Dick Tracy (1991)

Preliminary: This has a lot I love. A Look that's up to par for 91, tight controls, infinite bullets (it seems), a neat idea where you can shoot in the background that's actually pulled off quite well for early consoles. But I'm never a big fan of run n gun/brawlers. And already on the first stage it's feeling a bit redundant and blah, despite how well-done it undeniably is (I like that you can break the glass and whatnot heh, lots of nice touches that showed they cared about the game they created). We'll see how far I get, but without a particularly good Sound and Look, (and perhaps me having a connection with the Dick Tracy franchise), I'm not sure how much it'll hook me. Also, why do I move so slowly lol.

I was gonna take a break for the night and play OSRS, and revisit this tomorrow. But 1-B is an interesting level. You can only punch, and it's well-designed/balanced to make that manageable while still difficult. Funny that Dick can just kill em with one punch :-p

Yea okay. It's a good game, and I'm impressed by it, but mid way through 1-B I was like, what am I doing ha. Same enemies, pretty lame tune, usual brawler frustrations. Meh, moving on.

Think I'll go ahead and call this a flawed but worthwhile hidden gem. In this version of Dick Tracy (not to be confused with the NES version, which greatly frustrated the Angry Video Game Nerd), it's an action platformer that is a unique blend of "run and gun" and "crosshair shooting" games. You can shoot your handgun at enemies ahead of you with one button, and by holding another button you can use your machine gun to take out enemies running around in the background (e.g. across the street from Dick Tracy). It's a very clever and fun setup that works way better than I expected, and I'm curious to find out if any other games have done something similar.

There is some variety to levels too. In some, you can't use your guns for whatever reason so it turns into a sort of one-hit beat-em-up. And in other levels, you control Dick Tracy while he's hanging on to a police car (that you can move around), so it's an exciting car chase with all the mobster vehicles. Everything plays well for the most part. My biggest issues though are: 1) All the levels look the same (i.e. dark city). 2) The music is pretty bland. 3) The game gets way too difficult in the final stages... There's one in particular where they just send in all the mobsters in the world at you. You kill so many mobsters in this game by the way, it's kind of hilarious. Uncharted's Drake has got nothing on Dick Tracy, lol.