Red Dog
Red Dog is a semi unique shooter for the Sega Dreamcast. It's a fast paced action packed ,shoot from the hip style shoot em up game. You drive around in this crazy 4 wheeled rover type thing that is armed to the teeth with an up gradable laser blaster for your main turret and many other disposable side weapons that can be picked up along the way in each mission. You can earn up grades to your armor and main guns in special bonus Missions called "Challenge Missions" you unlock one Challenge Mission after you successfully complete each main mission. Along with the single player campaign there is a multi player mode where up to 4 players can battle via split screen. I have not played the split screen very much so I can't say a lot about it.
Controls
Red dog has pretty solid controls once you get use to the touchiness of the analog stick. As well as guns you also have a force field like shield. You can use your shield to deflect shots back at the enemies that fired them. The shield has to be pointed precisely at the enemy in order to send the shot back at him, so getting use to the analog sticks sensitivity is a must. Once you master it you will be able to use your booster to drive fast and power slide, while shooting at multiple targets.
Sound and Music
The sound and music are of high quality. The sound effects and music fit the game well. I play the game using my VGA cord and a half way decent PC speaker system, the beats keep the action, suspense and tempo at a good pace.
Graphics
The game looks ok on a standard Television, but, the graphics are richer and far more detailed on my CRT PC monitor. Your rover and the enemies vehicles, monsters, structures are all pretty well detailed. Each map is different. So you get to see plenty of different looks. From snow covered rocky paths to rafting on water shooting a submarine. The games frame rate seems to be pretty soled as well.
Over All
Over all Red Dog is a very good game. The bosses are hard enough so that they will challenge you, but not so hard that you will be stuck on one all night. They gave you enough variation in textures on the single player maps to keep the game looking fresh until the end. if i had one compliant it would be that Red Dog is a little bit short. even though you can unlock harder difficulties the maps and challenges remain the same. but With the Single Player, Challenge Missions and 4 player split screen you will still get hours of entertainment out of Red Dog. I would recommend it to anyone. This is one of them games that I would recommend everyone try at least once on the Dreamcast. You can pick it up for around $5 bucks off of Ebay and for five bucks it is well worth owning this little gem. i gave the game a score of 8
Here are a few video clips of Red Dog that i uploaded.
Here is a clip of the beginning of the 2nt mission.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u07kNduWtqU[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u07kNduWtqU[/youtube]
This is one of the Challenge stages.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Awa6wNjqaOc[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Awa6wNjqaOc[/youtube]
You can find a few screen shots of Red Dog bellow
Click on any of the images to enlarge them
