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Dom Robinson reviews
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Sega 
Originally released as Gunspike in Japan, the re-named Cannon Spikeis a blast-em-up, allowing you to play as one of several old favourite Capcomcharacters (apparently, since I’ve never heard of them), including Charlie,Arthur, Shiba, Cammy, Simone, not all of who look human, because they’re notreally.
Played out with a 3D isometric view, the idea is simple. Wave after wave ofterrorist robots are coming for you and your task is to avoid their fire whilstreturning plenty of your own. Once a level is clear, you’ll travel round theworld on your high-powered motor boots to another place and do battle theretoo.
It actually looks a bit like the old arcade and ZX Spectrum favourite Target:Renegade and Alien Breed, where enemies approach you from all sides and you’ve got to doexactly as described above, except with arcade-quality graphics.
While the graphics are far from revolutionary, since they look like a tarted-upgame from the 80s, they certainly shift about at the required speed and Ididn’t notice any slow-down. Don’t expect your DC to be overheating fromplaying this one though.
As for the sound, it’s a bit of techno here, a bit of a Bontempi keyboard organthere, also harking back to the arcades of 10-15 years ago. There’s nothingwrong with that at all since it creates the right atmosphere and you can laughat all of those who claim that retro is “soooo yesterday!”
The gameplay’s a tricky fella though. One minute you’re able to fend off thehorde of baddies with a constant stream of gunfire before they explode – whichis easy, as well as trying to circle round them and spraying fire as you go -yet, the next, they’re either up close which means that the gunfireappears to go right through them(!) and they’re taking a swipe out of you, orone of the big end-of-level bosses has got you cornered and you have little orno hope of evading him, so you may as well turn round and bend over while hedilly-dallies with his great big cannon spike!
Overall, it is a fun game, but one that’ll have you questioning its longevity,so for the casual gamer it is certainly worth a rental, but don’t forget thatthose with a PC should easily be able to find something similar to this onthe internet, such as using MAME and looking for the aforementionedgame ROMs.
For those without such access it’s definitely worth a rental. I would’veadvised a purchase, given it’s cheap price, for some multiplayer post-pubgaming with your mates, but try as I might I cannot find anything other thana single-player mode which rather spoils things a bit.
SOUND EFFECTS AND MUSIC
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Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.