Mutant Rampage: Bodyslam (CD-i) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
411A playthrough of Philips and Animation Magic's 1994 2.5D beat 'em up for the Philips CD-i, Mutant Rampage: Bodyslam.
So, Philips went for the arcade/console style beat 'em up on the CD-i. Given the hardware, it was a gutsy move, and it's nowhere near as terrible as you'd expect. The graphics look great (at least, while they are relatively still - the animation is pretty rough) - the video is fairly similar to that found in the Mario and Zelda games (well, they do share the same developer) but are of much higher quality this time. Disney this may not be, but the cutscenes are far more competently drawn than the Nintendo licensed titles, and the quality is much higher due to this game's reliance on a MPEG decoder card being install. The character sprites have much more character than in most of these types of game, and they are much less concerned with being 'inoffensive' than their SNES and Genesis brethren were. In fact, many of them are hilariously vulgar. I actually really appreciated the look - not because there are cat-women with massive and visible nipples everywhere, or because I beat up a sumo-wrestler named Yahama or a street-gang flunky named Spooge, but because these elements all put together give it a lot of flair that most 16-bit era fighters lacked. Well, expect for the really good ones, like Final Fight and Streets of Rage.
The controls aren't particularly bad, or at least not using the official four-button Philips/Gravis pad. The enemy AI is cheap, but the game gimps you along by constantly healing you up. It's pretty fun for the most part - expect for the flying enemies. Rarely have enemies made me see red the way the flying ones in this game do. Think Jet in SoR2 was annoying? You haven't lived...
The video was recorded from a DVS VE200 model CD-I console (dated 1998, built-in digital video cart) through the composite connector plugged into an X-Capture 1 capture card. The game was played using the official Philips 4-button gamepad.
Played through on the easy difficulty level. This wasn't because the game is particularly difficult since it dishes out extra-lives pretty regularly, but the enemy patterns are infuriatingly cheap on all levels: they just become much more so on medium and hard. I played on easy mainly to minimize the amount enemies trapped and juggled me on the edges of the screen - on hard, it's fairly easy to have the computer destroy three lives before you're given the opportunity to fight back.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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