Game Journal: Cadillacs and Dinosaurs (1 Credit Clear, Hardest)

I cleared Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, a 1993 beat 'em up by Capcom, on the hardest difficulty.

The game gives you all of the usual Capcom beat em up tools such as throws and jab combos, along with an extremely fast dash that you can cancel into a huge flying punch. You technically also have a divekick (tap attack at the top of your jump arc) and a special move (down, up+attack) but I didn't find either of them particularly useful.

There a lots of guns you can pick up and use too. Trying to conserve ammo to take out difficult enemies or deal maximum damage to bosses is an interesting challenge, especially given that you can instantly lose the gun forever if an enemy knocks it out of your hands.

The game itself does a surprisingly good job of coming up with enemies and bosses who can still challenge you despite your fast dash, especially if you turn the difficulty up to the hardest settings like in this run. Admittedly most of the basic enemies and the knife guys can't really do much to you if you run away from them, but the flea-like Punk/Thug enemies and most of the larger elite enemies are decent enough at jumping around and chasing you down. That said, other than a few tricky encounters such as the last fight before the big heal in stage 5 and the second-to-last fight before the final boss, most of the difficulty in this run comes from the bosses.

The stage 1, 2, 5 and 6 bosses are all variations on the same theme; combo the boss, knock it down, try to keep other enemies away from you by slamming the boss into them, and loop the boss on wakeup by hitting it with the tip of your long-range jab (or in the case of the stage 5 boss' second phase, stand slightly out of its Z axis range and bait it into walking up or down into you). Slice (stage 4) is similar except you have to get much closer to him on wakeup and you have to walk up and grab him on reaction if you see him crouch, and Slisaurs (stage 7) are similar to Slice except there are two of them and they're harder than the entire rest of the game combined. Hence two of my three deaths in this run coming from the Slisaurs fight.

But even though I would personally have preferred it if they trimmed out lots of the game's easier parts (e.g. Stage 3 is basically a slightly interactive cutscene) or buffed up their difficulty somewhat, I still love this game. If it looks at all interesting to you, I recommend giving it a try yourself! And if you do give it a try, I hear that Mustapha is the easiest character to get started with. His running dropkick is extremely strong.