The Cliffhanger: Edward Randy

The Cliffhanger: Edward Randy is an arcade action game published by Data East in 1990. It belongs to a small group of titles that tried to translate the rhythm of adventure cinema into an interactive form: the hero fights on top of moving vehicles, on ropes and on unstable structures, and his main tool is not a gun but a whip, used both to strike enemies and to catch hold of the surroundings.

What made it stand out at the time was scale. Data East used large, heavily animated sprites and staged fights on surfaces that were themselves in motion, so the player had to track enemies and the shifting ground underneath at the same time. In the early nineties this was demanding on hardware and on level design, and it divided opinion. The results look spectacular, but they ask for precision and for foreknowledge of what is about to enter the screen.

Difficulty is arcade in the fullest sense. The game is built so that you cannot finish it on one credit, and progress comes from repeating sections until the timing becomes automatic. It is a single-player title. Here you can launch it straight in your browser, with nothing to install, which is the simplest way to find out whether the whip-based combat suits you. Today it is remembered mostly for its artwork and for how ambitiously it handled action set pieces in motion, which separates it from the run of ordinary side-scrolling brawlers released the same year.