 Thanks to Daniel for requesting this on my Patreon page, it's another mascot platformer. This one titled Rocky Rodent, and it's another case where they would've been better off sticking with the game's Japanese title, Nitro Punk's Might Heads. Now that's great. The game starts out with Rocky being chased out of a restaurant when another restaurant owner shows up looking depressed. He owns the mafia money, and since he can't pay them, they kidnap his daughter. Geez, isn't that a little dark for a happy-go-lucky hop and bop early 90s platformer? So Rocky Rodent takes the opportunity to track down the mafia don to get the guy's daughter back in exchange for being able to eat at the restaurant anytime he wants. So how does he plan to do that? By using his hair, of course. No, seriously, Rocky Rodent's primary attack is with his hair. Sure, he can jump on enemies just like any other game, but when coming across a bottle of hairspray, he's able to produce a crazy hairstyle that's able to do everything from shish kebab enemies and roll them like bowling balls, smash through concrete, whip enemies, or sometimes even find some clippers and shave it into a mohawk, which you can use as a boomerang. One ability I like is jumping straight into this block, allowing your hair to get stuck, press the jump button again, and he flips himself around to the other side. So that's kinda cool. There's four hairstyles in total, and they all have various abilities. The braid, for instance, can also become a grappling hook, and there's also a weird corkscrew hairstyle that allows him to bounce on it and reach higher platforms. Take one hit and you lose your hair, take one more hit, and you lose your life. The hair gimmick is interesting and something new, I'll give the game that, but where Rocky Rodin fails is in the enemy, boss, and level design. There's six worlds with multiple stages, but the game drags and drags because it's the same enemies over and over, the same layout over and over, and the same predictable boss patterns over and over. It's not that it's bad, there's some reasonably clever ideas here like the sprint stages where you're jumping over cars, but it's recycled again a couple other times in other stages. There's other interesting touches here like where this bird lays an egg on your head and eventually hatches and becomes your little helper guy, I guess? See, there are some good ideas here, but this is a good example of coming up with a good character, but not coming up with anything interesting to do with him. I just felt bored the entire time playing this game because the levels and bosses themselves just didn't have anything to offer, maybe that's just me, maybe I've just played too many of these games at this point, but that's how I felt playing this. There might be a lot of mascot platformers, but I don't think there are too many that are predicated on hair, so I give the game points for originality on that, but yeah, the visual style here is mediocre, other than the hair, I mean. The soundtrack is forgettable, the sound design is just kind of there. Rocky Roaden isn't a bad game, it's just kind of dull, and it feels like a missed opportunity. This is a game that could have used a sequel to make things a little more interesting, but you know what, like I've said in other videos, sometimes a game doesn't have to be this hidden classic, it just needs to be something halfway decent that you hadn't heard of before, and sometimes that's good enough. This is one of those games. Don't expect anything all that great from Rocky Roaden, but it's not exactly terrible either, it's definitely behind stuff like the Disney or Looney Tunes platformers or already Lightfoot or whatever, but it's certainly better than Eek the Cat or Bubsy.