I glare at my rival from across the tennis court: a sprightly brown and white dog with their nose to the ground, ready to snatch up a pixelated tennis ball at a moment’s notice. The two tennis stars lob shots back and forth as we both wait to strike. The ball catches the net and falls to the hardcourt. I mash the A button on my controller as fast as I can, snatching it from the small dog just in time. They pace to their side of the court. Watching. Waiting to steal my 15 minutes in the SUPER 56 spotlight.
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Skyway to Hell
SUPER 56 delights in setting up absurd stakes for their microgames, only to pull you to the next one just as quickly. You start on a cable car to consistently-temperatured Hell City. Why? Who knows? For now, you’re deposited in front of an apartment building where you meet Bones and Kronos. The two want your help ranking up in SUPER 56, the hottest microgame cartridge in this side of Hell. If they don’t rank up faster than John Zombie, their annoyingly pompadoured neighbor, they’ll never hear the end of it. A story with high stakes? Who needs that?
Minigames are madcap and brisk. My favorite, apart from the aforementioned beef with a small dog, features a couple running away from NPCs who eavesdrop on their lovers’ quarrel, locked into the world’s worst dialogue tree. Time the final choice correctly and you barely escape; fail and you’re trapped in dating advice purgatory as the timer runs out.
The Perks of Progress
Every successful minigame rewards you with experience points, which fills up your meter. Reaching meter milestones restores lives, provides mod gems, unlocks more customization options, or activates the next rank. Mod gems augment the minigame experience entirely. These gems can shuffle the minigame order, add lives to your base amount, or add other perks. Even if you flub a game, you’re usually rewarded with some experience for your trouble, giving every run a small burst of progress.
SUPER 56’s art style is blissfully chaotic, with vectors, pixel art, photos, low poly 3D, and pencil sketches all sharing space. Each minigame had a unique look to them, and that level of unpredictability combined with the compact runtime more than made up for the lack of other modes, which would have diluted the experience. Staying focused on a tiered single-player structure, with story and gameplay-based incentives to unlock, created a simple but compelling gameplay loop I had a hard time wiggling out of.
…A Cartridge in A Spare CRT
You interact with the game almost entirely using the A button of your controller (or the keyboard equivalent). Menu options, the entirety of profile customization, and the minigames themselves all function with a combination of tapping and holding a single button. Nested menus are where the single button gimmick grows tiresome. In the later phases of the game, where you’re potentially swapping out mod gems and customization items once every few runs, I gave up on tweaking my options because I grew tired of navigating through a maze just to switch out an item.
It’s a shame considering the profile rewards are often delightful—preset nouns to plug in to playfully rude phrases, a full array of pride flag accoutrements, a pixelated trout to set as an avatar. Some microgames only have one type of audio cue to clue you in, which might hamper accessibility for some gamers.
SUPER 56 didn’t quite unlock my never-before-seen score chasing tendencies, but it reminded me of why I fell so hard for the microgame format in the first place. Before WarioWare entries got into the double digits and sagged under the weight of their own lore, they felt like this: a collection of high-energy games with the goofiest connecting threads possible. Other collections like SPOOKWARE draw close, but only SUPER 56 matches that first Game Boy Advance entry almost perfectly in terms of energy.
The Verdict: At Home in Hell City
SUPER 56 invokes the best and worst of its microgame lineage with short, bizarre snippets, a narrative framework as joyful as it is inessential, and a central control gimmick that occasionally outstays its welcome. Small accessibility issues aside, Onion Soup Interactive avoids the major pitfalls of its contemporaries by limiting the experience entirely to single player with online leaderboards, tapering what could have been an overwhelming sprawl into a smart, snappy, collection.
Great
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Doesn’t overreach the number of minigames or modes available. | Single button control scheme wears thin when dealing with nested menu options. |
| Zany profile customization options. | Some minigames could use more types of accessibility cues. |
| Singular, scattershot art style. | |
| Generous modification options. |
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