Forget Call of Duty, Real Men Need the Retro Love: Smash TV

Ah, Smash TV. You're a guy of simple tastes, and you know what you like. Mass blood-leaky carnage, a general ridiculous shitstorm, all of that good stuff. This is a relic of a bygone gaming era, right here. Plots? Character development? Nuts to that, let's just shoot and/or explodinate everyone's face. Right off.

It's the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie philosophy, and there's nothing more man-tastic.

Anywho, yes. On to the point. And we do have one. Strap your ass in, here it comes now.

Smash TV hit arcades in 1990, and was later ported to the NES, SNES and Genesis (under the rather badass guise of Super Smash TV. What did the 'Super' mean? Even more effing death right here, that's what). It's a legendary twin-stick shooter, Robotron style, but we hadn't gotten our fancy-ass genre creating in gear at this point so we didn't know that yet.

The game was set in the impossibly futuristic, shit-your-pants-unimaginable year... 1999. It centers around the titular --heh, titular-- uber violent game show, in which contestants must wreck the faces of hordes of enemies in an arena setting, wash the blood off of their undercrackers and repeat. It's like a toontastic take on Stephen King's Running Man, or Gamecube's Madworld much later.

This good ol' fashioned arcade bloodletting is perhaps one of the purest gaming experiences of all. You use one stick to move and another to aim and shoot. There's no The Da Vinci Code-esque convoluted story to follow, or spangly cutscenes with production values rivalling Tinseltown movies. It's simply kill or be killed. More accurately, it's kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill and effing kill some more or be killed. What more could you need? Nothing, that's what.

Naturally, there are assorted power ups and bonuses to pick up along the way, in the form of fancy-ass wrapped presents or other items. Your objective is to proceed through the arenas until you reach the host of Smash TV, and win your freedom. And, y'know, life, which is pretty darn high up there as far as gameshow prizes go.

The game's console ports were a little wankier, due to the Mega Drive controller's button layout and Nintendo's family-friendly stance on the SNES (opponents wouldn't explode into tiny chunks of meat and bloody viscera when stepping on a mine on that version). Nevertheless, fans of this simplistic yet compulsive genre shouldn't miss out on this little mofo. Another true arcade classic.