Super Duper Sumos Review

Saturday morning cartoons turned video games are a popular genre for the GBA. Midway brings us Super Duper Sumos, a three person team of fatties, if I may say so myself. In fact, they survive by eating what look like submarine sandwiches; your health meter is indeed a sub sandwich.

The point of this side-scrolling beat-em-up title is to roam around the screen and beat up all the enemies you can see. Whether by punching, throwing, or butt smashing, the sumos get it done. If those moves don’t cut it for you, feel free to grab parking meters or other desirable objects to bash your foes. Sumos is admittedly an effortless affair, targeted towards a younger audience, but a cartoon targeted at children would also have the same audience for its game.

There is a somewhat large variety of enemies. They include porky thugs, demonic reindeer, and men in deformed penguin suits. I haven’t seen the show, but the baddies were most likely taken from it and what they have to do with a story with sumo wrestlers, well, only God knows.

Super Duper Sumos is a purely 2D side-scroller. You move your character up and down a path, intended to simulate moving in and out of a foreground. Moving from left to right, you can not continue until all enemies on-screen are defeated. The best example of a game similar in level structure is the classic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle titles.

Super Duper Sumos has some special attacks that are similar to that of Mucha Lucha. By filling up a three bar meter, you can unleash attacks on your adversaries at different strengths. When all three meters are full, the strength of the attack is greater than when the meter is only one or two. The attack eliminates or at least knocks down all of your enemies on-screen, for the most part. You actually fill up the meters by eating sushi, dropped by characters that you defeat.

I enjoyed Super Duper Sumos, but it is quite ridiculous that it doesn’t allow you to save where you are. I beat two of the six levels and decided to stop playing after about the first hour, so that I could do something else. When I returned, I found that those two levels were unlocked, but I had to start the entire game over in order to unlock new levels, you couldn’t start off at the level you left off at. If you are a fan of the show or are a parent/aunt/uncle/grandparent/etc., this is a clean-cut title that children will love. Super Duper Sumos is the perfect title to purchase, as a reward, for good grades.