WELCO METOT HENEX TLEVEL - Cliffhanger

Publisher: Sony Imagesoft Developer: Malibu Interactive Released: 1993

We've already established that Batman Returns on the Sega CD is one of the greatest games in the history of everything. And that mostly had to do with the kick-ass engine used in the driving sequences. So hey, if you're the people sitting on that technology, the logical thing to do is apply it to another big movie property in the hopes of striking gold one more time.

Malibu Interactive did just that with their Batman Returns engine, this time pinning it to the action flick Cliffhanger – Die Hard on a mountain starring Rambo and that chick from Northern Exposure.

Like Batman Returns, Cliffhanger is mostly a retread of the Genesis title featuring a bit of video and some CD-quality music. And like Batman Returns, Cliffhanger also featured console-exclusive levels (this time in the form of snowboarding areas) with scaling and rotation effects so gorgeous they made 17-year old me want to show the game to every one of my SNES-owning friends just to show them how lame their system really was.

The levels lifted directly from the cartridge game are nothing to get too excited over. Cliffhanger was, for the most part, a pretty lame Final Fight clone, in which Rocky runs from left to right beating up the same two or three bad guys with the same two or three moves. Every now and then you get to pick up a weapon of some sort, which is really effective, but not really enough variety to make these levels all that worthy of play.

And unlike Batman Returns, players weren't given the option to turn off these ho-hum beat-em-up sections and simply concentrate on the awesome snowboarding bits. Probably because there are only two of them (as far as I know).

The console exclusive levels breaking up this mediocre action might have been enough to save this game if it weren't for one fatal flaw – extreme difficulty. The difficulty in these snowboarding sections is tuned so high right from the word go that the frustration level for most players will be through the roof inside of about 10 minutes. Considering the first of these levels is the second area of the game, that makes for a pretty short play time overall.

The premise is this: Sly has found himself a snowboard with which he must outrun an avalanche. Along his path are endless amounts of boulders, tunnels, fallen trees, and so on that he must swerve around or jump over. Hit too many of these things, and his life bar is depleted, ending the level. Hit too many of these things in too short a time span (say, about three in a row), and he's overtaken by the crushing mass of frozen water bearing down on him.

The whole thing smacks of being tuned based on the skills of the QA testers and developers themselves. Someone at the video game factory was way too good at this game, and was apparently taken as representative of the gaming population at large.

Fun Fact: According to Wikipedia, one of the testers on Cliffhanger was none other than David “God of War” Jaffe. I checked the credits, though, and can't find his name listed anywhere.

One other notable aspect of Cliffhanger is the sheer amount of video included on the disc. It doesn't sound like much by today's standards, but this game boasts over 15 minutes of film footage sliced up and used as between-level story bits. Yeah, it's crappy Sega CD video, but it was still pretty cool to see at the time.

Cliffhanger feels like an early taste of what was to happen with Batman & Robin on the Sega CD (a game that used the same driving engine and featured the same controller-snappin' difficulty curve). It's a shame, really. Even though half the game is really nothing to get too excited over, it would have been nice to recapture the magic found in Batman Returns one more time.

Ah well.