A playthrough of SegaSoft's 1997 license-based platformer/light-gun rail shooter for the Sega Saturn, Scud: The Disposable Assassin.
Since the gameplay changes entirely depending on the controller used, this video shows two different playthroughs using Scud. The first shows playing through the game as a platform shooter when using a gamepad. The second playthrough, beginning at 41:30, shows my playing through it as a rail shooter, and is only accessible when using the Virtua Stunner light gun. After you finish the game, you get to option to play as Drywall, and his cutscenes are slightly different from Scud's, so I included those at 1:38:32 for anyone who is interested.
Scud: The Disposable Assassin was a US-exclusive Sega Saturn title based on the insane/hilarious comic by Rob Schrab that ran through the mid/late 1990s. You play as Scud, the flourescent yellow robot assassin, that has been hired to... well, to do his job. The problem is, he'll self-destruct as soon as he finishes, so he hurts the guy, but stops short of killing him outright. The guy ends up on life-support, so in order to keep himself alive, Scud must prevent the victim from dying. The hospital, however, demands payment to keep the guy breathing, and Scud has no money, so he runs off to do odd jobs for the money he needs.
The graphics look awesome for a Sega Saturn game. The characters are all incredibly well modeled and animated, and even in the dingiest scenes everything is super colorful. Explosions constantly rock the screen, and though the sprite-scaling does make things a bit pixelated at times, the sprites are generally razor sharp. As sharp as a native SD picture is going to get, at least.
The music is also pretty amazing: it's an eclectic mix of rap, rock, and techno (courtesy of the efforts of DJR/IB3, Fidget-X, and Unbelievable Jolly Machine), and most of it is absolutely worth listening to even outside the game.
There are only a couple of small hiccups in the presentation: the constant drone of firing and explosions can get pretty monotonous after awhile, and the FMV quality is absolutely abysmal in some scenes. I mean seriously, the company logo screens - the VERY FIRST THING you see when the disc loads, look like they could be playing off of a Sega CD. Thankfully the story related ones aren't quite as terrible, but they're pretty bad across the board.
Besides those niggles, though, the presentation is stellar. It's stylish and it's bold, and it's hard to not love it.
Unfortunately, the game play doesn't hold up. The concept is fine - a run-and-gun shooter/rail shooter sounds like a great way to provide variety while being able to reuse many of the same assets, except that the controls are incredibly sloppy, and the game is entirely too hard because of it. It will slaughter you every five seconds until you get into some kind of groove, but even then, survival is often up to luck in many of the encounters. Things appear with virtually no warning from the edges of the screen, and so many enemies fire at once that it's not possible to avoid taking damage in many cases unless you are going at it with two players.
It's too bad, because if the mechanics were as well done as the presentation, this would be an incontestable classic. As it is, it's still regarded as a "cult classic," as in, novel, entirely memorable, but thoroughly flawed. I want to love the game for the game that it is, but I can't. But I do hold many fond memories of it, nonetheless. It's worth playing for the experience. I just wouldn't bank on finishing it without a whole lot of effort.
PS. Apologies for the cross-hair on the screen in the light gun section playthrough. It was entirely too much effort to dig out everything needed (including a TV) to play this using the original hardware, so I recorded it using Mednafen, which is the only Saturn emulator I know of that can both emulate the game accurate and supports an emulated light gun via mouse controls. Mednafen hides the Windows mouse pointer, and since (as far as I know) Windows 10 does not provide a global 'enforce cursor' option, leaving Mednafen's crosshair enabled was the only way I had of knowing what I was shooting at. The game is more than hard enough without adding that snag into the mix. For the sake of transparency, I'd also like to mention that during the last boss fight, the game glitched and crashed. You'll probably notice that, when I use a continue in that fight, the game says I have three credits instead of one - this was the result of using a level skip cheat to get back to the final level in order to finish recording the game. No other cheats were used at all.
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