Apparently this little guy, this dubious creature "Tricycle-San" is the inspiration for Sonic's Chao. I love him. He can also do sick tricks, bounding into the walls of the labyrinths he finds himself in to kill enemies and yeet bricks on the other side, all in the aim of being able to collect flowers for a girl.

The wall-riding may legitimately be the only thing that seperates spatter from Rally-X, but for the standards of early Arcade games its a fairly radical piece of tech. It's a dodge roll and offensive move combined that can also technically be a projectile if used at the right moment, and in response to it's power the game is constantly spawning enemies every few seconds - encouraging fast, offensive play to get all the flowers before things get truly out of control.

Its fun! There's very little more to the game than that but like so many of Sega's 1980s arcade games it leans hard on expressive presentation and a simple hook.

I've been mostly playing this on the new Mega Drive version - a conversion that is so on point that it loops back around to being kind of pointless because there's so little difference between it and the original. But it seems like it was mostly made for fun, truth be told, getting it's original artist back to put together some actual box art and flexing the power of Stephane Dallongeville's new devkit for Mega Drive that M2 have built this upon. A tribute to a game that is certaintly mostly forgotten, but frankly, deserves a fair bit of love.

Good stuff.

Reviewed on Nov 03, 2022


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