Uploaded March 2026 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago

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A lot of people are more familiar with the Genesis version of this game than the original arcade version. It's not one of the more common arcade beat-em-up 1CC's that I see people do. Why? Because it's hard in a a very stupid way - there are zero health-ups in this game! Every hit is permanent damage that you'll never recover from! And damage is pretty standardized, every attack in the game does an equal amount of damage, with "combos" doing up to 2 hits, and enemy "grab" attacks able to take off even more if you don't mash out quick enough. Your health bar lasts for approximately 12 hits and then it's game over.

In belt-scrolling sections, it's very important to have enemies perfectly lined up with you before you start attacking - your basic attacks have very little Y-axis reach so if they're not lined up then you might miss, and then the enemy whiff punishes you because there's a lot of recovery on your basic attack. Sometimes they'll do a leap attack or throw a projectile if they're far enough away on the X-axis though, so you kinda have to walk up and down a bunch sometimes to throw them off.

The crosshair gallery shooter stages look fun at first but they're often the hardest part of the game. The crosshair moves very slowly a lot of the time, although it goes faster if you stop firing. These stages are usually entirely scripted on where enemies come out from so you have to memorize the locations of certain enemies that can otherwise land a cheap quick attack before you can react. 4-2 is probably the scariest of all these stages because those little spiky enemies tend to randomly scatter out before they choose to attack, and once they do leap into the air you have very little time to shoot them before they count as making contact with you. The final boss on 6-6 requires some careful routing, note of course that you don't actually have to shoot the brain, it does automatically once all the other enemies are dead.

There are slight differences between the characters, Karla felt the most consistent overall so I stuck with her. I see Scooter is often used in this, Gordon seems like the least popular.

I have zero idea where the judges at the end of the game are getting their scores from, and why that third guy hates my guts so much.

Full VOD with the rest of the cheevos - youtu.be/HigqXAN3RvA