At a Glance: Though it lacks the freakishly disproportional characters that are common to Japanese games, I firmly believe that Japan had to have some hand in making this monstrosity. To make matters worse, it seems to have been translated by the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, causing characters to constantly say things like “He thinks I have gnarly potential!” I hate this game.

Platform: NES (Download Emulator here - 192k)

Download: Download ROM here - 140k


And they said the NES wasn't powerful enough to induce seizures.Game Plot: You assume the roll of a dimwit named Jake that only speaks in horrible catch phrases. Somehow you encounter a magician named Zebediah, and he teaches you magic by making you run around an awful lot. It’s actually just the plot of "The Empire Strikes Back", but Luke has the intelligence of fishing tackle and Yoda is some horrible troll type thing. The actual game starts when you’re “attacked unexpectedly” (attacked by what, I have no idea). You then have to fight all the enemies off by yourself. Evidently the Great Zebediah is a lazy bastard and refuses to help in any way. Plus, he wears a hat with a “P” on it. Last time I checked Zebediah starts with a “Z.” I hate this game.

Weapons: You get magic! Of course it’s nothing cool, it’s just balls that you shoot at the enemy. That reminds me of another game… what was it? Oh, yes: every other fucking game made for the Nintendo. If you hit select you get to choose different types of magic, but since no matter what you select you always shoot the exact same thing, it’s not worth the effort. The thing that really sets Totally Rad apart from other games is that if you hold B down, you’ll start to flash wildly, and if you don’t begin convulsing, you’ll shoot three balls instead of one. I hate this game.

Enemies: There’s large green army men that run at you and occasionally shoot. Those are the only enemies that actually resembled anything. There are small widgets that fly harmlessly over your head, strange balls that don’t really do anything, and angry man / balls that fly and kill me every time I attempt to play this awful game. I hate this game.

Number of Levels: The sad truth is that with most games I have the problem of not being able to beat the game, and thus I can’t say how many levels there are. With this crapfest, I have the problem of not being able to beat the first level. You’d think that with enemies that have the artificial intelligence rivaling my keyboard, you’d have no trouble breezing through a level, but Totally Rad (Jesus, that is a stupid title) is so packed with enemies that it’s just impossible. After playing this game for a while, I began to realize that level one was just recycled code from Megaman, but in some terrible mix-up they got the code for level 32. I hate this game.

Pure, unadulterated, nightmare fuel.Number of Bosses: I think it’s safe to say that the number of bosses is equal to the number of levels. There were a few times that I actually made it to the end of the first level and got to fight a boss. Staying true to the general vagueness and stupidity of the game, this boss resembled nothing I’ve ever seen before in my entire life. Every time I faced him, the boss flooded the screen with his giant, unavoidable spheres of death and I was decimated. Now that I think about it, I believe that this was the only level and boss in the game. It seems all too apparent that the constant catch phrases and flashing colors are just used to keep the attention of your average, no-attention-span American child, but even then they’ll lose interest after the first level. So why bother making another one? That’s actually a somewhat clever idea from a business standpoint. Too bad it doesn’t change the fact that I hate this game. I hate this game.

Defining Moment: Upon loading the game, it immediately flashed every color that the NES was capable of producing, in a quarter of a second. Seizure number one. I came out of it only to see one of the most disturbing faces I have ever set eyes upon... “The Great Zebediah.” Zebediah is the disembodied head of a horribly mutated dwarf, and the pure horror of seeing him was enough to send me into a second seizure. But the fun doesn’t stop there. I then witnessed a conversation which made me lose all faith in the human race. Every word that was ever coined by some pot smoking surfer is included, as Jake tells his unnamed girlfriend about how he is going to learn magic from Zebediah, because he is a “most excellent dude.” The game itself then induced a series of seizures. During one, I hit my head on the corner of my desk and was knocked out. When I awoke, I felt a feeling of general well being. I saw that in the big picture, game developers have really evolved. Totally Rad was obviously made by cretins that thought they could string together a bunch of words and phrases they saw in various Nerf commercials and make everyone think it was cool. Just think how bad games would be if this trend had continued. I mean, there would probably be games with black men named something like "Superfly Johnson." Can you imagine? Finally, let me reiterate that I hate this game. I hate this game.

Graphics-7
Gameplay-9
Story-10
Sound-5
Fun-9
Overall-40

Each category in the rating system is based out of a possible -10 score (-10 being the worst). The overall score is based out of a possible -50 score (-50 being the worst).

– Nefarious (@TwitterHasBannedAllMyAccountsEver)

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About This Column

The Rom Pit is dedicated to reviewing the most bizarre and screwed up classic console games from the 1980's, the ones that made you wonder what kind of illegal substances the programmers were smoking when they worked on them. Strangely enough, the same illegal substances are often necessary to enjoy or make sense of most of these titles. No horrible Nintendo game is safe from the justice of the ROM Pit.

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