Active's initial attempt at a game was, if nothing else, something that must be seen to be believed. The game starts off with a digital audio loop that bears more than a striking resemblance to "It takes Two" by Rob Base, after which a deep voice instructs you to "Make your selection... Now."

And it's all downhill from there.

I'm not going to cover all 52 games individually. This being the kind of game that the internet loves to hate, I'm sure anyone reading this will have more than ample access to a reviewer willing to torment themselves in such a manner. (I recommend the Angry Video Game Nerd's review.) Instead, I'm just going to cover the highlights.

For starters, there's the menu itself, divided into three sections which you can switch between by pressing select. The graphics here are, as far as menus go, pretty good, and there's no obvious indication of a major problem, but closer inspection reveals something else. For many of the games, the allotted space isn't big enough to fit the full title, leading to some of the games being given either abbreviated titles, or misspelled ones. Bubblegum Rossie becomes Bubblegum Rosy, Star Evil becomes Startevil. Ninja Assault becomes Ninja Asault, and so on. Strangely enough, Dedant is apparently supposed to be spelled that way, and is not a shortening of Dead Ant.

Speaking of Star Evil, this game is just one of several titles to receive particular notoriety. The game itself is a vertical space shooter that, aside from it's poor quality, would be unremarkable, except that there is a large obstacle directly in front of you as soon as the game starts, requiring you to IMMEDIATELY swerve to the left or face death in less than a second. The graphics and sound are also fairly unpleasant, and the hit detection is questionable at times, but seeing as there's hardly any enemies to deal with, and the obstacles appear in a fairly predictable pattern, it's not much trouble.

Micro Mike is another of the games that takes ridiculous deaths to new levels. This time, it's a horizontal shooter, supposedly taking place in a microscopic "Honey, I shrunk the Kids" kind of world, though you'd never really know it from looking at the strange blue/green patterns and pink sprites. The main problem with this game, however, is that you have to swerve through a series of obstacles at the most blinding speed imaginable. There are enemies to shoot, but they're hardly a threat compared to the frantic pace you're expected to keep up all the way through. It's not uncommon for the game to end in less than a minute.

In all, there are 13 space shooters, and a few other games that come close, despite a minor change in setting. The shooters themselves vary in many of their details, but not in their quality. These games are just plain bad in every conceivable way, with very few, if any, redeeming qualities to be found. The overwhelming majority of games on the cart are platformers, or at least reasonable facsimiles thereof. While still sloppy, cheap and all around broken, these games vary a bit more, with some actually being kind of enjoyable. The two most infamous are Ooze and Bubblegum Rossie.

Ooze is remembered rather notoriously because it was part of a special promotion. If you beat the game, you would be given a secret code, which you could us to have your name entered in a draw for a cash prize. There's just one problem, the game is literally unbeatable on account of shoddy programming. Hell, just getting through level 1 is a real trial by ordeal, not because of the sparse peppering of slime related enemies or occasional pit to jump over, but because the controls are a mess.

In fact, several of the platforming games suffer from the same incredibly bad controls. For starters, jumping is done with B while shooting (if permitted) is done with A, which is already kind of awkward. On top of that, a lot of the games have trouble accepting inputs from both the buttons and D-pad at the same time. This means that often, you can't walk and shoot at the same time, and even worse than that, if you hold down B while jumping, you'll only jump straight up. This goes against our usual instincts, which is to hold the button in order to jump higher. Here, you need to tap the button as lightly as possible and then very quickly move your finger off the button in order to move far enough horizontally to actually clear whatever it is you're trying to jump.

The situation really comes to a head in Bubblegum Rossie, where you wind up hitting what essentially amounts to a dead end. At one point in level 1, you hit a platform that's to high to jump over. You need to stand perfectly still on the previous platform, then jump from one to the other, overcoming the awful control scheme in the process. It can be done, but it's crazy hard, which is unfortunate, as this game potentially could have been one of the more noteworthy titles on the cart.

Games regularly have very few levels, and clearing them is usually just a matter soldiering on until you are unceremoniously greeted with a black screen announcing (in pink typeface no less) that the next level is about to start. Deaths and game over screens are equally abrupt. In most of the games, clearing all the levels causes the game to loop back to level 1, without any indication that you beat the game.

Worse still, two games on the cart - Alfredo in the Fetuccine and Jigsaw, respectively - crash before loading, a couple others crash at certain points during the games themselves. Since you'd be crazy to actually seek out a physical copy of this game (more on that in a minute), the point is somewhat moot, because if you're running the right emulator, these two games might end up working just fine. If you run the wrong emulator, mind you, the game will just skip the title screen and jump directly into Billy Bob without ever letting you access the other 51 games, among other strange bugs.

