 Oh, yeah, you know I gotta play this one. If you're anything like me, you love ridiculously crazy arcade beat'em ups and fighting games from the 90s, the crazier and more wildly unrealistic the better. So of course a game like Die Hard Arcade fits all that criteria, this game is hilariously insane. Do you like taking missiles to the face, only to get right back up and brush yourself off like nothing happened? Do you like fighting Sumo wrestlers and robots? Do you like bad voice acting? And do you like it all presented in a mid-90s SEGA early 3D graphical style? Hey, in fact, this game was the first beat-em-up to use texture-mapped polygonal graphics back when SEGA made it in 1996. Obviously stuff like Virtua Fighter and Tekken had been around for a while, but Die Hard Arcade isn't a fighting game, it's a full-on beat-em-up. Well, mostly. The controls here definitely have some fighting game influences, which in my opinion is definitely a good thing. There are punch, kick, and jump buttons, and part of the fun of this game is finding out what other moves you can do from different combinations of those buttons, plus a joystick or a D-pad. Like this freaking helicopter kick that comes from nowhere? That's awesome. There's grapples here, too, one of which allows you to fling someone way up into the air and hit them a couple more times on the way down. You can even put someone in a side headlock and then give them a freaking vertical suplex pile driver? Holy crap, what the hell was that? That's kind of the trouble with a game like this. It's hard to keep track of what combo or sequence does what, but that's okay. All the moves work pretty consistently, since despite the overhead angle, your character can only face left or right. So yeah, it may feel like jump should be up based on the combat, but you get used to having jump be its own button pretty quickly. Of course, as you can see, the moveset is just a small part of this game. The real meat is in the ridiculous weapons you get to use, like this anti-tank guided missile thing you can just casually walk around with, even though there's no way that this thing doesn't weigh like 70 pounds. It's always a laugh when you see an enemy walk in with one of these, too, since it looks like they're listening to some jams on a boombox. But there's all sorts of other stuff, like this weapon that flings enemies all the way to the other side of the room as they go splat on the wall. Of course, that doesn't kill them, they just get right back up like zombies. You can also give enemies a good old-fashioned axe to the face. What is this, burn after reading? Maybe my favorite weapon in the game comes at the final boss who keeps his golf clubs in the office. I believe I'll use my putter. Four. You'll also have tons of stuff lying around that you can pick up and throw. And if all that fails, you can even arrest enemies if you get them on the ground and you're quick enough to lock them up. That'll negate their health bar and get them out of there entirely. A major thing that adds to the chaos this game presents is that it's two-player co-op. Player one is John McClane, and player two is some random woman, I guess. They both play the same. And there's no friendly fire here, thankfully, but you can throw enemies into each other, so be wary of that. I should also mention this game's structure is a bit weird. It's not what you'd expect. Rather than have one level after another, it's one room after another. You clear a screen of four or five enemies with maybe a mini boss, and the game magically cutscenes you to the next room. Occasionally, you'll get put into a quick time event where you have to press a certain button at a certain time to either dodge this fire truck or kick this guy in the face so hard he does a 360 cell that you would have seen from Paul London back in 2003. Hey, we even see the Marty Janetti-style twist cell when you give someone a clothesline. Some of these events pop up really quickly, so you've always got to be on your toes. You may have noticed through the footage here that this game has absolutely nothing to do with Die Hard. Sure, it takes place in a huge skyscraper, and sure, there's helicopters and weapons and stuff, but you occasionally fight robots, and this Shang Tsung looking guy is the villain who kidnapped the president's daughter. And yeah, it's just a generic beat-em-up plot. Hans Gruber and his flunkies are nowhere to be found. This is actually the first game in the Dynamite Dekka or Dynamite Detective series. They just slapped the Die Hard license on it when bringing it to the US because, eh, it's close enough, I guess. I'm playing the arcade version here, but this game did get a home port released in the US for Sega Saturn, as well as a remake for PlayStation 2 that stayed in Japan. This game got two sequels with Dynamite Cop or Dynamite Dekka 2 being released to the arcades a couple years later before landing on the Dreamcast and Dynamite Dekka EX, Asian Dynamite, in 2006, which stayed in arcades, but it's really just a revamped version of the second game. But yeah, whatever name you call it, whether it's Dynamite Dekka or Die Hard arcade, this game is hilarious fun right from the start. You fight in a bathroom where you kick the stall doors down, and why the hell is this guy nearly naked? Ah, get off of me! What the hell? This is an easy pick-up-and-play game with a ton of carnage, and what I really enjoy is that the enemies are smart enough to pick up weapons and use them themselves, but they're just dumb enough to make fun of. I mean, they're led by this guy of all people. But yeah, Die Hard Arcade is a quick and fun 25-minute playthrough, and you'll want to check it out any way you can. Alright, I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great best of your day.