A crosshair shooter with horizontal scrolling a bit like SNK's NAM-1975, this has most of the mechanics you'd expect from a game like this- movement of the crosshair is tied to character movement unless you hold the button to fire wherein your target reticle speeds up, destroy background objects for fun and items, etc.- but there's a few odd things outside the plot. Most importantly, rolling from side to side, usually a 'get out of trouble' button in this genre, does not give you invincibility frames, so if you brush against any bullets or projectiles mid-roll, you're taking damage. The thing is, Waffle's roll brings him very low to the ground, so the trick is to use the roll to 'duck' under projectiles instead of using it with wanton abandon. There's also quite a few items including stronger normal bullets and grenade launcher rounds which are very handy for clearing the screen and uncovering more items. Finally, each stage has a time limit but you don't need to worry about that too much, you mostly have enough time, but if you let it run out, well...

If that story hasn't clued you in, Spinal Breakers is a lot. Like, a lot a lot. Fight Nazis, dinosaurs and horrible flesh-creatures across mulriple time periods! Destroy background objects like trees and corpses that explode into piles of gore! The final boss is just a gigantic pile of gore and wires trying to kill you to start a nuclear war! The protagonist is called Captain Waffle!! (That last one, according to the Hamster stream and as translated by Gosokkyu, is because the development staff really liked the waffles at a local convenience store, so they added a waffle item and named the hero after them) The whole aesthetic is very low-rent, back-of-the-video-shop VHS stuff, and while it can be in bad taste at points- at least they removed that sign in this version, but the corpses exploding are really grim and the bad multiple endings, showcased in LordBBH's 1CC video, are bleak (CW: implied suicide)- I kinda like it. Very video-nasty style, it has to be one of the gorier pre-Mortal Kombat games in the arcade, and it plays... Fine. It's a little clumsy in its implementation of the roll meaning some attacks are just going to hit you, the scrolling is a bit slow and Waffle is a gigantic target, but I think this game activates the part of my brain that loves shlocky horror movies and it's pretty satisfying to nail each enemy, especially with the crunchy sound effects and super-detailed sprites. This is not a game for everyone and you might prefer to stick with the likes of Cabal and NAM-1975 that are more polished and better games overall... But this one is memorable, you'll remember it long after you play it.