The Cliffhanger: Edward Randy (Arcade) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
191A playthrough of Data East's 1990 action arcade game, The Cliffhanger: Edward Randy.
Played through on the machine's default difficulty setting.
Edward Randy is, for all intents and purposes, an unlicensed Indiana Jones game, and better than most of the officially licensed ones... well, maybe except for the excellent SNES game. And it fills that role far better than Wolfteam's Earnest Evans ever did.
Randy is chillin at home one day when some kid, chased by Nazis with guns, runs into his house yelling for help. Apparently her gramps, a Nazi scientist, discovered a crystal that could create a doomsday weapon, and so sent it to his granddaughter to make sure it would stay out of the Nazi's hands. That plan was a complete bust, so now you play as Randy, unsuspecting protagonist and reluctant hero, to save the day. And completely incidentally you have a date, in a contrived bit of nonsense character development.
So continuing on with the Indiana Jones theme, you fight (with a whip, of course!) through all sorts of impressive set pieces. You'll do battle on airplane wings, speed boats, and jeeps, usually at breakneck speeds with all sorts of chaos going on in the background the entire time.
Though it might not be the most novel concept ever - I mean, Data East didn't often come up with wildly original concepts - Edward Randy is an exciting and visually spectacular release that was in a league of it's own in 1990. It uses sprite-scaling to mimic 3D graphics, so things will regularly zoom into or out of the screen, and the scenery zips by smoothly as the "camera" swings its angle back and forth to match the action. It's not as smooth as Galaxy Force or Afterburner, but it is far more creative and dynamic in its use of the technique. It also does a really cool Turtles in Time style effect by flinging enemies at the screen when hit in certain ways - I wonder if Konami might've drawn inspiration from it? The game looks like a movie created with video game sprites, and that's by far the best part of the experience.
I guess that also might explain why so many of the machines look like they came straight out of Miyazaki's Nausicaa and Laputa films, eh? And is it just me, or is the bad guy (Dark Ogre) actually M. Bison from Street Fighter II in darker clothes? Or I guess I should ask if M. Bison is really just Dark Ogre wearing bright red, since this does predate Capcom's fighter by about a year.
The sound is pretty good, too, with its mix of FM and samples approximating "193X" style music nicely. The sound samples are pretty amusing too - some of the heavily accented yells ate beyond goofy.
After seeing the clear effort and care invested in its presentation, however, the game's biggest flaw becomes ever more apparent, and disappointing. The gameplay is a mess. You have a wide variety of moves, but the response time of the controls is sluggish, the whip swinging has some weird timing quirks, and the game badly needed a third action button to avoid issues with things like jumping and sliding. There were a lot of sound ideas here, but it really feels half-baked. Sloppy hit detection and endless barrages of attacks mean you'll get hit constantly, but oddly enough, the game is pretty easy. Your life is tied to your score - the better you do the more you have, but if you get hit too many times at once, you're done - but it's usually easy to pull off a balancing act between the two. You also jump right back in where you did when continuing, so it doesn't take long at all to blast through the game on just a few credits.
The Cliff Hanger: Edward Randy is a fairly unknown game. I imagine its technical accomplishments prevented it from ever being a serious candidate for a home port - the Saturn probably would've been the first console that could've handled it - and to strip away the special effects would effectively gut the game of any appeal it might've had on the 16-but platforms.
It's a fun but badly flawed showpiece. If only Data East had invested as much love and care in the gameplay as it had the presentation, Edward Randy would've been something magical. As it is, though, it's an impressive bit of puff of entertainment, but ultimately it lacks the substance to go any real distance.
Still, though, if you want to see something that was cutting edge for 1990, you aren't going to find a better example than The Cliff Hanger: Edward Randy. It's worth a look, even if only for its sheer spectacle.
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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