HILDROIDS. They were living organisms created by mankind to do tasks too dangerous for normal humans, just workers and nothing more... But in the aftermath of a nuclear war that no-one knows the starting point of, the Earth's axis shifted and this changed the Hildroids, making them start to think and act on their own, killing their human hosts. As decades pass, Captain Waffle awakens from hybernetic stasis aboard a space station, and notices the Earth's axis shifting again, but this time... People and creatures of the past begin to appear, and the Hildroids take over their bodies and even start to change history. If the Earth's axis shifts again, it might be too late, and the Hildroids might change the past irrevecobly! Leaving his wife and daughter behind, Captain Waffle heads down to Earth in a one-seat escape ship, determined to end the Hildroids, find the cause of the nuclear war from long ago and save the past. It won't be easy- the shifting axis sends him through Nazi Germany, Ancient Greece, even prehistoric times with Hildroid-parasitised dinosaurs and cavemen baying for his blood! Can Captain Waffle do the impossible and save the past, present and future?
A crosshair shooter with horizontal scrolling a bit like SNK's NAM-1975, this has most of the mechanics you'd expect from a game like this- movement of the crosshair is tied to character movement unless you hold the button to fire wherein your target reticle speeds up, destroy background objects for fun and items, etc.- but there's a few odd things outside the plot. Most importantly, rolling from side to side, usually a 'get out of trouble' button in this genre, does
not give you invincibility frames, so if you brush against any bullets or projectiles mid-roll, you're taking damage. The thing is, Waffle's roll brings him very low to the ground, so the trick is to use the roll to 'duck' under projectiles instead of using it with wanton abandon. There's also quite a few items including stronger normal bullets and grenade launcher rounds which are very handy for clearing the screen and uncovering more items. Finally, each stage has a time limit but you don't need to worry about that too much, you mostly have enough time, but if you let it run out, well...
If that story hasn't clued you in, Spinal Breakers is a lot. Like,
a lot a lot. Fight Nazis, dinosaurs and horrible flesh-creatures across mulriple time periods! Destroy background objects like trees and corpses that explode into piles of gore! The final boss is just a gigantic pile of gore and wires trying to kill you to start a nuclear war! The protagonist is called
Captain Waffle!! (That last one, according to
the Hamster stream and as
translated by Gosokkyu, is because the development staff really liked the waffles at a local convenience store, so they added a waffle item and named the hero after them) The whole aesthetic is very low-rent, back-of-the-video-shop VHS stuff, and while it can be in bad taste at points- at least they removed that sign in this version, but the corpses exploding are really grim and the bad multiple endings, showcased in
LordBBH's 1CC video, are
bleak (CW: implied suicide)- I kinda like it. Very video-nasty style, it has to be one of the gorier pre-Mortal Kombat games in the arcade, and it plays... Fine. It's a little clumsy in its implementation of the roll meaning some attacks are just going to hit you, the scrolling is a bit slow and Waffle is a gigantic target, but I think this game activates the part of my brain that loves shlocky horror movies and it's pretty satisfying to nail each enemy, especially with the crunchy sound effects and super-detailed sprites. This is not a game for everyone and you might prefer to stick with the likes of Cabal and NAM-1975 that are more polished and better games overall... But this one is memorable, you'll remember it long after you play it.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gremdark
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
