Rocky Rodent

Rocky Rodent / Nitropunks: Mightheads (ニトロパンクス マイトヘッズ) - Super Nintendo / Super Famicom (1993)


Irem developed a few titles for the Super Nintendo, with a couple of original titles among their arcade ports. One of these was Rocky Rodent, their stab at a mascot platformer and quite an interesting take on the concept. It has a compelling hairdo mechanic that combines unique platforming and combat abilities, but it suffers from a high difficulty thanks to some lengthy tricky stages and a ludicrously tight continues system. 

In the big city, the mafia boss Don Garcia has kidnapped Melody, the daughter of local restaurant owner Pie Face Balboa, for not making his protection payments. Luckily, the restaurant happens to be the favorite joint of Rocky (or Nitro in the Japanese version), a ravenous rodent with a penchant for wild haircuts, and Pie Face promises him all the free food he can eat if he rescues Melody from the dastardly mafia.

Rocky Rodent takes part in the side-scrolling tradition of having you run and jump your way to the end of each stage, avoiding enemies and obstacles along the way. Scattered around are special hairsprays, razors, and the like that give you a new haircut. This adds a melee attack to your arsenal, letting you hit enemies without needing to jump on their head, along with an extra method of traversal. 

The spiky hairdo can latch onto certain bricks to give you a boost up, the mohawk can be thrown at enemies or walls which you can then jump from, the braid grabs hooks that you can swing from, and the spring lets you reach great heights. Later on, you’ll also find an egg that, if you protect it long enough, will hatch into a small bird named Pecky who attacks nearby enemies for you. 

While they’re not required to reach the end most of the time, they allow you access to shortcuts and secret areas you’d otherwise miss, where you can sometimes uncover extra items such as extra lives, a megaphone that blasts nearby enemies and snacks that give you another life if you find 100. Levels have a surprising amount of hidden areas, and even alternate routes that encourage replaying stages with different hairdos to see what else you can find.

However, you’ll need to be careful because you lose your hairdo immediately if you run into an enemy or get attacked, and it only takes one extra hit to kill you. Although you can find items to give you a new haircut before too long, this fragility demands you play more cautiously, which sometimes works against the spirit of exploring these levels freely. It also makes the ability to break into a sprint useless, since the camera doesn’t pan ahead in time to stop you from running headfirst into an enemy. 

Rocky Rodent‘s quite difficult as a result, and it only gets tougher the further you go, with stages often taking 5-10 minutes to beat and crammed full of obstacles. Sometimes it’s quite satisfying to face up to the challenges being thrown at you, using quick timing and your knowledge of the mechanics and level layouts to survive. But more often than not, you’re put through a frustrating gauntlet of deadly hazards that goes on for far too long. 

What really hurts this more than anything is the limited continues system. For the entire game, you’ve only got five continues with three lives each, with no options to increase them or even a password system to resume your progress at a later point. You’re expected to beat the entire game in one sitting, and there’s over 15 stages to fight your way through. There is a cheat code that grants you infinite continues, but it’s otherwise too much to ask of players who aren’t willing to replay, memorize and master this within an inch of its life.

If you’re able to overcome or perhaps ignore that aspect, the underlying game is quite decent at what it does. The controls are mostly solid, letting you navigate stages with ease although you have to commit to your jumps and swinging from your braid is awkward. While stages are often lengthy, they provide an impressive variety of obstacles unique to the various areas you explore and are well constructed in doling out increasingly complicated variations on what you’ve already encountered. The handful of bosses you encounter can be quite drawn out, but they reward holding onto your hairdo with extra opportunities to attack. 

Where the game stumbles is in its presentation, which often comes off as repetitive and even dreary. While the graphics run well, barring the odd framerate drop when the action gets too much, you’re largely going through dim urban environments like city blocks, factories and sewers which often use the same drab color palettes. Meanwhile, the music by Rikei Hirashima does its best to provide fitting vibes for each of the major locations, but its tepid pace and arrangement start to grate when you’re stuck in the same place. That the music or colors don’t change between the different stages in an area doesn’t help, making it feel like you’re playing the same level over and over again. 

The American release is almost exactly the same as its Japanese counterpart, even keeping a secret area in the Ghost Apartments where you stumble across a woman having a bath, but there’s a couple of minor changes. You can now skip cutscenes by pressing the Select button, and a running animation was removed where Rocky’s legs would turn into a circle when he’s at top speed.





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