Smash TV (Xbox 360)

CNET editors' rating: 3.5 stars Very good
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Overall score: 7.9 (3.5 stars)
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Gamespot editors' review

• Reviewed by: Jeff Gerstmann
• Reviewed on: 11/29/2005
• Released on: 11/24/2005

It's a great time to be a fan of dual-joystick, Robotron-style action games. The release of the Xbox 360, with built-in support for downloadable games via Xbox Live Arcade, has opened up a world of opportunity for all sorts of games that might not fly in a $50 retail package but are great pickups for $5 or $10. And it just so happens that there are already three games on the service that deliver that Robotron-style action. The latest, Smash TV, is a sort of spiritual successor to Robotron: 2084, which Midway originally released in arcades back in 1990. Smash TV took the "left stick moves, right stick shoots" concept to the far-flung future of 1999, where game shows have become violent competitions where the winner gets fabulous prizes...and the loser dies. So, yeah, it's Robotron meets The Running Man, and with its Xbox Live support for cooperative play and scoreboards, it has probably never been better.

Good luck... You'll need it!

Smash TV is broken up into three levels, each of which is broken up into multiple rooms. Each room has a door on each wall, and enemies come spewing through these doors shortly after you enter each room. The basic enemy just runs at you with what appears to be a baseball bat, but you'll also encounter small tanks, wall-mounted turrets, crazy snake-men, and Mr. Shrapnel, a pudgy little guy who walks around the edges of the level, stopping eventually so that he can explode and send bits of debris flying in all directions. While no one regular enemy is too tough to beat, each level sends what feels like hundreds if not thousands of enemies at you, often at the same time, from all directions. This makes your ability to get out of the way pretty important, but being able to maintain a clear path to move around in is a pretty key skill as well. At the end of each level, you'll face a boss. The first level puts you up against Mutoid Man, a multistaged tough guy with tank treads for legs, who rolls around, firing eye lasers and various other weaponry at you. The enemy design is inventive and still pretty cool after all these years.

The game was originally designed to suck the quarters right out of your pocket. With its tough boss fights and ridiculous swarms of enemies, dying in Smash TV is easy to do. You're given infinite continues when playing alone, but when playing as a duo (which works just as well on one system as it does over Xbox Live), one player has to remain alive at all times--if both of you happen to run out of lives at the same time, you're done. Given those constraints, Smash TV isn't a punishingly difficult game, on its own. But when you work in the game's scoreboards and achievements, it becomes practically impossible. That's because the scoreboard divides your game score by the number of times you continued. Sure, you can just die your way through the entire game, but you'll never get a decent position on the scoreboard that way. Also, the game's Xbox 360 achievements include finishing the entire game without continuing, a feat that requires a ludicrous amount of focus and probably no small amount of luck. If you're already a Smash TV fan, the scoreboards and achievements should provide enough challenge to get you hooked all over again.

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