Dynamite Duke is a 1989 action arcade game developed by Seibu Kaihatsu. It was later ported to the Sega Master System, Sega Mega Drive and Sharp X68000. Being a Cabal-based shooter, it can be considered a follow-up to Seibu's Empire City: 1931 and Dead Angle.
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Trying to incorporate some melee combat into a rail shooter is a noble effort, but the execution here isn't great. Beyond that, it's pretty standard fare.
My 1CC (1,354,660): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pufTnOK3E6M
I don't know why I haven't heard of this game before. It's an excellent cabal shooter, a genre with already very few games in it. It looks cool, sounds cool, has some sick art and is really addicting to play. I'm not going to take the time to fully explain what a cabal shooter is, but it includes games like Sin and Punishment and Wild Guns where your character and cursor move in unison. Though in those games, you have a few more mechanics to play with. Here, you can also duck and move around while ducking.
Similar to those games, you go through each stage trying to destroy everything in sight for points. You have collectibles such as ammo, health and bombs. You get one bomb at 120K points and every 100K points there after. In addition, there's a boss at the end or close to the end of each level. You are graded on 3 criteria, how much you have destroyed, how fast you have killed the boss, and how much health you have left.
This allows for a lot to master. Sure, bosses have strategies where you can cheese them, but as you can see from my run, you will not get max score this way. You lose a hell of a lot of points. You also get 100K points at the end of the game for each bomb you don't use (for a max total of 8 bombs or 800,000 points), so here's a ton of optimization in this game, where I can't even begin to describe what a perfect route would look like.
All this makes for a high replayable romp that I could not put down for just over a couple of days of grinding. I spent around 9-10 hours on this one. A clear, IMO, is not hard to get if you use all your bombs and know how to cheese the bosses (which may sometimes be necessary), but that's not the point of this one. Play well and score well. My score here is quite modest, as the world record is around 1.7m points, but the optimization and routing are very, very strict the higher you want to go, making for a wonderful time.
I don't know why I haven't heard of this game before. It's an excellent cabal shooter, a genre with already very few games in it. It looks cool, sounds cool, has some sick art and is really addicting to play. I'm not going to take the time to fully explain what a cabal shooter is, but it includes games like Sin and Punishment and Wild Guns where your character and cursor move in unison. Though in those games, you have a few more mechanics to play with. Here, you can also duck and move around while ducking.
Similar to those games, you go through each stage trying to destroy everything in sight for points. You have collectibles such as ammo, health and bombs. You get one bomb at 120K points and every 100K points there after. In addition, there's a boss at the end or close to the end of each level. You are graded on 3 criteria, how much you have destroyed, how fast you have killed the boss, and how much health you have left.
This allows for a lot to master. Sure, bosses have strategies where you can cheese them, but as you can see from my run, you will not get max score this way. You lose a hell of a lot of points. You also get 100K points at the end of the game for each bomb you don't use (for a max total of 8 bombs or 800,000 points), so here's a ton of optimization in this game, where I can't even begin to describe what a perfect route would look like.
All this makes for a high replayable romp that I could not put down for just over a couple of days of grinding. I spent around 9-10 hours on this one. A clear, IMO, is not hard to get if you use all your bombs and know how to cheese the bosses (which may sometimes be necessary), but that's not the point of this one. Play well and score well. My score here is quite modest, as the world record is around 1.7m points, but the optimization and routing are very, very strict the higher you want to go, making for a wonderful time.
Not good. Maybe fun for a minute or two, and incredibly short overall, but it feels kinda stingy on ammo and the bosses are really bad. The final boss in particular is three phases long with no refills on health or ammo in between, and I probably wasted about half my playtime there. The reward for my efforts was this image immediately followed by this music. Didn't really feel like time well spent to me.
15 minutes and not a moment wasted. Recommended for people who want another Sin & Punishment fix with an added layer of fast food Schwarzenegger machismo. Only real weakpoints are the lack of good music and the hand-to-hand combat feeling really rough during the bosses.
Dynamite Duke plays like Cabal had a child with Punch-Out! Dynamite Duke is an Arnold Schwarzenegger with a cybernetic arm and a machine gun, fighting against a race of mutants created by a mad scientist. Dynamite Duke ducks and covers to avoid enemy bullets while spraying through a horde of infantry and tanks in a shooting gallery, the game turns into a boxing match when facing the boss of each six stages. The game was initially an arcade game ported exclusively to SEGA consoles such as the Master System and SEGA Genesis. Despite the lack of a two-player mode, this port of Dynamite Duke is quite an arcade accurate experience, missing only 3 levels from the original.