Revisiting older game consoles is fun because you not only get to play your old favorites again, but you'll likely also discover other interesting titles you may have missed in the past. The SEGA Dreamcast library is packed full of these sorts of games for us. For day 50 of Eric Vs. 365, Eric and Andrew played top-down arcade shooter Cannon Spike. Read on for more and a (almost full ...) play through.
I wasn't huge on the Dreamcast back in the day. I hit the high points - Soul Calibur, Crazy Taxi, Marvel vs. Capcom 2, etc. - but not much else really caught my eye. Andrew, on the other hand, was a big Dreamcast supporter and even subscribed to the Dreamcast Magazine. Yet, somehow, even he didn't know what Cannon Spike was when I fired it up.
Cannon Spike is a top-down perspective arcade shooter game starring Capcom favorites like Mega Man, B.B. Hood, Cammy, Arthur, and a couple of new characters. If it was made today it would be a twin-stick shooter, but since the Dreamcast only had one stick you have to position your character and then shoot in the direction they are facing. This makes some encounters trickier than they should be, but you get used to it. Each character has unique attacks and secondary weapons and it is decently fun. We played co-op and it was nice.
It is also surprisingly difficult, even on baby mode, though, and we didn't manage to actually beat it. We played through it twice - once off camera to see if it was worth playing and once on camera - and got to the end boss both times and died pretty much instantly and didn't have any continues left.
The other problem (or maybe blessing?) is that Cannon Spike is also very short. Like, 15-minutes or less to get to the end. It was originally an arcade game, after all, so I can understand the length. It originally launched at a "budget" $30 MSRP on Dreamcast back in the day, but even that seems a little spendy considering it is short and as deep as a half-dried rain puddle. We didn't pay nearly that much (or anything, actually ...).
Something else I've noticed while revisiting the Dreamcast is that almost everything is a freaking arcade game. I can kind of understand better why it failed since so many of the game experiences are so similar. Everything is short and shallow and arcade high score focused and it all blends together.
