 S-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s. Back in 1990, a Dick Tracey film adaptation was released, and with it came a whole bunch of video games including this one for NES, but curiously it's based on the original comic strip and not on the film. Alright, whatever. You start the game and you're given three options. Hit the streets, notepad and look at mugshots. You want to look at the notepad first, since your first clue about what to do in this game is already listed there, but there's four blank spots beneath it. Your goal is to fill in the next four spots in order to solve your first case. After the notepad, you look at the mugshots, which gives the location of each suspect. So let's go look for this first person here, Steve the Tramp. Unfortunately, you don't just select Steve the Tramp's mugshot and go to his level like you would in a Mega Man game. You have to drive around in this really goofy and awkward top-down driving section. You accelerate just by holding the D-pad in the direction you want to go in, but the thing is, your car automatically locks into the right lane, and that's an issue because you take damage when you hit other cars, as well as from completely random gunfire coming from wherever. This really sucks because you don't have any real freedom of movement because the controls always stick you in the right lane. Plus both your character and your car share a health meter, and it's really easy to take damage in this mode without even realizing it. You can get out of the car by pressing select, and yeah, you can gun down these snipers while on foot. But I mean, come on, just look at the gameplay here. This is like a cross between combat on Atari 2600 and the crappy NES X-Men game. Mercifully, the locations are all based on a grid, so to get to 5th and B, for instance, you go five streets to the right and two streets up from the bottom. Yeah, map would be nice, but this is good enough. Once you get to your destination, the action switches to a 2D side-scroller. The game actually gets kind of fun, since you can shoot enemies or just slap the bejesus out of them, which is always funny. Just press select to switch between the two, and there's also special weapons you can pick up here and there, like a tommy gun, tear gas, and a boxing glove you use to one-hit enemies, but there's limited quantities for each. Okay, the platforming here isn't the greatest, the jumping is kind of weird, and the game is just really difficult. There's bullets coming from friggin' everywhere. It's the classic NES difficulty, but hey, it's a heck of a lot better than that driving mode. There's one thing you gotta keep in mind here, however, if you shoot someone who doesn't have a weapon, you lose some health. I get what they're going for here, and it's to prevent you from going all contra and just shooting everything and making the player think for a second, but still, this kind of stuff can be frustrating for the wrong reasons for some people, and again, you can lose a ton of health without realizing it, but thankfully, you can always replenish health by driving to a police station. Once you find your target, you can either interrogate or arrest them, and early on, you're always gonna want to interrogate, since, hey, you need information about this case. So then you're back on the driving stage to find another location, which leads to another 2D side-scrolling stage. The game throws a wrinkle at you by having your next task be to chase down this car. This would be awesome if the driving system weren't so awkward. You keep finding clues and gathering evidence until you're able to arrest the culprit, then it's on to the next case. There's five cases total, but there's no battery save here. There is a password system, but it starts you at the beginning of a case, not in the middle, and you only get one life before it's game over. No continues here. I should mention, though, when you restart, you don't have to go through the interrogations anymore, as long as you remember the locations of the clues. You do still need to get the clues, however. You can't just go arrest the culprit, even if you know who it is. The other police will just say you don't have enough evidence. There's other outdated, annoying stuff here, too, like getting health replenishments. You have to switch to it like you would a weapon, then hold the select button while pressing B. It's not a game breaker or anything, it's just annoying. That's the word that comes to mind when playing Dick Tracey on NES, annoying. I do like a lot of what this game has to offer. The mission structure is cool, but the driving sections are incredibly frustrating, and there's little things here and there that add up to just an irritating, frustrating experience. I'd recommend this one as a curiosity, since it has some good ideas, but other than that, no thanks. Interestingly, there was also a Dick Tracey game made for Game Boy around the same timeframe, and it's strictly a 2D action platformer. There's no driving, there's no clues, and there's no interrogations or arrests made, for better or for worse. There's just five levels broken down into multiple stages, and you run to the right and shoot stuff and punch bad guys. There's similar special weapons, the Tommy Gun is here, there's tear gas, grenades. Overall, it's pretty decent. It's not worth going out of your way to track down or anything, but it's good enough for what it is. There's a couple extra gameplay elements here, too, like these puzzles. Each of the first four levels have 12 pieces of a picture that you can track down with the picture revealing who the next boss will be. Completing this will grant you extra hit points and even extra lives, but it's completely optional, and the game will just show you the picture anyway, even if you don't get all the pieces. I should also mention the story here kind of acts as a sequel to the movie, so that's kind of neat. So yeah, the Game Boy Edition isn't really as ambitious as the NES Dick Tracey game, but it's still perfectly okay for what it is. If you'd rather just say, screw all this, just let me shoot everything that moves, then you're gonna wanna play the Dick Tracey game on Sega Genesis developed by Sega, and this one's kind of a blend between a running gun, a beat-em-up, and a gallery shooter. It's like a cross between the Punisher and Wild Guns, which sounds cool on paper, but the thing about this one is all you do is walk to the right, jump over the occasional garbage can, and shoot everything. You press A to shoot in front of and behind you, press B to jump, and hold C, and you'll shoot the characters in the background with your Tommy Gun. There's six levels divided into three stages each. You get three lives and zero continues. It's fun for a while, and you do get these bonus shooting stages, but man, this game really needed something else going for it. I like the combination of a third-person gallery shooter with your typical action platforming, but they didn't go far enough with it, in my opinion, so as a result, this game really gets boring after about five minutes. Oh, and it's also really friggin' difficult because these dudes never, ever stop coming at you. It's just the same flunkies over and over. Also, this same game got a version released for the Master System as well, but it's pretty much the same game. So once again, just like the NES game, I like the ideas here, but the execution needs work. So there you have it. The Dick Tracy NES game has its strong points, but has some incredibly frustrating shortcomings. The Game Boy Dick Tracy game is much more streamlined, but is kind of dull as a result, and the Genesis Dick Tracy game is fun for about five minutes before you realize that's all the entire game is. And like I said, it's hard to recommend any of these beyond just a brief curiosity. Hey, thanks for watching, and have a great rest of your day.