Cheetahmen II (original 1993 pre-patched unreleased version)

The Cheetahmen was a franchise created by Active Enterprises that attempted to compete with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Transformers. It debuted in 1991 on the Nintendo Entertainment System multi-cart Action 52 that was extremely expensive and was known for being one of the worst games ever made due to it being extremely unfinished, poorly made, and unoriginal gameplay.

The cardtridge

An updated version of Action 52 was released on the Sega Genesis in 1992, a Super Nintendo version was also advertised in some magazines but never released, the Cheetahmen would get their own stand-alone sequel in 1993 titled Cheetahmen II, but for unknown reasons, it was cancelled in the middle of development, the original fixed and working version of the game remains lost, and only 6 of 10 playable levels are accessible to the public.

The Cartridge

Cheetahmen II was scheduled to be released sometime in either 1993 or 1994, but it was never completed, and the game was never officially released.

Around 1996, 1.500 copies of the game were found in a Warehouse, and these cardtridges became extremely rare collector items, going for around U$D 2.5000 U$D on the internet, however, several free ROMs for PCs can be easily found on the internet, the game was absolutely the same as the first one, with the exception of new levels, the same music, sprites, and bugs were prevalent on the version, and it was even more buggy and unplayable than Action 52 due to it being in an unfinished state.

All copies of the game were reused Action 52 cartridges, some with a small gold sticker reading "Cheetamen II".

The Patch

it is impossible to get to the levels in which one plays Cheetahman Aries without altering the ROM image or experiencing a glitch that very rarely starts the game on these two levels, A patch fixing all the game breaking bugs was made freely available by romhacking.net member PacoChan in July 2011. Subsequently, a "fixed" version of the game titled Cheetahmen II: The Lost Levels was being developed by the original Cheetahmen creator Greg Pabich. The new version of the game was be released on an actual NES cartridge and was intended to fix the glitches found in the original game. To fund the game, Pabich started a Kickstarter program in which donors would be given rewards depending on the amount of money pledged. The program started on August 6, 2012 and finished with success in September 6, 2012. To tie in with the project, a short video was filmed with The Angry Video Game Nerd, Pat the NES Punk, The Game Chasers, and Pabich himself advertising the game.

However, Pabich's version of the game seemed to use PacoChan's patch without his permission. Although they removed some graphical modifications found in PacoChan's version, they forgot to remove some not so obvious changes. For example, PacoChan fixed some spelling errors in the intro, although not all of them. Greg Pabich's version contains exactly the same fixes and mistakes.

A lot of controversy was ensued during Pabich's campaign, Pabich had already done several projects attempting to "ressurect" the Cheetahmen for "its fans", being acused of the project being a scam, due to him releasing a "Patched NES" version that is already released for free on the internet (that is actually a simple 0 budget hack, and not a fix), and abusing of the Angry Video Game Nerd's fan base for his own gains, needing more than 65 thousand dollars to "hack" the game (that is impossible to fix due to its source code being lost) that is already free, as a response, the Angry Video Game Nerd pulled his support on the campaign in August 2012 and deleted the campaign video where he appears with Pabich promoting to "fix" the game.