Well if I sure didn’t pick a handful of weird-ass platformers this month! This was actually one of the first Genesis games I owned growing up. I really don’t understand why my parents picked this game out of hundreds of titles, but I’m actually quite happy that they did. For the sole purpose of this review, anyway.
DeCap Attack (which I’m sure no one on Earth knows) is an updated version of Kid Kool on the NES and Psycho Fox on the Sega Master System. If you have actually seen screenshots of it (which I’m sure Mr. Franzen will provide in the finished version of this review), then, like me, you will wonder why in the blue hell this game was called “Magical Hat Flying Turbo Adventure” in Japan. There are no hats, nothing is “turbo” and it sure isn’t very magical, either. But I digress….
The best part about DeCap (we’re on a first name basis) is the names. Your hero, Chuck D. Head, must play through levels on a map shaped like a skeleton in order to find the uber-villain Max D. Cap. These areas are given clever human anatomy names like Abdomanland and Armington, but the names were never really relevant to the level design itself, and I’m sure they bored the hell out of our mummified friend.
In the levels, Mr. Head attacks by extending his entire face out of his torso and by throwing skulls plucked from the floor. Items are also collected (what platform games don’t have items to collect?) and can be returned to Dr. Frank N. Stein in exchange for different potions. These potions do what you would expect them to: invulnerability, eliminating everything on the screen, higher jumping, etc.
If I had to compare DeCap Attack to any other platform game, I would have to say Boogerman, minus the dick-and-fart-joke humor. It’s a standard platformer for the Genesis that isn’t fast like Sonic the Hedgehog, isn’t innovative like Comic Zone and isn’t fun like Ghouls n’ Ghosts. It has an overall bland feel, albeit morbid as hell, but every department comes up lacking.
The graphics are pretty colorful but still couldn’t save the game from being a total sausagefest from the get-go. The controls feel sluggish, and the overall slow pace of the game really grabbed this title by the hair and drug it in the dirt.
Outside of having a clever naming system, DeCap Attack pretty much took the worst elements of every platform game you could think of at the time, put them in a blender, urinated in it and gave it to unsuspecting parents to give to their children for Christmas back in 1991. Thanks, Mom.
