Overdue Reviews is an occasional series in which I pretend to be a videogame journalist. This week: the arcade classic Cadillacs and Dinosaurs.
We had two arcade machines in our sixth form common room. One of them was Cadillacs and Dinosaurs. I remember it vividly.
Strangely, I remember very little else about the sixth form common room, or even in fact if it was a common room. I think there were benches, or possibly sofas, which I may or may not have frequented. There was definitely a second arcade machine, something to do with American wrestling, but it paled in comparison.
Cadillacs and Dinosaurs was a side scrolling multiplayer beat 'em up in the style of Streets of Rage. It was made just at that point in the nineties where the art was still hand drawn and the pixels were just small enough to appreciate, but before everything turned into chunky and untextured polygons. In other words, at the time, it looked amazing.
It was unusual in my experience because of the range of items your character could interact with - guns and other weapons could be collected from fallen enemies and used against them, rocks and explosives could be thrown, enemies could be thrown at other enemies. A particularly nice touch was that guns had limited ammo, after which they could be wielded as clubs or simply thrown. Someone obviously put some thought into the detail there.
There were four characters to choose from, each with slightly different special abilities and moves. When you lost a life and respawned you came back with a bazooka. There was a level where you drove a cadillac across a desert and just smashed through barrels and bad guys. There were varied bosses and dinosaurs aplenty. It was colourful and bold and at times brilliantly silly.
I never saw it available for any home computers or consoles and a quick search online suggests it didn't get much further than life as an arcade cabinet, even though it was generally well received. Despite all the money and time I wasted on it, I wish I could go back to that sixth from common room and play it again one more time, just to see if it was as good as I remembered.
Fortunately, the internet's amazing, and you can play Cadillacs and Dinosaurs for free, right now, in your web browser. Enjoy.