Um ótimo jogo de plataforma antigo, com uma trilha sonora muito boa e cenários LINDOS pra época.

A jogabilidade tenta inovar com o diferencial do protagonista conseguir "trocar de cabeça", cada "cabeça" tem uma habilidade diferente que irá te ajudar a passar determinadas fases.

As lutas contra chefes são o destaque do game, a grande variedade e criatividade nos níveis do jogo estão entre os melhores de qualquer plataforma de 16 bits.

O maior contra do jogo é sua dificuldade. O jogo até começa tranquilo mas uma vez que o desafio aumenta, tudo fica MUITO DIFICIL. Os estágios mais pro fim do game terão inimigos vindos de todos os lados, alguns dos chefes começam a usar ataques aleatórios que são muito injustos. O que realmente torna o jogo absurdo de injusto é que você tem vidas muito limitadas e os níveis não apresentam checkpoints. Morreu uma vez e você terá que começar o estágio atual novamente (incluindo lutas contra chefes de várias fases). Game over e você terá que recomeçar do inicio do jogo.

Em poucas palavras o jogo é estranho, frenético, repleto de lutas de chefes memoráveis, esteticamente agradável e realmente criativo. Em contra partida a dificuldade do jogo faz você desanimar com ele.

God damn am I surprised on how much this game's grown on me ever since my first playthrough a while back. I think this might genuinely be my favorite Genesis game as of now. It's just bursting with so much creativity and charm, not to mention it's just super rad as hell too. A stage play is a super cool style to theme a game around, and Treasure truly knocked it out of the park with it. You have super cool set pieces and sequences like the opening chase, practically every fight with Maruyama, the climb through Dark Demon's tower, and the flying stages which honestly became one of my favorite parts of the game. The game is a blast to play as well too, with Headdy's gimmick making for some really fun platforming and combat. I initially had some issues with odd difficulty once I first played it, but I didn't really have that issue this time around. That's probably because I played the original Japanese version, which is noticeably more fair. (Though to be fair, extra knowledge this time around did help as well) Either version would probably be fine for me now though, since I basically love every corner of this game now, but I would recommend the original version if you want to try it out for yourself though. This Genesis classic really is something special.

Also if nobody got me, I know Dynamite Headdy OST - Hustle Maruyama got me. Can I get an amen?

Dynamite Headdy is one of those games that's just impossible to hate. I could just end the review there, but I still got some extra space to fill out so ummm

Lets start off with the visuals, and.. fucking hell, what to say? They are BEAUTIFUL. This may be the best looking game on the MD, everything is so colorful and full of life and detailed and, and, and! The toy aesthetic also allows Treasure to make some stunning set-pieces. Sometimes, in the middle of boss fights or levels, I would pause the game and just.. look it at. Jesus Christ, have you ever just looked at Dynamite Headdy?

The game is also incredibly charming. I've already talked about the visuals, but there are other things, like the stage names. Fly Hard, Twin Freaks, Stair Wars, Toyz in the Hood, Fun Forgiven, Illegal Weapon, Terminate Her Too, The Rocket Tier, it might seem like i'm making these up, but nope. They're so unfunny that they become funny again.

There is one massive problem for me though, and that's the difficulty. To put it into simple terms, this shit is brutal, especially the last few bosses (the laser machine and final boss weren't too bad though). Once the schmup level came around, I was already using save states compulsively. If I wasn't trying to finish it though, it wouldn't be a big problem since this game is just fun.

Overall, a definite classic with a difficulty level that's a bit too high for me. Maybe I should try the JP version, anything to help with that ball-bustingly hard twin freaks boss.

I've got real admiration for the theatrical trappings, with panels falling off the back wall and gyrating stagehands gussying up the set as you stroll through, but I think coming back to this style of gameplay doesn't hit the same for me anymore. the treasure hyperfocus on impressive boss fights is here without the richer mechanics of gunstar heroes or alien soldier, leaving much stricter scenarios where the player has less leverage over the proceedings. it's heavily setpiece-driven and thus built upon cracking open whatever essential strategy solves each individual encounter rather than learning particular mechanics over the course of the game. a good example would be izayoi, who has a rapid arm extension attack that aims for your head, so if you throw your head above you right when she starts tracking, you can repeatedly have her whiff and then bop her in the face when she briefly exposes it afterwards. that's a cool little extension of the game's primary mechanic (you can throw your head in any direction), but once you lock it in the repetition of her behavior pattern and her cyclically available weak point make the fight rather static.

not sure what to think of the different abilities you can get with various heads throughout either. theoretically I could've enjoyed having them woven in through enemies or something else organic a la kirby, but having the abilities just sitting out in the open right where you need them feels a bit raw. it's especially apparent given how few there are that alter mobility or do anything other than make combat easier; perhaps a bit of tunnel vision on the developer's part, even though you can tell they attempted some actual level design here. you may get a sequence with some wall-climbing thanks to the spiky head ability, but these segments boil down just to "scale the wall with the powerup" without many complicating factors thrown in aside from a late-game segment where you use it to stall on the ceiling and avoid rocket trains zooming by. the way that abilities are applied in the boss fights also fall into a narrow paradigm, with more than a few bosses having abilities sitting around that effectively shut them off: time stop in multiple fights, both a bomb with crazy damage and invincibility in the aforementioned izayoi fight, and the hammer in both rever face and the final boss fight. really something where some sort of trade-off regarding grabbing the ability would've made more sense; the developers settled instead of interleaving junk abilities in the rotating ability selection that will inevitably cause you to eat a lot of damage until they wear off.

