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Killer 7 looks astonishing. More than anything else, I just want to find out how the hell you play it. But it just keeps on getting delayed. Argh.
Meludreen>
Mario World... well, Suedey already knows what I'm going to say here. As great as it is, there's something about it that prevents me from giving it the adulation that a lot of other people do. Sometimes the various elements don't hold together very well - the dolphins that you have to use as platforms on the one level, for example, look out of place with the design of most of the other sprites, like they were taken from another game. Just little things like that. And the much-praised inertia on Mario can annoy me. Which isn't to say that it's not a brilliant game, just that I think that there are a couple of better ones in the genre.
I prefer Yoshi's Island's purity. I know it's far more linear, but that works for me. And the controls feel just that little bit tighter. I also prefer the less obscure means of opening up the hidden levels, and how it's never anything less than gorgeous.
I think part of the issue with modern platformers is undoubtedly linked to the whole 3D thing. You've got polygonal characters running around polygonal worlds - I'm not talking about things like Mario 64 or Sonic Adventure here, but games that are made out of 3D elements, but take place on a 2D plane - and that makes collision detection so much more complex than it ever was with sprites. There's just more room for things to go wrong, for a platform edge to not recognise that you're standing on it, or an enemy to connect a hit despite not actually touching you.
It's also an issue of character. I don't care what people claim, 3D simply cannot express character in the same way as 2D. Compare a 3D fighter - Soul Calibur, say - to a 2D one - SFIII - and there's a marked difference. The 2D fighters can wink and grin and grimace, and their doing so is far more effective than the 3D ones trying to do the same. It's the nature of the animation - the 2D stuff is only ever going to be seen from one angle, whereas on a 3D character it has to look correct from any and every angle. So 2D doesn't have to worry about being 'correct' in any way. It just has to look good when looked at from one direction, and that means that the artists can ignore things like propotion and realism. And it's hand-drawn, which makes a world of difference.
Transfer that to platformers and it matters even more, because they're all about the characters. Also, for a painful number of years, developers have forgotten that platformers should surprise and delight by offering up new play mechanics, and instead have spent all their efforts on making them technically impressive. Daft.
But yeah, Dynamite Headdy. I keep on meaning to do this game justice as there's not a single decent fanpage on it on the entire Internet - even the Treasure fansites tend to ignore it. Comparison to Gunstar Heroes doesn't hold water, really, because GH is primarily a run and gunner, whereas Headdy is a proper platformer.
Visuals and audio are perfectly matched - colourful, insanely detailed backgrounds (unlike Mario World's very basic-looking areas), lunatic, sugar-coated sound effects ("You got a secret bonus point!"), infuriatingly addictive music. The control scheme is solid and inventive - the elasticated neck has just the right amount of boing to it, the different heads allow you to mess about with different strategies for each area.
But mainly it wins out over anything else around because of the variety on offer. No two levels are the same and no one element is ever repeated. Treasure have never been as wildly inventive as they were here. A level made out of tilting, Mode 7 style platforms (Super FX chip, eat yr heart out). A dizzying blast through the backstage theatre area, clasped in the hand of a swirling robotic arm controlled by an insane cat. A full-on shmup level, ending with a mask boss that gets 'older' the more you shoot it. A rotating level based on the old C64 classic Nebulus. Bosses that morph and shift and keep on blowing the previous ones out of the water.
Also, a two-tiered system of secrets. First one: Find the basketball heads and enter a basketball mini-game, using your head to bounce the balls into the hoops but avoiding the bombs, then scribble down the number you're given on successful completion of each of these stages and input the code into the box that appears at the very end of the game for a hidden level where Headdy has to beat up a Hollywood producer who throws dollar bills at him in an attempt to buy his life story! Second one: find the Secret Bonus Point men hidden in all the levels and open up... well, I don't know, as I always miss a few of them.
It's one of the many, many games that emulation doesn't do justice to. Running it through Gens or whatever is better than *not* playing it, obviously, but it really needs to be experienced as was intended to appreciate just how innovative and technically impressive it was/is. Nothing else comes close to pushing the vanilla Megadrive to breaking point the way this does. |
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