Dick Tracy (NES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
465A playthrough of Bandai's 1990 license-based action-adventure game for the NES, Dick Tracy.
Though it was released just a couple of months after the popular movie starring Warren Beatty and Madonna showed up in theaters, the NES adaptation of Dick Tracy is actually based on the comic strip from the 1930s.
In the NES game, our yellow-clad servant of justice has to follow the trail of clues to solve five different cases. In each, once the police chief has given Tracy the first piece of evidence, you're given the freedom to roam the city.
Though the first clue of each case gives a clear idea of where you should begin your investigation, where you go is entirely up to you. Chicago is a large city with a lot of places to visit, and in an early example of the now ubiquitous "open world" format in console games, Tracy has full access to it all from the start.
The city is laid out in an NYC-style grid of lettered and numbered streets to ease navigation, and there are a couple dozen spots - including night clubs, warehouses, apartment buildings, and shops - that can be visited. However, you have to be extremely careful as you start out: many buildings play host to rooftop snipers that will fire at you without mercy.
There are no extra lives nor continues, and since each hit that Tracy (or his car, if he is in it) absorbs will sap half of one of his life gauge's four shields, so the snipers have to be dealt with immediately. You can jump out of your car at anytime to fire at them, though, and thankfully, once dead, they don't respawn for the rest of the game.
Once you've reached your destination intact, the game switches to platformer style of play. In these scenes, you search for clues and question suspects, but you have to be careful to follow the rules: everytime you either shoot at someone who is unarmed or accuse the wrong suspect, you lose a chunk of health.
The controls are pretty stiff - Tracy's jump is awkward and often falls short and aiming his gun can feel clunky, but the biggest issue that I had with it was in switching items. You have to switch between your punch and your gun pretty often, but this involves cycling through everything you're carrying with the Select button as you're being attacked, leading to some unfair and frustrating moments in the later stages.
But though it all seems a bit unforgiving at first, the game is pretty generous with the number of special weapons and health kits that have been hidden in most areas, and it provides a password at the end of each case.
Dick Tracy is an ambitious effort for an NES game, but a few of its more punitive design quirks suck a lot of the potential fun out of the experience. I generally enjoyed it - the music is alright, the graphics are sharp and stylish, and the game's overall format is novel and appealing - but there's never any sort of commensurate payout for the investment that it requires to finish. Sure, you could do much worse on the NES, but you could also do much better.
The Genesis game (https://youtu.be/0O7lO2Jntjw ) was much better.
_____________
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.