The second pre-Reymann limb thrower created by the technomaniacs at Treasure. Let’s see how they live up to their big name.

While Plok was an entertaining game, a few poor game design decisions were enough to degrade a potentially good platformer to just above average. But the guys from Software Creations really tried to make their character the hero of not just another passing jump and gave their all, but they simply did not have enough experience, or inspiration, or all at once. And so it happened that the game did not receive sufficient support either from the audience or from the developers themselves subsequently (not counting the official comic book 20 years later), which is why it disappeared from the horizon, remaining for history only an ordinary platformer, for the average gamer having rather nostalgic value. Maybe things are much better with the game from Treasure?

Better, but not much. And not at all because Treasure suddenly took and tied up a broom; a cruel joke was played by the desperate desire of many famous and not so famous companies to repeat the success of SEGA with its blue hedgehog, which resulted in a total oversaturation of the market, which by 1994 had reached frightening proportions. Of course, the subsequent massive transition to 3D significantly thinned out the crowd of one-day mascots (at the same time touching some good representatives like Sparkster), but until that day it was absolutely impossible for developers to break through. And in the case of Dynamite Headdy, it’s not just offensive. This. unfair. Wherever you look in the game, everything glitters and sparkles, there’s nothing really to complain about, but let’s take it in order.

The first thing Dynamite Headdy throws at the player is something that is not so often found in platformers, especially older ones – an in-game story. The world of toys is a complete mess. While a new theatrical performance was being prepared, an evil doll with the self-explanatory name “Dark Demon” imagined itself to be the crown of creation and decided to arrange a voluntary-forced filtration of the population, leaving only those whom it personally considered worthy. Those who were less fortunate in finding themselves in the taste of the newly-minted emperor are destined to be dismantled into small pieces and sent to the scrap heap. The main character named Haddie was also an outsider. Having tried to rescue his brothers during the next purge, he himself is captured, from where, having worked his head a little, he successfully escapes along with several survivors. It is from the escape scene that control of the hero passes into your hands.

You can describe Haddie something like this: Plock in reverse. If all the limbs except the head were detached without difficulty, then the latter is enough for the newly-minted hero to fight the forces of evil by the eyes. Although Haddie’s default arsenal of abilities is small: biting and clinging, his functionality can be expanded with the help of numerous interchangeable heads, which he will find in boxes throughout the game. Despite the fact that each individual box contains only two or even three different heads (and the third is often of an auxiliary nature and does not contribute at all to increasing firepower), there are slightly less than twenty of them in the entire game.

Not all of them, by the way, are equally useful, and some are even harmful, so it’s better not to take everything indiscriminately, especially in large messes – due to absurdity, you can lose your life very cheaply, and they are already worth their weight in gold. Such caution should be observed, at least until you have memorized the icons of all the heads depicted on the boxes with them, and learn to navigate them quickly and accurately.

As for the game itself, Dynamite Headdy is such a classic platformer, only from Treasure. What is Treasure famous for besides the fact that they come from Konami?? First of all, the uniqueness of each game situation. The puppet show staged by Treasure is made in such a way that with each new level you will get more vivid impressions of each other. And this is facilitated not only by the above-mentioned interchangeable heads. Either the hero will climb a cylindrical tower accompanied by a cool pseudo 3D effect of a “camera moving around the tower”, then the game suddenly becomes a horizontal scrolling shooter, then it will be possible to turn the level upside down, or something else will happen.

Of course, Treasure didn’t https://nonukcasinosites.co.uk/review/midnite-casino/ invent any of these things (at least not specifically for Dynamite Headdy), but they did a great job of not just packing the game with enough variety, but also dosing it in a way that doesn’t devolve into chaos.

Secondly, Treasure is famous for its bosses. If the reader happened to see their next game Alien Soldier, all possible questions will disappear by themselves. Despite all the variety invested in, Dynamite Headdy truly thrives in battles with local leaders. Of which they have produced so many that they cannot leak out. In addition to the bosses of the levels themselves, the passage is sometimes interrupted by skirmishes with Haddy’s eternal rival Trouble Bruin (or Maruyama, if you play the Japanese version, but we will dwell on regional differences a little later), eager to take his place as the public’s favorite and the most popular toy, as well as with numerous semi-bosses and. half-half-boss. At least the latter don’t look like ordinary enemies at all.

Sometimes it will get ridiculous: you fight one half-boss, then go to another screen and fight another half-boss, then go to another screen and fight a couple of half-half-bosses, after which you fight the boss. Dynamite Headdy does not give the player a chance at all, and this is even though there is no time limit at all.

The only thing I would like to find fault with is Haddie’s ability to grab onto characters specially designated for this task and thus be pulled up to higher platforms. The fact is that this trick has been implemented several times. whimsical. Contrary to expectations, a character who is hooked onto someone will not hang in the air, waiting for the next action. More precisely, his head will remain where it is, but his body, if it suddenly loses ground under its feet, can roll head over heels with unpleasant consequences. To avoid this, you need to cling quickly, accurately and without thinking. By the way, one of the optional training levels is dedicated to the climbing procedure, and I strongly do not recommend skipping it.

