Greendog: The Beached Surfer Dude! (Genesis/Mega Drive)

Greendog: The Beached Surfer Dude! is a game about a surfer that features very little in the way of surfing, to the point it is only really done in a single cutscene and the surfboard that appears as part of its plot just seems to be one there for the sake of it rather than having some true significance to it being a surfboard. While this might be what the “beached” part of the title is referring to, it seems that our protagonist Greendog, besides engaging in some surfer lingo at the start and end of the game, is actually a lot more interested in skateboarding, inline skating, scuba diving, and piloting a cartoonish pedal-powered helicopter than riding waves.

We can at least quite clearly see Greendog is a surfer dude stereotype thanks to his swim trunks, blond hair, and the manual inserting random surfer slang into its plot synopsis, although his lack of a face is an odd yet interesting design choice. We also join his story as his feet are sticking out of the sand on the beach, Greendog having apparently wiped out and washed up on a beach while surfing on some huge wave. While underwater, a strange pendant ended up around his neck, cursing him through no fault of his own, and his bikini-clad girlfriend appears to suddenly explain that he needs to collect the six pieces of an ancient Aztec surfboard to be able to remove it. For as long as Greendog wears it, any animal or human near him will suddenly turn violent and attack him, explaining the opposition he faces along the way, and the pendant also prevents him from surfing as an extra punishment that truly motivates him to go out and get the ancient board back together. Admittedly, it would have been disappointing if the game about a surfer dude going on an adventure wasn’t a bit ridiculous, so if anything, this goofy set-up for the action is quite welcome.

Greendog’s adventure takes him to six Caribbean islands, and despite the areas all being tropical locations, it does a decent job of differentiating the first half of each stage, having them take place in different locales on the islands such as the jungle, beach, and a developed city. The second half of every stage though is far less imaginative, as Greendog enters an Aztec temple to get the surfboard piece. The visuals in these temples are all based on the same tile set and the game gets pretty lazy in their design, with the same boss reappearing, same switch puzzles cropping up, and the final aztec temple of the game is actually the same as the second one, you just take it on wearing skates instead of riding your skateboard, a hardly meaningful difference all things considered. Most stages in the game are platforming challenges, with Greendog leaping across gaps that are a touch inconsistent. Greendog can drop safely into water without dying, although he will have some angry fish latch on to bite him over and over until you shake them off. In some areas, dropping down a pit will take you to another part of the level, and in others it’s an instant death, so it’s usually best to play it safe and just cross by jumping on platforms. Jumping isn’t quite as smooth as you might like though, partly because Greendog has such a huge sprite. If you put another Greendog on top of him, he’d be almost as tall as the play area, and this means sometimes jumps can feel cramped between a low ceiling and the sometimes high floor. The bigger issue is determining how he’ll hit the ground, with the sprite quite animated despite its size so that you might miss the edge of a platform or might get hit be a foe you thought you were over or under. The points where this causes trouble won’t crop up too often, but it still doesn’t feel as precise as it should.

Enemies in Greendog: The Beached Surfer Dude! tend to follow consistent attack patterns, meaning you can avoid the damage if you see it coming, but the game does crowd the screen a bit in some areas like the underwater level, meaning you have to be on the offensive quite often. Greendog’s main means of attack is a throwing disc that will fly back to him, hitting anything it touches along the way and making short work of most common opponents. On your adventures, hitting things with the disc can make food and power-ups pop out, and while most of them are food that is only useful for points, there are healing soda cans to be found and the power-ups are actually useful and appropriately rare. The game calls these Panic items, with the most useful of the bunch being a homing flying disc that shoots out and stays on screen for quite a while and an umbrella hat that makes you invincible for a time. You can carry them until you need them too, making them perfect help for bosses or those moments where the game fills the screen with a few too many foes. You can take quite a lot of damage before going down and are healed between levels, so death comes less from taking damage and more from the inconsistent pit deaths and some weird moments like a level with rising and falling water levels where if it gets an inch over your head while standing in it, you’ll instantly die.

Despite those little moments of annoying deaths, Greendog: The Beached Surfer Dude! is thus far a fairly average platformer. The attack method works, jumping’s only a little sloppy, and stages bring new enemies into the mix and have small touches like a dog who can help or hinder you depending on if you grab his bone first, a subway train that brings in new enemies, and vines and chains to swing across gaps. This game is not purely about jumping-based platforming though, and unfortunately, the variety added to the gameplay does not really enhance it. If anything, the extra modes of play in special levels drags the game down as it is poorly implemented variation. The most common secondary type of play is skateboarding, with Greendog moving ahead on his board and needing to jump over spikes and avoid flying enemies. You need speed to make the jumps, but the spikes won’t instantly kill you if you hit them… although falling down a pit does. Skateboarding needs to be done with a surprising level of caution as well, as there are objects in every skateboarding stage that, if you touch them with your skateboard, will launch you further back into the stage, adding some annoying repetition to the affair. Skateboarding is preferable to inline skating though, which is basically just skateboarding but with less reliable jumping, but it is thankfully the rarer of the two. Scuba diving is technically just a reskin of the platforming levels but with floatier jumping controls, which can magnify the jumping issues a touch since you will have likely gotten accustomed to the rules of regular jumps by now only for them to be changed. This is the stage with the worst case of enemy overload as well, puffer fish swimming in constantly from the right, and since your jumps are floaty, you’ll likely land on them for damage you didn’t have much chance to avoid. No matter which of these variations you encounter, it slows down the game a bit too much and deliberately hurts a player who is trying to advance through them quickly to get to the more decent platforming levels.

The odd pedal-copter stages where Greendog flies between islands are thankfully inoffensive if just a bit boring. They are essentially bonus stages where you can collect points, and they all are pretty much the same stage as well. Fly over the ocean, punch fish or birds with a boxing glove on a spring if you feel like it, collect falling food from the sky for points. However, if you don’t care much for points, you can usually fly at the top and just get to the end of the stage to continue the game, the copter sections not putting up any real fight once you realize their simple design. The pedal-copter is just another instance of variety put in for the sake of it, the developers not having a clear vision for how to make it an actually interesting challenge.

THE VERDICT: Greendog: The Beached Surfer Dude! was a borderline passable platformer at first, with at worst a little trouble during some jumps due to Greendog’s size and movement. Still, he had decently diverse areas to do it, some skills to handle the enemies there, and a goofy story to why he was doing it all. The issues arose when it tried to do more though, every island connected through a dull flying stage and the skateboarding/inline skating stages being somewhat tedious and not even always original designs. Hitting one of these stages means repetition unless you proceed at an antithetically slow pace, and here the instant death pits really wear out their welcome. Accommodating the obstacles means less fun and fluid play, dragging down what could have otherwise been a silly standard platformer.

And so, I give Greendog: The Beached Surfer Dude! for Sega Genesis/Mega Drive…

A BAD rating. While straying from platformer basics may make this game seem more original, they feel tacked on and incomplete. Greendog wasn’t really standing out as a stellar platformer before you take up a skateboard or hop on the pedal-copter, but learning the jump style wasn’t too hard and the level designs at least kept things different enough. Putting you in half-baked gimmicks though makes it harder to forgive the game’s design, and those level’s don’t have the strength needed to distract you from the moments of less reliable play. Being launched backwards to do the same jumping challenges doesn’t enhance the title, it just keeps you in its less enjoyable sections longer.

Greendog: The Beaches Surfer Dude! tries to be a radical time, roping in extreme sports outside of surfing to be even more gnarly, but the end product just ends up a bit bogus, few areas of the game having the polish to truly leave the player feeling stoked.