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Before Altron tortured innocent
Game Boy Advance owners with cheesy, half-baked translations
of games they loved on other systems, they subjected players
to original (but equally crappy) games like this one.
Mighty Hits is the closest thing Saturn owners have to Namco's
fantastic, fun-filled Point Blank series... which when you
stop and think about it makes you feel kind of sorry for
anyone with a Saturn.
Mighty Hits has a few of the things
that made Point Blank so endearing, such as a lighthearted
setting (this time you're slinging your side iron in the Old
West) and a wide variety of challenges which test your skill
and accuracy with a light gun. However, this game has a
lot of OTHER things you won't find in Point Blank... and Point
Blank fans everywhere should thank their lucky stars for
that.
 For
starters, the graphics in Mighty Hits are polygonal... and
downright hideous. It's clear that the designers were
trying to give the game the same look and atmosphere as
Pixar's famous film Toy Story, but the rendered full-motion
video and polygonal characters look more like they were taken
from a college freshman's first digital art project. I'm
not talking about a talented student either... this is more
like the kind of guy who spends more of his time making beer
bongs than doing homework or studying for tests.
The mini-games in Mighty Hits are
almost as incompetantly designed as the graphics. If the
designers really wanted to make this game like Point Blank,
they should have made the light gun challenges more fun than
tedious, rather than the other way around. Mighty Hits
occasionally stumbles across some good ideas, but for the most
part, the mini-games are either completely unoriginal or
awkward and confusing. In one stage, you've got to throw
balls into moving funnels, which is not only frustrating but
rather contrary to the purpose of a LIGHT GUN GAME. I'm
supposed to be shooting at things here, right?
The worst part of the mini-games
is that the objectives in each aren't always clear.
Sure, Mighty Hits offers a description of each challenge
before it begins, but it's a disconcertingly lengthy
description in Japanese. Even a native speaker isn't
going to want to read a frickin' novel before they start
playing... if they're anything like me, they just want to jump
into the game head first. Of course, on the other hand,
at least they'll eventually know they're doing. Any American
unfortunate enough to have imported this game will be forced
to figure out the challenges through trial and (lots of)
error.
The death blow for Mighty Hits,
and the thing that will tempt you to strategically move the
"S" in the game's title, is the dumbfounding gun sight
option. What seems like a helpful feature turns out to
be a crippling handicap, as turning on the sight restricts
your gun's aim to the top half of the screen! Way to go,
Altron. It's pretty obvious that you didn't hire
playtesters, but couldn't your programmers have at least
caught an enormous flaw like this on their own? It might
have actually made Mighty Hits more fun, or at least less
excruciating to play. As it is, Mighty Hits has the
dubious distinction of being one of the worst light gun games
on the Saturn, surpassed in sucktitude only by Sammy's
legendarily lousy Death Crimson. |
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Mighty Hits
Altron
Light Gun
Game
 
When in the stage select screen,
target the S and E in "stage", then the L and T in
"select". Then just fire at the cards to select the
games you wish to play.
Pretty high... each of the rounds
in Mighty Hits has a different objective, but since all the
text is in Japanese you'll often be left guessing what the
heck you're supposed to do to win. Luckily, there's a
European version in English... if that can be considered
luck.
The mini-games take a few
seconds each to load, but with so many of them in a game,
Mighty Hits feels mighty slow. I wouldn't recommend this
one for parties.
Altron also released a clone of
Parappa the Rapper for the Sega Saturn called Jung
Rythym. Like Mighty Hits, it wasn't very
good.
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