Blood, sushi y in wild 'Cop'

Dynamite Cop

Sega

Somewhere in the alchemical world of video game creation, someone mixed the beat-the-crap-out-of-the-other-guy ethos with the moving-along-a-lineal-course-and-killing-your-opponents heart of gun games and threw in a dash of running around a room with your enemies aspect of survival horror. The outcome is "Dynamite Cop," its direct predecessor "Die Hard Arcade" and the play related game "Fighting Force."

It's your job to save the president's daughter on her hijacked cruise ship, but actually your job is to beat up terrorist pirates with the weapons at hand in the game, such as deck chairs, sushi, French bread and high powered weapons. It's great being able to smack someone with a tuna until it squelches into a bunch of pieces, then pick up their weapon that you've made them drop and make them sorry they ever chose the terrorist pirate career path.

Being an arcade game, the action is somewhat limited. The missions are discrete and relatively short. All but the first mission have limited continues however, so there is at least a challenge involved in some of the missions.

The Dreamcast version adds a few wrinkles to the game; in addition to picking up illustrations during the game and viewing them in a picture gallery, you have the option of a versus mode and a survival mode. In the first, you fight a friend or some other person sitting next to you; in the second you fight an endless stream of corsair kidnapper wannabes until they take you down for good.

"Dynamite Cop" has some interesting functions. You can download a file called a detonator pack from the internet or the demo game disc from the last Official Sega Dreamcast magazine and get an additional character and other goodies. There's a trade off between ease of use and rewarding those willing to interact with the game. It's hard to say whether the trade off is objectively worth it.

This disc contains what promises to be an odd development in the Dreamcast story. Old Sega arcade games are starting to get included with new Dreamcast games. "Dynamite Cop" comes with the ancient "Tranquilizer Gun." Simple yet unplayable, the game is not enthralling or even interesting. A mere artifact, it may be of interest to those who enjoyed it when it was state of the art in the early '80s. But this game would've looked outdated on the Atari 2600. Hopefully, Sega will continue to include their old games on new games; they can only be better than this.

"Dynamite Cop" is short and to the point. Beat everything that moves with everything that doesn't. And, on occasion, beat the moving ones with some of the other moving ones you've got by the ankles. Dumb, violent fun for the whole apartment.

- Ted Watts

11-29-99