But look at the world itself, because it is gorgeous. Each level is filled with details that, it would seem, are not particularly needed for the game, but they are the ones who breathe life into the environment. Dolls tangled in wires and hanging from the ceiling behind the scenes, an auxiliary character who shows the vulnerability of the boss and periodically receives cabbage soup from him, a boss who spins the battle arena around its axis with such a cool pseudo 3D effect that it makes you feel sick as if from the real thing – the list could take a long time. Consider only the guards with swords on the first level, who protect themselves from attacks head-on, but who can, for example, be pushed from a hill. What is touching is not the very fact of such an opportunity, but the way they fall, waving their arms and uttering a drawn-out “ohhhh~”!»

Neither the artists, who drew a lot of animation for both the foreground and background, nor the programmers, who generously supplied the whole thing with a bunch of different visual effects, spared their efforts. But what they did best was to convey the feeling of a puppet theater production. Flat scenery, sometimes deliberately creating the feeling that the director was trying his best to save on props, the opportunity to sometimes dive behind the scenes, where the puppet life is no less vigorous, the dolls themselves are made in different styles, from the plush Trouble Bruin to Japanese karakuri.

It’s expected that when the game moved west, like many others, it was subjected to a little torture procedure called “localization”, but in the case of Dynamite Headdy it was much worse. Having apparently decided to save on translators, almost all dialogue was removed from the American and European versions of the game, leaving literally three lines of text. And since each battle with the boss was preceded by a short conversation with him, the game script was considerably thinner. If the original at least somehow explains the events taking place, then Americans and Europeans could only rely on the instructions included with the game. But she couldn’t answer all the questions either.

For example, the following scene haunted me: before the final battle with the Dark Demon, the protagonist’s girlfriend suddenly appears (Heather in Westerners, Finji in the original), who is captured by the evil one a second later. It (the scene) looked like it shouldn’t exist; Instead of a damsel in distress suddenly appearing, the final battle should have just begun. In fact, it turned out that Finji tried unsuccessfully to reason with the villain, ending with the remark: “Dark Demon, in fact you. “, which, of course, she was not allowed to finish, which added a bit of mystery to the decisive battle.

And Dynamite Headdy has been further complicated. AND. I don’t know what to say about this. Someone in the mid-1990s actually looked at Treasure’s game and decided that somehow it was too easy to beat? I heard that this practice of unnaturally complicating Western game releases existed due to the cartridge rental system adopted abroad, because the longer a gamer tried to complete a rented game, the more money the distributor received from him. I don’t know how true this information is (maybe the Japanese developers just decided to make fun of the white man), but, remembering the numerous reviews on the same GameFaqs, ending with the question “Buy or Rent?”, there is still a logical grain in it.

In any case, the Western release of Dynamite Headdy is a real test of strength, severely punishing even the slightest mistake. Firstly, Haddie himself has become more fragile. Secondly, bosses have become stronger and a little more aggressive. Thirdly, you are not given a single continuation (instead of two in the original), so if you lost all your lives before you found at least one, then welcome to Game Over. Although some difficulty changes, oddly enough, were in place – in most cases, the leaders were made simply annoying, replacing an honest challenge with a test of patience. Considering that the bosses from the second half of the game, even in the Japanese original, tear ass, battles with them in the Western version develop into some kind of special kind of perversion. To be honest, they at least remained passable, but they will require maximum concentration and endurance from the player.

Fortunately, experts who speak both Japanese and romhacking skills came to the rescue, thanks to whose efforts a translation of the original version of the game into English was born. Now no language barrier will prevent you from familiarizing yourself with the game in the form in which it was intended by the developers! You can download the patch for Japanese ROM from this link.

Music is a separate story. While the soundtrack lacks some of the virtuosity and technical finesse that the Super Folleen Brothers brought to Plok’s soundscape, it thrives without them, relying solely on the Japanese penchant for melody. Well, Dynamite Headdy has about five times more compositions, thanks to which almost every game situation and every boss of any significance has its own unique musical theme.

The variety of the compositions themselves is impressive. At the head of the table there are pleasant and easy-to-listen melodies, but as soon as you turn to soulful soft-jazz motifs, the desire to play disappears – the sounds will drown out the music. Boss themes seem to live in their own world. No, stylistically such compositions are consistent in the general key and do not fall out of the story, but sometimes they completely break all the templates and either turn on a powerful FM guitar, or light up the dance floor of the 1980s in the spirit of Kraftwerk, or do something else – create diversity in general. If we try to give the soundtrack a brief description, it can be boiled down to the following: it fits perfectly into the theme of the puppet show. Cheerful, a little weird and incredibly charming, which is what this world of toys is.

The game music record, as is usually the case, was not officially put on sale, but something even more interesting was released – an amateur tribute album. Featuring 26 tracks from a wide variety of artists and covering almost the entire original soundtrack, it allows you to look at familiar music from a completely different perspective. Some remixes, to be honest, have strayed so far from their originals that without background information on the album’s website, this connection can sometimes be difficult to establish, but no one promised rearrangements. You can download the tribute here.

As a result, we can say that the low popularity of Dynamite Headdy and its local fame only among the remaining fans of SEGA products is simply criminal. The game is full of style and real life, tons of imagination are put into it, and the varied gameplay does not let you get bored. Dynamite Headdy is a show worth going to.