Platform: Sega Genesis

Developer: Vic Tokai

Publisher: Sega

Release Date (NA): 1991

Genre: Platformer

Nerd Rating: 4.5 out of 10

When I first saw this game at a used book store, I said “WTF”… The picture on the front of the cartridge is a little wacky.  There’s a skull bursting out of the picture with a stunned look on his face, and behind him is a pair of mummy-type legs (with orange knee-pads??) running through some grass.  Then the title on the top of the cartridge looks like this: DECAPATTACK.  With weird highlights, colors, strike through, and stuff.  So when I saw this game was only $1, I knew I had to try it out!

The game starts off immediately with a kooky scene of some weird disfigured skeleton body being separated into 7 pieces.  Foreshadowing perhaps? Maybe my weird mummy friend, also known as Chuck D. Head, has to collect the 7 missing body parts.  The storyline begins with a mad scientist, some weird Frankenstein creature, and another odd creature.  They are having a conversation.   I later discovered who the characters are, but without having the game insert, we would have no idea.

• “Frank N Stein: Chuck, Max D. Cap has emerged from the underworld to invade our world.
• Weird creature: Come on, chuck, now’s the time to show your stuff.
• Max D. Cap: The time has come for my underworld army to conquer the surface world.  We’ll show no mercy to those who stand in our way — if anybody is foolish enough to do so.
• Weird Creature: Be careful. Good luck chuck.
• Frank N Stein:  Now’s the time to test your power, chuck!”

The thing is, I think the weird creature that pops up and talks about ruling the surface world is Max D. Cap, the bad guy, but where the hell is Chuck D. Head??  Nothing about this scene makes sense. It’s not even clear who is talking to whom, because the one creature pops up in the middle of the convo and leaves before it’s over. Not a great start. It’s confusing and the music is awful (reminiscent of a Battletoads score, but at least in Battletoads it fits).

So, our story begins in Abdomainland, where this God-awful-looking mummy thing (who looks to be missing a head), begins running around this platforming stage with some pretty obnoxiously atrocious music in the background on a pretty short loop.  Wait, he doesn’t have a head, but with a simple push of the B button, his effin’ eyes and mouth shoot out of his chest and attack enemies??  This is wacky… and it’s wacky enough to be intriguing.

So I’m running around this pretty flat stage (which is kind of strange for a platform game), punching lights out with my face-chest attack, and I notice that there’s only 1 thing in the upper left, and it’s my life-bar (which is appropriately 3 hearts, shaped like real hearts, not a buttcheek shaped heart, that disappear when you get hit).  What about all of these items I’ve been collecting? Hm, weird. I continue on, and I accidentally mash the A button, and a separate window pops up.  In this window all of my collected items are neatly organized in an inventory system and ready for use.  You move a mouse-type curser arrow over an item and you can either “use” it or “ask” what it is.  There are a couple of power ups, a 10 second invincibility potion, a 10 second freeze-enemy potion attack, and some weird thing that they won’t tell me what it is. They just say “Wait until you see what this one does!” as if to try and get me excited through this shitshow of a video game.  I didn’t use any of them. Instead I exited out and continued playing the game.

This game continues on, aimlessly making me jump and kill enemies in a seemingly never-changing world of crows, round green enemies with helicopter hats, ghosts, and wolves that walk on 2 feet.  The game can be pretty glitchy sometimes, as once or twice I would just barely miss the mark jumping for a platform and I would fall short.  Instead of falling all the way down I would kind of just be stuck in mid air right below the platform.  There are some cool controls though, like how I can jump in the air and hit the jump button over and over, making Chuck kick his feet and fall to the ground much slower.  This proved to be especially useful if I made an ill-advised jump and needed some spare time to get out of it.  The enemies can be seen coming at you from far away, so it’s not ridiculously hard.

I got a little impatient one time and just didn’t care about getting hit. I took on too much damage, I died 3 times, and the game was done. I had to start over from the very beginning. I never got a chance to see if there were any continues or not.   While I bashed this game over and over, and really didn’t have high expectations for it, it truly wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.  The levels are odd, the enemies are odder, and the story is oddest, but it controls fairly well and I like the variety of potions and power-ups.

Graphics: The graphics in this game are pretty awful.  There is not a great variety of color, texture, or enemy sprites.  The background can sometimes look very similar to the foreground, leaving the player confused and angry.  Nothing in the game is very detailed and it’s all just a little too simple and grainy (more grainy than most games).

Sound: The sound in DECAP is truly difficult to deal with.  The music is exceptionally loud compared to most of the sound effects, and your character makes a terrible noise EVERY TIME he changes directions. EVERY DAMN TIME. It sounds like laser beams from a ray gun.  How did they ever think that noise resembled skidding shoes? How??  Overall the sound is not enjoyable and is quite annoying.

Playability: The game is definitely playable and the glitches don’t cause for too much trouble.  The bosses aren’t overly difficult, and I found the game to be rather easy at times and frustratingly difficult at other times.  I would have enjoyed a little more of a challenge.  Once I got a hang for the controls and using my items in my inventory, I was able to really focus on getting through the levels and finding more potions. The control scheme is a synch and provides for some quality gameplay.

Replayability: This game has a pretty low level of replayability.  Once you accomplish a bunch, you already hate yourself for wasting so much of your day playing this game.  I read some other reviews, and many people talk pretty highly of this game… I’m not one of them.  You might like to put the game in just to show it off to your friends, kinda like the game Two Crude Dudes (check that one out), and get some good laughs at the expense of the game-makers.   I see why this game was $1, and I might go trade it in for $.30 store credit.

All-in-all, bad jokes and bashing aside, DECAP ATTACK had some potential.  From a platforming perspective, the idea wasn’t bad.  Create a platform game where you have an inventory of collected items and you can use them at your disposal whenever you see fit.  But the execution was poor, and the story-line was even poorer… Poorer than a bum taking cigarette butts out of an ash-tray outside of a restaurant.  This game missed the mark by a large margin.

Nerd Rating: 45/100

Submitted by NerdBerry