[played on original Mega Drive hardware]

My only exposure to Decap Attack before this playthrough were the brilliant strips based on it in Fleetway's Sonic the Comic... which ended up having very little to do with the game after the first arc (and even in said first arc, the connections were very tenuous). But enough about 20-year old comics based on an old game, what about the old game itself?

By 1991, the Mega Drive/Genesis had built up a decent library of platformers, and while Decap Attack doesn't reach the highs of something like Revenge of Shinobi or Sonic 1, it's still a super solid time! Everything feels very deliberately designed, and there's a fair amount of variety in the stage layouts; there's levels where you're climbing upwards and auto-scrollers where you're chased, as well as one where you're descending downwards, which was a nice subversion. The presentation ends up capturing a really unique vibe, with the muddy colour palette and soundtrack feeling unabashedly "Genesis" whilst also fitting the horror theme quite nicely.

Overall, I ended up being surprised by Decap Attack more than anything. It's not really a must-play, but if you've exhausted every other great Mega Drive platformer, it's definitely worth a look!

The end terminus of a windy road of a video game series, in which six separate franchises somehow participated across three unique titles. I can't, as of this writing, vouch for any of the other properties involved in this series. But I can say that Decap Attack is... okay.

Decap Attack is a game of confused identity. That much is unsurprising from how the game came to be (most immediately: a reskin of a tie-in to anime series Magical Hat), but I don't know that enough was done thematically to give the game its own sense of self. Like, the idea is that it's supposed to be this spooky, grimy world in which a mummy is reuniting a skeleton-shaped world that was split by a demon, and he attacks by lobbing his spare skull or thrusting his torso-head at enemies. Weird, rad, gross. So why are the bosses mostly silly animals? Like I would've thought for sure that the toad and mole bosses were holdovers from the Magical Hat version, but they appear to have been invented wholesale for the spooky game. Kinda odd to go from a skull-and-blood motif to a doofy whiskery mole with coolguy shades.

But I also think the most definitive element of this video game series - those sticks you fling yourself into and launch from - is starting to feel vestigial here. Granted, I understand that they were hell to deal with in Kid Kool, and less than ideal in Psycho Fox. They're not exactly great here, either, being awfully fiddly and hard to get a consistent angle on. They have the strange function of healing you here (you didn't go into the Options and lower your hit points, did you?), which is certainly a way to keep them relevant. Sorta suggests that they threw it in to try and inject some purpose, considering Hat from Magical Hat is a one-hit wonder.

I don't think Decap Attack is bad or anything. It's certainly a weird little title, which is always a plus in my book. But it's over and done with pretty quickly, and just feels like an "also-ran" in every SEGA Genesis collection it crops up in.

...which makes it all the funnier that it's far and away the best part of the Fleetway Sonic the Comic. Like, holy crap, if you haven't read it, you have no idea. I wanna see Chuck & Head show up in SEGA crossover stuff exclusively because of Nigel Kitching's brilliant, brilliant reinterpretation of the property. I know it'd never happen, but a guy can dream...