Play Cheetahmen II Online

Summary

Cheetahmen II is one of those NES oddities that never saw an official launch, yet somehow slipped into collectors' hands. In 1996 a Florida warehouse yielded about 1,500 copies, all pressed onto repurposed Action 52 cartridges and marked with a tiny gold sticker that reads “Cheetamen II,” making the physical game a true rarity despite the flood of ROM dumps online. The title lets you rotate among the three Cheetahmen—Apollo, Hercules and Aries—after each two‑level boss, but a programming bug locks the Aries stages unless you patch the ROM or stumble on an extremely rare glitch. A community‑crafted fix arrived in July 2011 from romhacking.net user PacoChan, and the same year Greg Pabich packaged a “fixed” version called Cheetahmen II: The Lost Levels for an August‑September 2012 Kickstarter that sparked controversy. That cartridge only contains six of the ten intended levels, but it preserves the original’s side‑scrolling platform feel, graphics and chiptune soundtrack.

Storyline

In Cheetahmen II, the mad scientist Dr. Morbis makes his first appearance. At the start he creates the Ape‑Man, the creature that the Cheetahmen must battle throughout the game. Dr. Morbis also serves as the boss of the Apollo stage, where he repeatedly runs to the right until the player defeats him.

The ultimate confrontation comes when Hercules faces the Ape‑Man as the final boss; defeating it triggers a soft‑lock that ends the game. The Aries stages recycle the level layouts from the original Cheetahmen, specifically levels 2 and 3, and feature Cygore as the boss, a foe that runs back and forth and also causes a soft‑lock after being beaten.