Check out those graphics. It’s like God spat in a Cartridge.

Arcade games are designed to be as hard as an Android’s chuff because they want to steal all your money. That’s what they’re there for. Converting an arcade game onto a console and reducing the number of continues to two is, therefore, quite harsh.

Moving away from the difficulty a second though, what the Hell is Dynamite Duke standing on in this game? He slides left and right without so much as a twitch of the legs, leaving me to believe that just below the screen’s view is some sort of conveyor belt or a small Horse. And why on Earth can’t Duke move while he’s shooting? If all wars were fought in this way it’d make for very uninteresting films.

As arcade ports go, this is awful. The graphics have obviously taken a hit. The first level consists of you fighting on what looks like a greyscale Chess board with a few random objects poking out of the ground. The enemies all wobble on stage like they’ve just dropped a brick and when there’s more than 5 bullets on screen you get a ridiculous amount of slow down and screen flashing, meaning you either take a hit because you can’t move or you take a hit because you can’t see the bullets. Great.

Now back to the difficulty. As mentioned previously, you only get 2 continues, each one containing 2 lives. This doesn’t sound quite so harsh, but each continue means restarting a level, and each life lasts approximately 50 seconds. Now it’s not that the levels are particularly difficult, it’s that you can’t do one thing without doing something else.

You can’t duck without moving your aim down. You can’t shoot without standing still. You can’t punch anything because you’ll never get far enough. You can’t move left without your aim moving left, equally you can’t move right without blah blah blah. It’s just painful.

So you’re left floundering around centre-screen while invisible bullets pummel your stupid steroid face off and end up shooting the floor because all you want to do is lie down and die.

1/10