Wednesday 19 September 2012

Saturn Month: Preparation for Police Brutality

Time for another round of Saturn games and this time we'll be looking at Die Hard Arcade.  Die Hard Arcade was a fucking awesome coin-op beat 'em up game that got a Saturn exclusive port and is incidentally one of my personal favourite arcade games ever.

The story behind the game itself is fairly straightforward.  Some prick has taken the presidents daughter and you have to go smash the faces of many thugs to get her back.  Really simple premise, perfect for just kicking the shit out of people, which is all you really ask of a beat 'em up game, let's be honest.

That said, the story behind the games development is a bit more strange.  If you go look it up, or when I get round to shooting a video for it, you may notice that it actually has very little to do with Die Hard.  That's because it actually has NOTHING to do with Die Hard and I imagine the title was slapped on it so it would boost sales.  In Japan it was developed and released under the name Dynamite Deka, and after it was complete, they nabbed the Die Hard licence and slapped it on when the released it in the west.

The gameplay is standard beat 'em up stuff, but it's fucking awesome.  You can do normal shit like punching and kicking if you're boring, but if you're awesome you'll use the environment or one of the many weapons in order to make murdering your fellow man that much more efficient.  Kill all the dudes in a room to progress to the next room to kill more dudes.  Sometimes you'll get a quick time event between the rooms so you can have the game automatically kill a dude for you if you get it right.  Then right at the end, if you're on 2 player mode, you get to murder each other as a little nod to stuff like Double Dragon.

The upcoming video will be a little different for this one.  I have a friend coming up to Nagoya to visit me, so we're hoping to grab a copious amount of beer and scream at each other while we die miserably, so keep an eye out for that one.

Also before I finish, the game got a fucking awesome sequel on the Dreamcast called Dynamite Cop
Same game, different setting and much more refined gameplay, it was awesome!  If I ever get a chance to show you that one, I will, so I'll keep my eyes peeled for a Japanese copy of this thing too!



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