Games of the Abstract: Three Dirty Dwarves (1996)

 

Developer: Appaloosa Interactive

Publisher: SegaSoft

One to Three Players

Sega Saturn

 

Tragically a rare game nowadays, Three Dirty Dwarves is cumbersome at points, but it is a deliciously unique and weird as it takes the scrolling beat-em-up and skewers it, making up for the times this is awkward with some true imagination on screen. Two figures have to be thanked for this: E. Ettore Annunziata, who was behind the original concept and story, and its developer Appaloosa Interactive. Annunziata is a name who has gained a cult appreciation as he is behind Ecco the Dolphin, a unique creation for Sega hardware which played to Genesis / Mega Drive fans as an unconventional franchise. Annunziata is a figure with willingness, even with games which still played to genre tropes, of making them very unconventional. He is like a man out of time, as a game like Kolibri (1995), a scrolling shooter which is however about a hummingbird, would be something you would presume came from the modern indie era, only to have actually been funded by Sega, Kolibri for the infamous 32X add-on as one of its few games.  

Amongst Annunziata's career as a producer and conceptualizer through Sega, two of them were sadly lost on the Saturn as rarer titles. One is Mr. Bones (1996), a deeply odd multi genre hybrid, like a mini game collection with a plot, about a resurrected skeleton with the taste for blues guitar, and Three Dirty Dwarves, to which the second figure worth nodding to is the Hungarian video game developer Appaloosa Interactive, frequent collaborators with Annunziata. Founded in 1982 as Novotrade, the later Appaloosa Interactive were a Hungarian company who helped bring Ecco to be and their work on Three Dirty Dwarves too produces a very idiosyncratic production. Especially with the sense of the animated scenes here suddenly allowing me to nod to the appreciated art of Eastern European animation, if combined with something from the post-Ren and Stimpy era of cartoons from the USA, you have two groups coming together to bring something unique.

One cut scene, if you do not press start at the first screen, explains this strange game’s context. Four children, military experiments to produce hyper intelligent figures to help cause conflict, to their creator’s ire are pacifists more interested in tabletop role playing games than violence. In this world, that which is fiction is actually an alternative reality, bringing forth three dwarven anti-heroes (and monsters from their world) from that interrupted tabletop game to help rescue these children from the military base, even if they have to ransack a sporting goods store for weapons and march through the American cities in a violent rampage. One takes a baseball bat and baseballs for projectiles; one a bowling balls and pins; the last, as hunting exists as a sport in the USA, has a shotgun, and the trio go forth causing mayhem.

This for a beat-em-up, having to go through stages picking through goons with a limited set of attacks, is idiosyncratic even before you get to fighting an entire gym, the building itself and not the occupants, nor the baseball mini-game. One to three players can play its three leads, and it is only in hard mode on the difficulty options where a conventional form of health bar is brought in. Instead, going by the idea you have the three dwarves to choose from even in the one player mode, all onscreen and able to be switched between in single player on the fly, they themselves need to be protected. One hit knocks one out, and all three out ends your chances, but this is contrasted as a potentially hard gameplay mechanic with the fact that a) in multiplayer, you can wake yourself up, or b) in any option, a nice whack to your follow dwarf does not cause harm but actually restores them back as a usable fighter. Neither is there any lives or a traditional game over; everyone out means just restarting the level, only a lack of save function for the game your other obstacle in trying to beat the challenges for a game you could clear in an hour or so. This game is frustrating at times, like all beat-em-ups as you fight through a curious horde of enemies, so this different style will add newer frustrations for some players, but it is an inspired take which, with the ability to keep charging ahead, is to its virtue.

It is befitting such a strange game, where level one is tame in comparison to the later game, yet would be weird to most casual players. The first level is tame only because, by level two, you soon into the game have to have a boss fight against a man entirely covered in dogs that throw them at you, which as opening bosses in any videogame goes has to be one of the most intimidating for any game even claiming to be "quirky" or "original" decades after Three Dirty Dwarves' release trying to match this in that area. Matching the visuals and the gameplay is a motley assortment of obstacles and challenges in your way. Some have aged - it is a weird fight, in a car junkyard, with a diminutive voodoo priest riding a headless chicken, but that archetype has become problematic, as is the one female orc in a dress who with hug your team to death until you figure out to throw a male suitor to her - but even some of the edgy choices, like gun tooting postmen, have aged more to reflect the nineties than being offensive like the stereotypes have, where cartoons for kids from this time, let alone videogames like this, has a willingness to be edgy and scuzzy. This particularly game baring the few times it has questionable designs also presenting some delightfully perplexing moments even one after another in the same level.

Elderly homeless women armed with duck tape contrast with biologically mutated axe welding blue babies, to fork throwing criminals on Staten Island to military machines armed with giant booting abilities, and as a result, the most comparable thing to this game in this genre, for a unique tone which keeps wrong footing you with its next level, is Denjin Maki 2: Guardians (1995), a true compliment as one of the most surreal of the beat-em-up genre's existence, in good ways as well as bringing in such a unique tone and mood to match these designs. Unlike that game, this is simpler for a beat-em-up, not as elaborate with its combat controls if with more attack buttons to work with, and instead what is more idiosyncratic for Three Dirty Dwarves is in its systems, even when a health bar in some form is added in higher difficulties, and even in terms of the tangents in genre. Like Mr. Bones was, there are some left field turns which are clearly trademarks of E. Ettore Annunziata as much as Appaloosa Interactive looking at this genre and presenting their own takes. Even in terms of the beat-em-up levels, the boss battles (which are their own levels) have their own weirdness, including one player only sections, such as the aforementioned fight against an actual gym building, throwing protein shake at you and walking about on human feet, or the fight with the dragon, which begins by riding a wrecking ball into the screen to destroy the building it is hiding within before the conflict starts proper. For a game this short in scale, in mind to the longer games being generated for consoles at the time, it is a wild journey worth the one hour or so, where even hitching into a truck to reach a destination is its own level for a tangent.

The presentation helps so much. The animation, the few that are here, feel like the creation, even in digitized FMV, of people who honed their craft over the decades before in animated productions outside of videogames, whilst yet befitting this perverse take on Americana which feels like a twisted animated cartoon I might have seen growing up in the nineties. The music by András Magyari, Attila Dobos and Attila Héger as well is gleefully quirky, adding a spin to this distorted world where, from the Bronx to a military base, everything feels off and dirty in a way that is somehow still cartoonish. The game sadly become one of the rare titles for the Sega Saturn, which is sadly neither surprising as this was always going to be a cult game on a console, the Saturn, where the idiosyncratic titles would become rare even if it was losing the console war in the West. In 1996 alone, Super Mario 64 was released, as was Crash Bandicoot, and Tomb Rider and the original Resident Evil, whilst one of the few exceptions of an idiosyncratic game which got heavy promotion in this year was NiGHTS into Dreams..., which had a huge weight of expectation behind it as a Sonic Team title and a killer app for the Saturn itself. This was always going to be among the quirky titles which get stuck as "cult" titles even if they never get released again. This did get a PC port, but it has become one of the curiosities and underrated pieces from a console where a lot of its most fascinating games have become rarer to acquire. A shame as this maligned title is truly unique and brimming is a magic to its nature.