As I round out my review of the trio of retro games sent to me by Mega Cat Studios, I can’t help but wonder what happened to gamers and humanity in general. There’s an extent to which I completely understand the fascination with collecting physical cartridges of systems long gone by. We love to wax nostalgic about the heft and routine of the rectangle, the ritual of getting the game to work and the anxiety of having glitches and misloads. I adored my SNES, I truly did, and it sits comfortably as my favorite console of all time thanks to timing and the gaming library. I appreciate innovation, and I get why some games are now applied to old technology with new tricks. But I would have far fewer fond memories if one of my childhood games was Super Fanger.

Good news, you have this inscruitable legend to show you what achievements you’ve unlocked!

What in the cast iron mouthguard is Super Fanger? Why, it’s a multiplayer game of tag between three entities. There’s a duckish thing, an octopus, and the spectre of death itself. The rules are simple: touch the other player. You run around the screen, you can pick up a few items that either help or hinder your actions (slowing you down, speeding you up, etc.) and each character has an ability. The octopus drops ink that can slow you down, the duck can quickly dash forward, and the reaper can either repel or attract things. For those keeping score at home, the reaper is the best character by far, so matches usually involve players scrambling to see who can get that character first. You start off with one zone for the tag and gradually unlock more through solo games, where you have to collect bubbles while dodging AI miscreants.

You ever get a card for your birthday, and you take the time to really read the front, appreciate the art, comment on the thought and design for the benefit of the card giver, and then open it to find nothing inside? No money, no gift card, not even a hand drawn picture. Alright, no, there shouldn’t be an expectation that every card will have money inside. But if your aunt is hyping it up by saying “I think you’ll really like what’s inside the card!” and then it turns out she meant the cute pun about bananas being appealing, what’s a person to do? You smile, you say thank you, and you do your absolute best to swallow down that disappointment that you didn’t have at the beginning of this exchange. 

That’s what I felt with Super Fanger, because the graphics and the splash made me think something wonderful was in store. You have this pretty groovy animated Mega Cat Studio logo, and there’s this thing about achievements under the options menu, and I quite like how the characters are designed. Seriously, they all have names (Nixie the octopus, Fritz the reaper and Regi the duck), and there’s some solid pixel design in everything. Regi’s got an appropriately ruffled look that only accentuates the cartoonish nature when he’s caught. Nixie waffles between being distraught and being haughty at inking her opposition. And Fritz somehow conveys the distress of being a reaper who is being pursued by either a water fowl or a cephalopod, and both of those are equally hilarious. The scriblins (the NPCs in one player mode) are weirdly cute, and the whole visual vibe worked.

Yes, this looks cool. Is it a bad sign the first two screenshots have nothing to do with gameplay?

Then you start playing. Round one, player one has to tag player two. Round two, player two has to tag player one. Whomever goes the longest without being tagged is the winner. The game is limited: Super Fanger doesn’t comprehend draw distance or anything, so if a player is at the corner of the screen, it won’t go any further. There’s some minor obstacles in the field (a greenhouse to run through, tilled soil that can slow you down but might spawn a crop to help you out) but otherwise you just run at each other. The special abilities only work once unless you pick up a pumpkin to refill your stamina, and, otherwise, you…run. At each other. In a relatively slow way, because otherwise Regi’s one-and-done dash ability would mean nothing.

After a couple of honestly quite boring matches where it was just a matter of moving, I decided to try my hand at the single player arcade mode, knowing that I would unlock more stages as a result. This, sadly, never came to pass, because the AI is faster than you, mostly unencumbered by the hazards in the stage, and there are two of them. Consider that for just a moment. The “game” aspect is two players, one on one. The arcade mode, where you’re practicing to theoretically get better, is two on one. These things just instantly home in on you, they have to obey the laws of physics and cannot clip through buildings but, otherwise, are player seeking missiles. There’s no rhyme or reason to where and how the bubbles spawn, and the theoretically best strategy is to run around forever and get the bubbles when and if they’re remotely convenient.

As I stare death in the face, I know my sins will take me to hell.

I hated it. I hated this so much I can’t begin to properly articulate it. Yes, it’s hard, but it’s not hard because it’s challenging. It’s hard because the layout is purposely stacked against you in a way that asks you to put an unnecessary amount of time into getting good at running around a screen. The RNG will put bubbles in odd spots, and the scriblins couldn’t care less about anything except your death. I did my best and my high score was three, and that was only because one bubble spawned immediately beside me after I picked up the previous one. You need a minimum of twelve to unlock the next stage. I’ve had this game on my PC, my phone and my SF2000 for almost two weeks, and I can’t do it anywhere.

Also, I have no proof of this, but Super Fanger asking you to get better about dodging two beasts instead of a single player seems counterintuitive to getting better. You win at the arcade by calculating the probability of how two forms will move and then reacting in turn. Versus is a single other player, which is a totally different moveset to consider. It’s like realizing you’d like to get better at jump rope, so you put in a ton of effort to level up by doing double dutch with Gogo spinning the ropes. Yes, some of the takeaways will make you a better jumper, but you’re going to react differently to a single rope and probably trip yourself up perpetually anticipating the second rope that’ll never come. Am I just fabricating excuses on why I’m bad at this game? Probably, but that doesn’t change my level of enjoyment.

The octopus looks HORRIFIED that the duck is coming. Why? Why??

I found some good rationale for both Old Towers and Plyuk because there was, beneath it all, a game that could be played in some capacity to satisfaction. They weren’t my favorite retro titles of all time, but I gave them a pass because it at least was a competent and complete experience, even if Plyuk was shockingly short. But there’s a headscratching level of confusion when it comes to the how and why of Super Fanger being available on a cartridge that rivals the retail price of a modern game. It’s got no end game or finale towards which to strive. The gameplay is repetitive, boring and devoid of excitement. There’s not even a way to use three characters at once, which would have been some form of entertainment for the novelty alone. It’s just two person tag, and that gets old as quickly as you’d imagine it would.

Super Fanger is perfectly good as an indie project that someone made for proof of concept or as a passion project to celebrate some of the quirks of the SNES. As a game that I cannot get anywhere else (compared to Old Towers and Plyuk both have itch.io versions), it’s appallingly underwhelming, frustrating, and is clearly crafted purely for the collector’s eye. It’s unique, I cannot deny that, but so is finding out someone loaded their paintball gun with frozen blueberries. It’s not what you were expecting, but it still stings.

Super Fanger is available now on Super Nintendo.

Reviewed on smartphone, SF2000 and PC via the bsnes core.

A copy of Super Fanger was provided by the publisher.