Of all the iterations Vic Tokai made of its same basic platformer, Magical Hat is by far my favorite. Sure, it’s far from perfect, especially when placed alongside the kinds of things Nintendo was putting out at the time. But Magical Flying Hat‘s a relatively low-budget offering compared to, say, Super Mario World, so comparing the two’s a bit like comparing Primer to something like Avatar.

For what it is, Magical Flying Hat stands up as a fun way to while away a few hours. Some of its design decisions are really, really strange, admittedly. On one hand, its attempts to kill you with hidden enemies are immensely frustrating, but on the other, it liberally showers you with extra lives at every turn (there’s a secret trick that will give you about 14 or 15 of them on certain levels). But even with all this in mind, there’s a charm and pace to Magical Hat that keeps me going back to it. Certainly, before Sonic the Hedgehog, Magical Hat was the speediest platformer on the Mega Drive, and the breadth of its levels gave it more of an epic feel than the more restricted stages of, say, Castle of Illusion. It’s also far more entertaining than the disappointing Mega Drive iteration of Alex Kidd.

Decap Attack

Like Kakefu-kun, Magical Hat was based on characters that wouldn’t have meant very much to western audiences. So when Vic Tokai couldn’t get the license to release the game in Europe and America in its unexpurgated form, the decision was made to give its graphics and sound a fairly major overhaul.

The result was Decap Attack, a cartoonish, horror-themed game which replaced Hat with a mummy-like character named Chuck D Head. Instead of a furry helper or mechanical egg, his special attack involves (you guessed it) chucking his own head at the game’s army of grotesque enemies. There are a few other mechanical changes, too: Chuck can take four hits from enemies before dying rather than Hat’s one-touch-death, while extra lives are no longer in quite such abundance.

It’s still a fun, quirky game, but for this writer, the decision to replace the vibrant colors of Magical Hat with the drab browns and greys of the western version was more than a little disappointing. I can still recall having a couple of copies of the 90s magazine Mean Machines, comparing the Japanese version’s graphics to Decap Attack, and wishing that Magical Hat could get an official release in the UK.