HACHOO!
Original Release: Jaleco, 1989, Arcade
An early, choppy beat-em-up from Jaleco that nevertheless shows quite a bit of creative spark and presentation polish
Hachoo! (Arcade, Jaleco, 1989)
Where to Buy: eBay
How to Emulate: Arcade Emulation Guide
Review by: C. M0use
Hachoo! came out in 1989, when the beat-em-up genre was just on the verge of its breakout with Final Fight and TMNT and all that. People were still doing experimental stuff at this point and I think what Jaleco was going for was a fusion of Double Dragon's overall style with the more precise movements of Karate Champ. Gameplay-wise it really didn't work out, but they did put a lot of effort into the presentation and it ends up being an interesting game if not a particularly fun one.
The thing they put the most effort into was its visual hook: if you grab an enemy and press down while throwing, you can chuck them into the screen for an elaborate insta-kill. This was almost two full years before the second arcade TMNT did it with sprite-scaling instead of overlaid animation frames ... Sega's Arabian Fight would also do something similar to this about three years later. So it's definitely novel.
The downside is there are only about eight enemy types, I assume due to having to animate this feature. You end up with a lot of palette swaps, and the game isn't real long but is kinda padded out with just tons of them being thrown at you. The whole process is literally painfully repetitive on the hands with the slower and clunkier movement of your character and the need to be more fussy about how you approach enemies due to most of them being able to instantly hit and stun you from a fair distance. The common sneaky nutkicker enemies that you fight the most are actually tougher than the big guys that appear more infrequently as mid- or end-bosses, as the latter can usually be chain-kicked to death without interruption while the common enemies will 50/50 you on attack priority. Enemies can also throw you as well when you close with them, but they don't possess the raw Hachoo power to chuck you through the screen.
The music jags between being kinda cool and absolutely terrible, but the backgrounds are consistently good and the game's art is quite nice overall. The gameplay makes it something more amenable to being watched on YouTube than actually played, though.
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