Battletoads

2025-02-04
It's incredibly funny to me that someone bought this game for me when I was like 6 because it seems almost cruel in retrospect to buy such a terrifically punishing game for a child. I mean if I grew up in the 80s instead of the 90s I guess ball-sundering difficulty in games like Contra was the norm but I didn't and I think this still stands up as the hardest thing I've ever played. And it's the easier than the SNES version! Well, let it be no surprise that coming back to it 20 years later it still absolutely savaged my soul causing me to yell expletives as I played it from the toilet with my Analogue Pocket such that my partner thought maybe I was passing a kidney stone. No, honey, I'm just getting fucking REAMED by this Speeder Bike level.

Evaluating it as an "adult" I also have the perspective to realize a lot of the difficulty is kind of bullshit. The hitboxes are laughably bad at times. I can watch as my frogman-foot passes through the entire lower half of the first boss and deal no damage. Nice! And several of the sections feel like they just require memorization like the aforementioned Speeder Bike section and the final jetpack section.

Battletoads does have flair though. My username has "trash" in it so you know I'm down with a game with some weird ass frogman in sunglasses fighting a shit ton of rats in...space? And David Wise's soundtrack has some absolute bangers.

But that's it. A dollop of early 90s charm does not counterbalance the overburdensome difficulty. Too bad they didn't get my Wario Land or something.