Dynamite Headdy (Genesis) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
1,277A playthrough of Sega's 1994 action-platformer for the Sega Genesis, Dynamite Headdy.
I fight the "true" final boss and get the final ending screen in this playthough.
Dynamite Headdy was one of a group of projects Treasure began after completing work on Gunstar Heroes, but it wasn't as popular as the earlier game, nor do people seem to remember it as fondly.
In my opinion, it is a better game than Gunstar Heroes. GH is an excellent game, there's no question of that. It's just that for all it does well, Dynamite Headdy tends to do better. What an awesome game it is.
The setup is a bit odd - you play as Headdy, an uber-ugly neon yellow puppet that can detach and throw his head at all sorts of things. Need to kill a bad guy a few feet away? Throw your head at him, of course! Need to reach a ledge that's too high to jump to? Throw your head at it as an anchor to boost yourself up! I mean, what else would one do?
But in addition to his standard repertoire of moves that regularly sever his spinal cord, Headdy can also don any one of several heads with special abilities. They can make him shrink to a fraction of his original size, turn him temporarily invincible, shoot waves of bullets, blow things up, and more. There's even a gross fat lady head that you generally want to avoid since it slows Headdy down to a crawl and leaves him temporarily defenseless.
All of these heads serve a specific purpose and are suited to particular situations, whether your trying for a seemingly impossible-to-reach power-up or needing to plow through a giant wave of bad guys. They add a ton of variety to Headdy's attacks, and a lot of the game's fun comes from experimenting with how to best make use of each of them. It's particularly nice that the game includes a fairly thorough (and completely optional) set of tutorial stages, easing you into things before it goes totally nuts on you.
The game provides a ton of opportunity to experiment beyond the tutorial, too, with an amazing level of attention given to the quality and the diversity of the stage designs. You'll be solving a simple puzzle one minute, only to find yourself being nearly squashed by a giant mechanical dachshund or dodging giant rockets the next. No matter how awesome the stages are, though, like in most Treasure games, the bosses are the true stars. Very rarely do they stop at the garden variety "dodge fire and blast it until it explodes" type of encounters. One takes down a skyscraper as you're scaling it, while another is a Matryoshka doll that starts out as a baby's head and eventually turns into an old man. There is no limit to the craziness, and it really makes the game a joy to play.
It also provides for a plethora of ways in which the game can, and undoubtedly will, kill you. It's difficult. Apparently Sega of America demanded that the game be made more difficult for American audiences, and they got their way. The difference in difficulty between the US and Japanese versions of Dynamite Headdy is nearly a big as what we saw between versions of Contra: Hard Corps. Dynamite Headdy isn't *that* difficult, but it certainly will test you, no matter how good you are. The ending is great though, and the type you don't mind working for. How many platformers have you played where the ending ran for nearly ten minutes before the credits?
There were a fair number of changes in graphics made as well, so if you're a fan, it's worth your while to check out both versions.
The graphics are phenomenal - it digs even deeper into the bag of tricks that Gunstar Heroes was pulled from, and it far surpasses what 99% of the Genesis library ever attempt (let alone achieved) on both a technical and an stylistic level. Tons of stuff gets flung around the screen with nary a hitch in speed or framerate, the clever use of bright color makes it look just as "colorful" as the SNES's best looking platformers, and some of the scaling/rotation/perspective tricks are pretty jaw-dropping the first several times you see them. The audio is also hard to find fault with - there are a ton of music tracks, many of which rock out pretty hard, and the voices are completely free of the Genesis's trademark muddiness and distortion - the quality even beats out the likes of Strider 2.
If you'd like a good laugh, keep an ear out for the pathetic scream that enemies make when you push them off cliffs.
I've been waiting for a good opportunity to put up this video. I was really pleased with how well it came out, and with the game being included with the Genesis Mini coming out next month, this seemed like a good time to pull the trigger. I hope you enjoy watching it, and it'd be awesome if it inspired you to go play this top-notch classic! Headdy deserves every fan he can get.
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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