iyellatcloud recently described shadow of the beast as 'designed by 10-year-old [themselves]'. For my money, Headdy is the good future equivalent of that kid design fantasy. Just this insane deluge of visuals and gimmicky set pieces crammed into a 2MB cart. It's actually pretty adjacent to Ristar in being this sensory-oriented arcade platformer, though it aims further into structural chaos than dreamlike delight. Not every idea lands - I could do without izayoi, dark demon and baby face's boss fights. The western version's bizarre localization sucks, but the worst part above all else is the sparsity of continues - this game is too on-rails to justify having to start over THAT many times just to complete it.

Now this is a god damn video game.

It really feels like Treasure threw everything they had at this game, and anyone familiar with their output knows that's saying a lot. This game is wild. It's weird, it's crazy, it's kinetic, it's gorgeous, and it's a whole lot of fun to play.

Headdy definitely outpaces Gunstar Heroes (arguably Treasure's most acclaimed game of this generation) for variety, with gimmicks and power ups that are always fun to engage and experiment with. Platforming is tight, Headdy's controls are very responsive, and the art direction gives you so much to soak in as you dash between bosses - which (in true Treasure form) are the real highlight of the game. It's never quite on the same level of Alien Soldier, where levels simply feel like a means to an end, though. But, very much like Alien Soldier, bosses are creative showcases that are sometimes too chaotic to fully take in. There's a few that really push the Genesis and I was surprised to see what Treasure was able to pull off at the time.

True to form for Treasure, this game is also hard as hell. Unlike Gunstar Heroes and even Alien Soldier, however, I didn't mind running the gauntlet again after burning through my continues. Dynamite Headdy owes a lot of its replayability to just being a damn fun game to play, but its aesthetics and music certainly pulls its weight. The soundtrack in particular is incredible and very effective as invoking stress and excitement at the exact right times.

Dynamite Headdy is hands down one of the best games on the Genesis and pretty high up there in Treasure's catalog. There's only a few reviews on this site for it, which I just have to take as a sign that not enough people have played it. Fix that. Right now. Or so help me, I will rip my head off and I will throw it at you.

When I was a kid, I didn't really have a lot of knowledge on games outside of Mario, Sonic, Rock Band, and some GTA through word of mouth at school. We went to GameStop one day in maybe 2011 or 2012 or so and Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection for the PS3 caught me eye, so I took it home with me. My mind was absolutely blown when I started playing it. 40 doesn't seem like too many now, but all those strange little games from before I was born were awe-inspiring to me. However, for the longest time I couldn't really make any dents outside of the Sonic and Alex Kidd games, so I didn't really form real thoughts on many of them until the past two or three years.

Dynamite Headdy, on the other hand, stuck out to me almost immediately. Might be the very first one-off title to really resonate with me. I knew very early on that I wanted to finish this one, that it was a winner. Similar story with Ristar, but between the two this won me over.

To this day, this is my favorite game in the Genesis library. Upon replaying Gunstar Heroes it came into a VERY close second, but the memories and nostalgia for this one are near unparalleled for me. It helps that I also love just about everything that it does. It's so goddamn stupid in the best way possible, just all over the place, completely off the rails. You can poke around at random shit and maybe you'll find some secret bonuses, which after I learned about it basically completely enthralled me all over again. It also has maybe my favorite game soundtrack out there. I really don't think there's anything not to like here. It's a stone cold classic.

It's another victim of changes in localization, though. I've always been used to the international release since I've played it so many times, but for today's replay I did the Japanese version and I think I have more issues with the palette changes than the difficulty changes. A lot of stuff just looks much, much better in the Japanese version, and in the process of turning Maruyama into Trouble Bruin overseas it made a lot of boss and enemy palettes comparatively really awkward. Most of the dialogue is taken out as well, which unfortunately removes a good chunk of the humor. I fucking love how these wacky ass adversaries all speak so professionally, like the big colorful goofy ass dog who is played completely straight as a bounty hunter. That kind of shit is so funny to me.

I think charm prevails over all in a grand majority of my favorite things, but aside from a few brutally difficult sections such as scene 8-5 (again mitigated in the original Japanese version) this is pretty much flawless in all other regards too if you ask me. It was probably my favorite game of all time before joining the site, and it still comfortably sits in my top 5.

One more thing, I think it's genuinely one of very few things that couldn't be recreated today. There's a ton of overly absurd and "quirky" indie platformers nowadays, but they just don't hit the same. There's something lost these days in the art of presenting the goofiest shit possible with a straight face, instead typically being overtaken by layers of irony and pandering to internet culture. And then a bunch of kids who probably advocated for Banjo in Smash Bros will shove it down your throat. Maybe it's something I'm just a killjoy about, but it really just isn't the same. Post real Soul™.