STARRING: Adventure Kitty: Drill Buster and BUDD
ADVENTURE KITTY: DRILL BUSTER
This game was a deceptively clever little tile-based-movement action puzzle game featuring a cat with a drill digging his way down ground, drilling fast, robots passed and he's dead now
It's a little bit like Boulder Dash and Mr. Driller together. It's just as much about pathing the safest way through the levels as it is moving quickly and skillfully around hazards. You're incentivized to go as fast as possible through the levels as possible to chase score and letter ranks.
Playing through the levels was easy enough, but doing them as quickly as possible without dying to get high scores was pretty tough, actually. You can't just dash from point A to point B, you have to get enough coins to dig through a coin barrier or dig a certain amount of direction restricted arrows, or you get thrown back to the last barrier you broke. It was a lot of fun.
B.U.D.D.
This game has been one of my favorites so far. A slick sci-fi game of the likes of Wonder Boy in Monster World and Monster World IV, with tons of cute sprites and artwork reminiscent of the time period. Metroidvania at a manageable scale if you're bad at directions or generally keeping track of where you are--like me!
The game begins as your protagonist, green-haired spacefarer Eris Altair, has her ship fired at while returning home from a mission. Forced to make an emergency landing on a verdant planet, she must gather three of her ship's lost pieces to escape.
Eris is equipped with a sword and shield, and in short order comes across the game's namesake: the BUDD. Specifically, the BOXER type BUDD, which she can launch at enemies with red boxing gloves ready to pummel. This allows her to break large blocks that previously hindered progress as well.
Eris' sword swing, much like that in Monster World, is stubby and takes a bit of getting used to in order to truly 'get it' compared to more generous attacks in other games, but, in my opinion at least, that makes it more fun to use. There's a small combo meter in the upper left of the screen as you attack, and getting a higher combo (seems to) rewards more experience points, which unlocks more attacks such as a Zelda 2 jump stab. You can even mix in your BUDD's punch for extra damage, reminiscent of Monster World 4's companion Pepelogoo.
The game is dripping with appreciation for lesser appreciated Sega titles. Very little of the game's soundtrack is original, instead lifting music from a variety of Sega games, such as Vectorman, Ristar, and Phantasy Star.
This demo is pretty beefy and is very fun and really captures a time and place in Sega's history very well. There's another planet to explore after leaving the first one, but I decided to wrap up my playthrough there for now. I really enjoyed this one!