Mutant Rampage: Bodyslam is a Double Dragon clone on CD-i. We always feel that it would be a perfect CD-i game for head-2-head simultaneous gameplay, but unfortunately it is one player only. While we recently went through this game, we noticed it could be finished in 2,5 hours, which is pretty decent. But at the end, we wonder why this title requires the Digital Video Cartridge?
Mutant Rampage: Bodyslam is the third game by Animation Magic, a USA studio who was also responsible for Link: Faces of Evil and Zelda: Wanf of Gamelon. The game engine show similarities and even the animation has certain overlap. Looking closely at the animation it is clear this is no Disney quality but it feels as clunky as what they did to the Link and Zelda CD-i game. While that is what it is, it doesn't seem that Mutant Rampage cutscenes are actually coded in FMV at all.
As this title requires the Digital Video Cartridge, why is there no fluid animation, like what Gremlin Graphics did in Litil Divil? When we play through the fighting scenes, it doesn't even seem that more is happening on screen compared to what happens in Link: Faces of Evil. We would expect that in some way, the 1MB extra memory was used in the fighting scenes. The reason why we wonder is that Mutant Ranpage could have reached a wider public if it was a base case CD-i, and the game itself doesn't really show of as a FMV title. It is a unique experience on CD-i, as there is no CD-i version of Double Dragon or fighting games like Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter. If you want to fight on CD-i, you can only play Rise of the Robots or perhaps Caesar's World of Boxing :) If you're curious how it looks like, see the video below:
