Check out the front and back of the box.

I bet you thought that after Action 52 was released, Active Enterprises slowly faded away into nothingness, didn't you? Well, they did.. but before then they created one more cart - Cheetahmen 2, a sequel to the Cheetahmen game on Action 52.

The game box is pretty nicely done.. however, the game itself is packed into leftover Action 52 carts (they're exactly the same, and even have the same Action 52 title and label art on them!) The only way you can tell which game is which is by checking the back side of the cart to see if there's a small gold sticker reading "CHEETAMEN II", although even this is not on all Cheetahmen ][ carts.

The game's main selling point is its intro, featuring the three cool-o Cheetahmen (Aries! Apollo! and Hercules!) and their quest to defeat Dr. Morbis and his evil bio-engineering experments or something. The music is pretty boppy, but the graphics are a bit strange.. check out that picture above; Aries (the bow-and-arrow bloke) looks like he's missing an arm and the Cheetahman on the left, at first glance, seems to have extremely large feet. It only gets worse from here.

The game itself? Well.. it follows typical Active Enterprises style by having the worst code, worst graphics, worst sound, and worst gameplay of any game you've seen, except this situation is made even more noticeable since unlike Action 52, there aren't any other games to try out on the cart.

As in the original, you get to control one Cheetahman for 2 levels each. Aries has arrows, Apollo has a club and his kung-fu abilities and Hercules has his general hugeness as a weapon. The game itself is mostly just badly-coded side-scrolling platform fare, with the Active tradition of ending a level at one nondescript spot and starting a new one at another nondescript spot. It's really difficult to explain only in text and screenshots how badly this game runs; it plays like a BASIC game you typed into your Commodore 64 from a magazine listing, complete with bugs.

Conclusion: Unless you can find it cheap or you are an insane completist collector you should really stay away from this one at all costs. The fact that this game is one of the rarest for the NES is proof enough for me that there is a benevolent God over the world (which is more than any Wisdom Tree game can teach).

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