Menacer 6-Game Cartridge (Mega Drive / Genesis review)

Developer: Western Technologies Inc.
Publisher: Sega
Released: 1992

Menacer 6-Game Cartridge is a collection of mini-games that use the Sega Menacer light gun.

In Pest Control you protect a pizza from a swarm of insects. Only part of the screen is visible so you need to move the gun around to see where they're hiding. If they eat the whole pizza it's game over. It's fast paced and your obscured vision makes this a fun mode. In Space Station Defender you must destroy aliens before they shoot you. You can't fire at will as you need to recharge your weapon by shooting the Power target. This is a nice idea but the mode is mind-numbing and never gets difficult. Ready, Aim, Tomatoes! stars Toejam and Earl. The scenery scrolls and you must defeat enemies before they attack you. You have a limited supply of tomatoes but you can hit bombs that destroy everything on screen. It's repetitive and you'll quickly tire of it. In Whack Ball you control an air hockey mallet and you need to hit the ball onto every block within a time limit. Flashing blocks randomly appear and if the ball makes contact you'll lose seconds or your mallet becomes miniscule. It's relatively fun and I'll give the developers credit for trying something different. FrontLine places you in a battlefield against helicopters, planes, tanks and SUVs. You can fire using your gun or missile, the latter of which has limited ammo. It's boring and little changes throughout. Rockman's Zone is like Freedom Force (1988, NES) as the screen scrolls to the right and bad guys appear in windows and doors. Hitting an innocent bystander will lose one of your lives. The action is almost non-existent and you'll frequently have nothing to shoot at for 20-30 seconds!

Menacer 6-Game Cartridge is a lazy title and a bad first impression for the otherwise awesome light gun. It just screams of a cheap, quickly programmed game just to have something to bundle with the light gun and the only reason to try it is for the novelty factor.

Random trivia: The developers originally planned to license a number of sports stars for the prototype games including Joe Montana (American Football player) and David Robinson (Basketball player). However, these modes were scrapped to keep costs down.