Action 52 (NES)

Action 52 is a terrible unlicensed cartridge containing 52 terrible games, a bundle which retailed for $200. If you played each game for a week, it would be the worst year of your life.

Make your selection, now.

Apollo Cutscene
In Cheetahmen, each character has its own introductory cutscene. However, the cutscene for Apollo appears to have no text accompanied with the obligatory image. This is because Active forgot to put the alphabet characters next to the image tiles in the ROM. The unused text can be found in a memory viewer during the cutscene and Levels 5 and 6 of Cheetahmen:

APOLLO IS THE MASTER OF THE CROSSBOW. USE THE CROSSBOW TO DEFEAT THE ENEMIES ON THE LAST TWO LEVELS AND GET DR. MORBIS

Unused Title Screen


French Baker has an unused, near-complete title screen using the Cheetahmen II font. It can be seen in the PPU as French Baker is loading.

Unused Title Screen/Font


Like the example above, Evil Empire also has an unused title screen. There is also an alternate font containing the letters "EVILMPR" in that order, which also went unused.

Unused Level 3
Setting the value of RAM address to  (or using the Game Genie code ) at the Rocket Jockey menu will bring the player to Level 3. This is a semi-playable level with a wrongly colored background and sprites that glitch out when certain enemies appear. There are also mountains in the background that don't appear elsewhere in the game, as well as projectiles that spawn periodically.

Completion Message
There was a contest planned where anyone who could beat Level 5 of Ooze would be entered into a drawing for $104,000. However, because this game is awful, Ooze locks up on Level 2 and hence it's impossible to complete. As all the game's text is in plain ASCII, the message and "personal code" can easily be seen at in a hex editor:

Unused Level 8
Setting the value of RAM address to  (or using the Game Genie code ) at the Ooze menu will bring the player to Level 8. This level is set in a different environment than the rest of the levels, taking place in the outdoors, with pink oozy things and the giant water droplets from Level 1. There's also a 1-Up which can't be collected. This was intended to be the last level before seeing the screen above.

Copyright Notice
One for Active Enterprises, possibly for the sound driver, is at offset : Copyright 1991 ACTIVE ENTERPRISES All RightsReserved by Author Driver  Version 2.09x

Menu Template
Due to the way the Action 52 cart handles bankswitching, a few games had to be split up into two or more parts. Each of these parts is essentially a standalone game and is based on the same code template as every other game on the cart. As a result, several ROM banks contain a default menu template:

GAME NAME ONE PLAYER TWO PLAYER MAIN MENU

This unused template is present eight times in the ROM, at, , , , , , , and.