiators themselves were all built up and promoted in the same style as Pro Wrestling, complete with edgy-sounding nicknames like Nitro, Turbo, or Saber. Perfect video game fodder, right? Well, not in the case of the American Gladiator Super Nintendo game. I will say it's not a total loss, but overall, it's just not very good. There's seven different events here, with the goal of course being to outperform the other contestant, which is weird because there are some events where you never even see the score they get until after you've completed your event. There is some head-to-head stuff, though, where you're both on the same screen, and I should mention that some of these events are two-player versus, which is kinda neat. There's the Atlasphere, that's the goofy hamster wheel I mentioned earlier, only here you just take a top-down view and try and roll up these little hill things. There's Assault, that's where you dodge tennis balls flying at you 100 miles an hour, while moving from station to station and trying to hit a target. There's the Human Cannonball, where you swing on a rope into one of the Gladiators, and, uh, that's it. Joust is where you fight another Gladiator with a giant Q-tip, trying to knock them off their platform or just make them submit. The wall has you, uh, climb a wall while a Gladiator tries to pull you off. Powerball has you race to put these little balls into these containers while Gladiators try to maul you. And last, there's the Eliminator, the obstacle course which is randomized between dodging, jumping, running, and riding down a zipline. So it's kinda like Nickelodeon Guts, only not completely broken. It's still kinda lousy, but it doesn't totally suck. Visually, this game isn't much, as you can see, and the music isn't much better, but what makes this game a total stay-away are the inconsistent controls. Some events are okay, the Atmosphere is functional. I mean, it's kinda boring, but it works in its own way. The Joust actually has a modicum of strategy to it, where you wanna try and block with one button while bashing high or low with another. Powerball works in theory, and you can have a second player in there too, which is cool, but once you've got the ball and you get tackled, you gotta go to the other side and grab the next ball from over there. Boy, it would've been nice to have the game actually mentioned that. Assault is ridiculously unintuitive. You go to each barrier and press Y to switch the viewpoint, then press R to pick up the gun, and you have to be standing in the exact right spot to pick it up. And don't forget to use the absurdly inaccurate aiming mechanic in the upper right. Then to leave to the next barrier, you press the L button to put the gun down and you just shuffle off awkwardly. Of course, the game doesn't actually tell you any of this, you just have to screw around until you figure it out, and there's no scan of the manual online anywhere. The absolute worst are the wall climb and the human cannonball. I don't have the slightest idea how the controls are supposed to work on the wall climb. I think they tried to do some sort of gimmicky thing by pressing buttons along with the direction on the D-pad in a certain rhythm as a way to build momentum, or at least that's how it seems. Whatever it is, it doesn't work. And human cannonball, you have two meters up top, they start in less than a second, you fly across the screen and wildly miss your opponent, and wait, that's it? Seriously? What the hell was that? The obstacle course has you tapping the L and R buttons back and forth to run and build momentum, all while dodging stuff, and I guess it's okay, but it sure as hell isn't enough to save this game. From what I can tell, the Genesis game is pretty much the exact same game, so that's a stay-away too. However, the NES, American Gladiators game, has one major thing going for it. That scream. So yeah, American Gladiators is definitely a disappointment and a no-doubt stay-away, and that's too bad because I was really hoping to like this one. When I was growing up, I had an American Gladiators-style game for Game Boy. It was a licensed game, in fact, Bart vs. the Juggernaut, and that game was actually halfway decent, so I figured, hey, if a Game Boy game can get it right, then surely a Super Nintendo game can, but nope. Even the events that work are still pretty dull, and the events that don't work are a complete unintuitive mess. Avoid this game. Alright, I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.