But it's not all doom and gloom. Some of the games present here suck a lot less than others, and while it's hard to call them good, they are actually kind of fun, when played in the right mood. Streemerz, for instance, is a clever little game about a cat/clown thing that has to climb a series of platforms... for some reason. The catch is that you can't actually jump in this game, so you need to use the titular streemer in order to pull yourself up. Obstacles block your path, but you can take a certain number of hits before dying, which is good, because many of these obstacles have been placed in locations where they simply can't be avoided. There are also enemies that run back and forth very quickly on certain platforms, as well as multiple paths to the top. Also, this is perhaps the only game in existence where bags of money are bad for you!

Another highlight is a game called Meong. At first glance this is little more than a little icon moving across a grid of squares and exploding for no reason, but it's actually fairly sophisticated. As you wander the grid, you need to avoid falling into holes, marked by black squares, but the farther you go, the more trap squares you run into. By moving slowly and patiently, the traps start to reveal themselves, allowing you to avoid them. You can't move to slow, however, as idling on one square for too long will also kill you. This is the only game on the cart that requires any kind of critical thought.

Dam Busters is another decent enough game, despite a complete absence of dams being busted. Time Warp Tickers is also notable, despite being possibly the weirdest game on the NES. In it, you control a pair of walking fingers through a mishmash of 50s memorabilia, while flicking enemies and turning them into floating words.

Best of all, you can actually quit any game at any time by pressing start then select. This is a brilliant idea, and something that a lot of other multicarts from that era ought to have implemented. There's nothing more annoying than having to get up and press reset every time you want to change games. Still, it's not a good sign when the ability to stop playing a game is it's best feature.

And then there were the Cheetahmen.

As every game company needed an anthropomorphic mascot character (it was the early 90s, you kinda had to be there), the Cheetahmen were designed to be Active Enterprise's answer to the Teenage Mutuant Ninja Turtles. Seriously, a comic book documenting their origin story was produced, with plans to launch a line of action figures and produce a Saturday morning cartoon series. In some ways, Action 52 was largely meant as a launching pad for the three cat-man hybrids.

The game starts with a crude story about some guy playing Nintendo when a giant arm pulls him into the TV, where he meets the Cheetahmen. Then, for unclear reasons, the Cheetahmen head off to go fight a series of enemies from the other 51 games. There are six levels, and every two, you get to play as a different cheetahman. Aries is the Martial Arts master, Hercules is the powerhouse, and Apollo fights with a crossbow, which is incapable of hitting anything, thus inadvertently making him the weakest of the three. There's also a coupe of secret rooms that provide you with 1-ups and allow you to skip portions of certain stages.

You're actually greeted by one of the yellow bastards on the title screen, not to mention the fact that the Cheetahmen is the only game with an actual (albeit shoddy) plot, making it pretty clear this was meant to be Action 52's show stopper. However, a lot of the obstacles you face in this game are seriously out of balance, especially where Apollo's crossbow is concerned. Also, your health bar is absent most of the time, and even my pre-teen self, playing this game back in 1992 was able to discover on his own, and subsequently exploit a bug that let's you jump in mid-air. In the end, it suffers from the same lack of quality as the other games, just with a slightly larger scale behind it.

Action 52 is just plain ugly, with Cheetahmen and Billy Bob being the only two games out of 52 to contain adequate artwork and visuals. Some games are little more than a mess of pixels, but for most of them, they look like something you'd find in the margins of an eight year old's math notebook. There's also practically nothing in the way of animation, and backgrounds are extremely repetitive.

The music, however is hit or miss, with some of the misses being downright atrocious and some of the hits being disturbingly catchy. None of it sounds particularly high end, even by NES standards, but the tunes themselves will stick in your head. The best of the bunch, naturally, is the Cheetahmen, but other highlights include Dam Busters, Bubblegum Rossie, Ooze, and Silver Sword, to name a few.

The most fascinating thing about this game, however, is it's price. Working on logic that probably seemed impeccable at the time, Active Enterprises decided to slap this game with a price tag of $199.99 (!) arguing that it was technically only $4 per game. Suffice it to say, there weren't many takers, and the price eventually came down. Irony of ironies, however, is that the game now fetches top dollar as a collectible. This is why you'd be crazy to actually seek out a legit copy of the game. If the moral implications of piracy bother you, keep in mind that you're playing Action 52, and therefore the only person you're really hurting is yourself.

All that aside, I have to admit, I still have a soft spot for this game, and not just in a "lol this gaem sux" kind of way either. I genuinely like it. Even as a kid, playing this game for the first time, disregarding the warnings of my cousins who'd rented the game and had their weekend ruined by it, there was something special about this bad game that set it apart from other bad games in my mind.

When I heard there was a sequel released for the Sega Genesis, I just had a try it.