 Suuunnnness drunk! One of my favorite things about going through these older games is finding something made from a dev team that wasn't happy with playing it safe, especially with the licensed title. You see both ends of the spectrum with this on Super Nintendo where you've got titles like True Lies, which is a really fun game featuring a surprising amount of blood... well, at least on SNES... But of course, you also have mailed in crap that makes you question the meaning of life... like Wizard of Oz. Keeping that in mind, I really admire the hell out of games, like Lawnmower Man. Is it good? Eh, not really. It has its strong point, but is it interesting to the point that it's actually kind of surprising? Oh yeah, definitely. It does help to have super low expectations going into games like this, but man, Lawnmowerman has no business being this weird and this goofy. I guess maybe it shouldn't be too surprising since this game was developed by Sales Curve Interactive, and while that's an incredibly goofy name, they did also make the very good top-down shooter Firepower 2000. So the story here is that this crazy scientist is trying to do experiments on virtual reality with the hopes of somehow turning it into a weapon for the military or something? Because virtual reality allows you to invade brains somehow? I don't know. So they find this learning disabled guy named Joe, but things go wrong and it's up to Angelo and Carla to warp into his virtual domain and defeat him somehow, because otherwise he could be released into the global network, whatever that is. I honestly have no idea how any of this makes any sense, but hey, it sounds cool. And really, the game is the same way. Describing all the different gameplay elements here makes this game sound pretty cool, because you switch between Run and Gun Shoot'em Up and, uh, Superman-style flying stages? So weird. The game starts out with you choosing between either Angelo or Carla, with the goal being to find your way around each level, eventually earning the ability to decode the security system in order to unlock the last level, where you gotta hunt down the Lawnmowerman himself. The game starts out as your typical side-scrolling Run and Gun Turrican-style game locked into just shooting left or right with the ability to charge your weapon and collect and use bombs. Only, uh, you'll notice right away the controls here are not the best. They're trying to go for the whole momentum thing, where the longer you hold down a direction on the D-pad the faster you go, but it does not work in a game like this where enemies come at you from all directions, and their projectiles blend into the background. I mean seriously, what the hell just killed me? I mean imagine playing Contra 3 with Mario-style momentum-based controls, only you can't see what's coming at you. I don't care what other bells and whistles you throw at me, the game's just not gonna work. Getting past that initial section is really just a matter of inching across the screen little by little and just crouching the entire time. Come on, is this a Run and Gun or a Crawl and Cower? And sometimes, even if you do duck, they still manage to hit you. It's cheap as hell. Anyway, you need to collect data to grant access to the endpoint, and in this first section it's just right over here, so that's no problem. And after that, you get to these incredibly goofy first person flying sections where you gotta dodge what's coming at you by tapping left and right with the D-pad. I admit, this is pretty damn cool for an SNES and definitely ahead of its time, but the gray makes it feel like I'm flying through Paddy and Selma's house on the Simpsons. After that, it's more Run and Gun stuff, find the data, unlock the exit, and dodge an insane amount of stuff coming at you, and you go back and forth between those two modes for a bit, occasionally stumbling upon a terminal, where you have to enter in a code to blow it up. It's just a simple matching game. Eventually, the flying stages are more than just dodging stuff, you get to make stuff go boom, and again, this is pretty cool. Eventually, the flying sections switch to a third person perspective for more of a traditional rail shooter approach. And all in all, you've got three lives and three continues to get through 30-something short levels, although when you continue, you do so from the same spot. So really, you get nine lives to get through the whole game, which is not nearly enough because this game gets ridiculously hard at times. One major selling point this game has going for it is that it's two-player co-op, or at least the Run and Gun sections are. The flying levels make you take turns. And okay, this just looks funny. I mean, it looks like you're fighting some face-painted drunk guy that'd be in the front row of an Auburn Tigers football game. Lawnmower Man's biggest selling point, in my opinion, is the soundtrack. Seriously, this sounds like something from Clan of Zymox. It's just missing the vocals. The music here is really impressive. It reminds me of Metal Morph in that sense, another mediocre science fiction game I looked at a while back, only I think I like this soundtrack even more than that one. So yeah, Lawnmower Man has some cool ideas, and they're actually executed reasonably well for the time, and it would be a recommendation if the gameplay weren't so clunky and so cheap. It's classic one-hit death stuff here, and if you think that's bad, wait till you play the Sega Genesis version. It's pretty much the same thing only faster, because, you know, blast processing and all that. So you have even less of a chance of putting up a fight against stuff you can barely even see. Lawnmower Man is just one of those weird oddball curiosities. I'd only recommend it if you're sick to death of everything else. I certainly don't think it's bad, just that you're way better off playing other stuff first, even when it comes to licensed games like Alien 3 or Judge Dread. I'd put this one alongside other interesting but flawed games like Demolition Man. Lawnmower Man is definitely an interesting playthrough, but it's one of those games where you gotta put in the work to get to it, and your mileage is gonna vary on that big time. Alright, I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.