There are some games for which the Internet just cannot seem to calm its collective, relentless hate-boner. At some point, it becomes ingrained into our gaming culture that certain games suck, everyone knows it, and there’s no need to play them for yourself to decide. The committee voted it into law back before you were born, and that’s just the way things are. Well, it’s been twenty-two years since Cliffhanger‘s release on home consoles and since I had never played the SNES version I thought I’d give it a go and see if it truly deserved all the scathing comments and negative review scores. After all, there’s nothing quite like the feeling of playing a game everyone tells you is a piece of crap only to discover the magic was inside of you all along. That was basically the theme of my Friday the 13th piece after all. So relentless, incurable optimist that I am, I willfully plugged a game based on a Sylvester Stallone film into my Super Nintendo and gave a flick of the power switch. I’m now undergoing mandatory counseling sessions with my beloved console because I understand what I have just done is considered abuse in my home state. Seriously you guys: don’t risk your relationship with your 16-bit mistress–learn from my mistake.

In other words, if you see this title screen, start running.

Cliffhanger thrusts you directly into the Stallone-sized boots of Gabe Walker, a ranger who specializes in search-and-rescue of climbers who go missing in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. But a routine rescue mission goes off the rails when a group of stranded hikers he and his co-worker Hal are sent to find turn out to be thieves, led by a man named Qualen, who just completed a $100-million heist. They want their money, and they’ll kill Hal if Gabe doesn’t do the dirty work of locating the three briefcases lost in the mountains. The only question is, can you outwit Qualen’s cronies, collect the money, and rescue Hal while outrunning avalanches, scaling sheer cliffs, and crossing narrow ledges?

Crossing the rope: all in a day’s work.

I actually have very little negative to say about Cliffhanger the movie. It’s a solid action flick with a unique premise and some utterly insane stunts performed in real life by people who were weighed down by not just heavy climbing gear but also balls large enough to generate their own gravity wells. Nowadays they would shoot a film like this in the middle of a nice temperature-controlled studio set in front of a green screen and just add in the blowing snow and thousand-foot drops in post-production. Director Renny Harlin didn’t have that luxury in 1993, so he just used a real European mountain range, had a stunt man perform a mid-air plane transfer so dangerous no insurance company would  underwrite it, and hurled himself off a ledge to test the safety of the climbing gear because he was in the process of earning his ‘Finland’s Craziest Export’ merit badge.

There’s “bringing a knife to a gunfight” dumb, then there’s “fighting Stallone” dumb.

So that explains the film. But the film and the game are two different beasts. The only thing I can conclude based on available information is that developer Malibu Interactive was given the project without warning, and were told “yesterday” when they inquired about a due date. Either that or Sony Imagesoft was gearing up to deliberately sour their own reputation with Nintendo as a precursor to the whole PlayStation project. Nothing else makes sense, least of all the studio’s decision to turn a film which is primarily about finding stolen money and outwitting the elements into a Final Fight-style fighting game.

And apparently a ballet too.

Seriously, Cliffhanger wants to be Streets of Rage but on a mountain. Given the cutscenes that appear before the game and between each level, it’s clear the plot is intended to mirror the film with a few liberties taken here and there for stylistic purposes. But the gameplay drops this pretense immediately by expecting us to believe Qualen, a man who takes hostages to entice Gabe into searching for his money, is willing to send an endless number of palette-swapped henchmen to kill the very man he’s using to recover said money. This is like a guy pleading with workers to please shore up the dam while simultaneously planting explosives intended to blow holes in the very thing meant to keep the flood waters out.

One instance where “Run away!” is completely acceptable.

The fighting engine isn’t even that good, which leads me to believe Cliffhanger was not designed to be a fighting game from the beginning but had these elements shoehorned in at a later date. Every fighting game worth its salt enjoys a variety of characters for the player to send to the hospital. Cliffhanger gives you two generic enemy options for 90% of the game: a guy with a rat tail hairdo and ski jacket who looked at Stallone and thought, “I could beat him in a fist fight!”, and a man who for whom a camo top and jeans are ideal for some cliff-side knife fighting. Keep in mind: Gabe’s in a short-sleeve shirt because Qualen took his coat as a means to entice him to work quickly. Slashy McTanktop here apparently didn’t get the memo about snow-covered mountains leading to death by exposure. There’s a third character who shows up later, a pudgy Hobbit-looking bald dude with the audacity to block most of your attacks, and some of the bosses return for encore presentations as regular enemies, but even this isn’t enough variety for a 16-bit beat ’em up.

This guy at least had the sense to dress warmly.

The basic problem we run into is that Cliffhanger‘s fighting elements aren’t good enough to rescue it from being a poor platforming game, and its platforming elements aren’t good enough to rescue it from being a poor fighting game. The controls especially need extra help, feeling too stiff for when finesse is called for, but not loose enough to allow for some forgiveness when it comes to basic actions like running and jumping. If your running and jumping controls have problems, perhaps building an entire level around outrunning an avalanche while leaping fallen trees and snow-covered boulders isn’t the brightest idea in the design document. If that’s not an indication the game needed more time with Quality Assurance before release, I’m not sure what is.

“Bats. Why did it have to be bats?”

The other clear indicator that Cliffhanger didn’t get nearly enough playtesting is its utterly merciless difficulty. While it tries to compensate for this by allowing you to select your number of starting lives (3, 5 or 7), the fact is some parts of the game make Battletoads look like a cakewalk. At least with Battletoads you were reasonably clear on what you needed to do in order to survive. Cliffhanger‘s poor controls fail to offer you this respite–it does you no good to know you need to run and perform two perfect jumps to cross a lake when simple tasks like running and jumping can’t be executed effectively enough to become second-nature to most players.

Oh look: twins!

So yes, Cliffhanger is a terrible game. The sad thing is, it’s a terrible game that could have been average or even above average if the developers had thrown out the desire to be “Double Dragon in the snow” and focused instead on creating a rock-solid platformer with decent controls that tasked the player with surviving the elements. A game that allows you to outrun an avalanche, free-scale cliff faces, and navigate dark caves with limited light sources, all while having to maintain your body temperature, could have been memorable for all the right reasons. Malibu’s efforts unfortunately created one memorable for all the wrong ones. Don’t attempt to rescue this one; we’re all better off letting it freeze to death in its own mediocrity.

Gabe engages in his favorite hobby: invisible marshmallow roasting.

If there’s one redeeming thing about this game, it’s the masterful ways the spin artists at Sony Imagesoft ran the ad campaign for it. Using pull quotes like “Cliffhanger could send gamers over the edge!” from GamePro’s October 1993 preview is all well and good, but taken out of context that could be interpreted as either “gamers will love it” or “this will drive players insane”. Later reviews of course veer towards the latter, but let it never be said the ad guys weren’t at least as optimistic as I was. Have a look for yourself:

Michael Crisman

In 1979, Michael Crisman was mauled by a radioactive Gorgar pinball machine. After the wounds healed, doctors discovered his DNA had been re-coded. No longer fully human, Michael requires regular infusions of video games in order to continue living among you. If you see him, he can see you. Make no sudden moves, but instead bribe him with old issues of computer and video game magazines or a mint-in-box copy of Dragon Warrior IV.


If he made you laugh, drop a tip in his jar at http://paypal.me/modernzorker


(If he didn't make you laugh, donate to cure his compulsion to bang keyboards by sending an absurdly huge amount of money to his tip jar instead. That'll show him!)