Golden Axe (Genesis)

I’ve long been guilty of giving short shrift to one of the most prolific and popular video game types of the ’80s and ’90s: The belt scrolling beat-’em-up. I’ve covered a handful, certainly, but not many relative to the legions of platformers, shooters, adventure games, and RPGs that tend to dominate my digital leisure time. Unlike the equally neglected sports titles, military simulations, and abstract puzzle games, it isn’t because I’m not fond of the form. Really, it’s down to the fact that these games are virtually always best enjoyed with friends. Not unlike their kissing cousins, the head-to-head versus fighters. This social component is such a keystone that brutalizing endless hordes of palette-swapped thugs solo can feel oddly hollow. Lonesome, even.

Nevertheless, I do sometimes get the urge, so today is the venerable Golden Axe’s turn in the spotlight. Technōs Japan’s Double Dragon had been one of the biggest arcade hits of 1987. Indeed of the decade’s latter half. When it came time for Sega to craft a response in 1989, they opted against aping Double Dragon’s urban setting and street punk antagonists in favor of a savage sword & sorcery saga patterned on Conan and similar pulp fantasy heroes. And that’s not just me making glib assumptions for once. Lead designer Makoto Uchida is on record as saying that he drew on his love for Schwarzenegger’s Conan and similar action flicks of the period to give the competition a run for its money. He likely went a little too far with it, in fact, since the arcade Golden Axe prominently featured voice clips lifted without permission from Conan, Rambo: First Blood, and others. Naughty Sega.

Golden Axe is a classic revenge tale of three muscle-bound heroes, Tyris Flair, Ax Battler (who fights with a sword, naturally), and Gilius Thunderhead, setting out to defeat the evil warlord Death Adder, who wields the fabled axe of the title. Each of the protagonists has lost at least one friend or family member to Death Adder’s villainy. Up to two can play simultaneously, though the choice of character here seems less impactful than it is in many brawlers. They don’t map cleanly to usual stereotypes of the fast one, the strong one, and the balanced one. Rather, the trio is differentiated mainly by their varying skill with magic. Collecting blue potions throughout the journey will fill up the player’s magic gauge. Activating magic will cash in the entire stock to generate a screen-wide special attack that deals damage based on the number of potions spent. Tyris can stock a maximum of nine potions, Ax Battler six, and Gilius just four. Apart from this, their moves are quite similar, making them akin to an easy, medium, and hard mode, respectively.

In addition to the magic system, Golden Axe’s second signature contribution to the genre is the rideable beasts that appear in most stages. They’re functionally a variation on the weapons carried by enemies in Double Dragon, except that instead of knocking a baseball bat out of an enemy’s hand and picking it up to swing as his buddies, you’re knocking a rival swordsman out of the saddle and commandeering his fire-breathing dragon or wacky whip-tailed chicken critter. In both cases, you can only get hit a limited number of times before the power-up disappears for good.

As I played through Golden Axe again for the first time in many years, I found myself wondering if this Genesis port had been shortened in some way. Levels seemed to fly by before I knew it, being no more than a half-dozen screens long in some cases, if that. It turns out that the opposite is actually true! The Genesis edition had a brand-new final area added on top of faithful reproductions of the arcade’s six. This effectively nudges a fifteen minute game up to around the twenty minute mark. That’s roughly on par with the aforementioned Double Dragon, but positively dwarfed by 1989’s two most influential beat-’em-ups, Capcom’s Final Fight and Konami’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, as well as the majority of their successors. The presence of that single new stage and Duel mode, an endurance style sequence of twelve matches against increasingly difficult groups of enemies, ultimately doesn’t do much to alleviate Golden Axe’s extreme brevity.

The combat isn’t all it could be, either. While you’re given a varied enough arsenal of weapon strikes and throws on top of your magic, it becomes clear early on that one move overshadows the rest: The dash attack. It’s fast, it knocks any victim to the ground in one go, and opponents are apparently unable to defend against it in any meaningful way. From the lowliest grunt to Death Adder himself, all give way before the almighty dash. This renders Golden Axe fairly trivial to complete, which I suppose could be considered a plus if you’re in no mood for a challenge and would prefer to steamroll the minions of darkness without breaking a sweat. On the whole, however, I’m inclined to count it as a negative.

If I had to summarize Golden Axe in one word, it might be “ungainly.” It carries an air of awkward adolescence about it, releasing as it did right on the cusp of seminal works fated to usher in the beat-’em-up’s true ’90s golden age. Still, this one is fondly remembered for a reason. Its barbaric atmosphere, brilliantly conveyed through quality pixel art and composer You Takada’s bombastic score, remains as appealing as ever and has inspired no less than five sequels and three spin-offs over the years. This impressively accurate home conversion also enjoys its own cherished place in history as a showpiece of early (pre-Sonic) Genesis marketing, when the company was pushing the “arcade experience at home” angle as hard as they could. It absolutely lives up to that hype, despite lacking a few animations, voice clips, and the original’s gloriously nutty fourth wall-breaking end scene. Stay gold, Ax Battler.

Splatterhouse 3 (Genesis)

By 1993, it must have been clear to publisher Namco that their action horror series Splatterhouse was in dire need of an update. All three installments to date (counting the parody spin-off Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti) were simple single-plane beat-’em-ups in the tradition of Irem’s Kung-Fu Master. Walk to the right, kill monsters, and that’s about it. Kung-Fu Master was a great game…for 1984. Since then, however, landmark titles like Double Dragon and Final Fight had rewritten the brawler playbook. Splatterhouse 3 would finally reflect this.

Five years after Rick Taylor rescued his sweetheart Jennifer from the clutches of underworld demons in Splatterhouse 2, the two have settled down to start a family. Alas, evil forces predictably return to invade the Taylor household, threatening Jennifer and the couple’s son, David. It’s all part of a scheme by an entity known as the Dark One to use a magic stone (and a little human sacrifice, of course) to attain ultimate power. Rick must one again reluctantly don the sinister Terror Mask, as only it can grant him the unholy strength necessary to avert his loved ones’ destruction.

Right off the bat, Splatterhouse vets will note that screen depth is now a factor. Instead of being locked onto a horizontal plane as before, Rick and his foes are free to maneuver around one another in search of positional advantage. This isn’t the only change intended to bring Splatterhouse 3 up to date with its genre contemporaries, either. Grabs and combo attacks are now the order of the day, and non-boss enemies can soak up a lot more punishment as a result. A generic zombie that might have been dispatched with one or two basic punches in the earlier games could well require a dozen here.

When the going gets especially tough, Rick has one last flashy new trick up his jumpsuit sleeve: By collecting the blue orbs scattered around the mansion, he can fill up a meter along the bottom of the screen. As long as said meter is at least partly full, he can transform at will into an even more freakishly musculature form, dishing out extra damage and taking less in return until the meter either depletes on its own or every monster in the current room is slain.

Determining the ideal moments to transform Rick is but one of several key strategies you’ll have to implement if you hope to earn the best ending. Simply put, speed is everything. Failing to complete the first, second, and fourth stages before the timer runs down will spell doom for Jennifer, David, or both. Other important considerations include mastering the tricky spin kick (more on that later) and using your in-game map to plot an efficient route through the sprawling mansion. No pressure!

Daunting as having to pulverize wave after wave of monsters under a strict time limit sounds, the designers at Now Production weren’t wholly without mercy. You’re given a safety net in the form of unlimited continues and a password system. So if a planned route or sequence of fights doesn’t go as anticipated, you can always redo the level from scratch with no repercussions. You can also safely ignore the timer in stages three and five, where it was seemingly included just to mess with your nerves a bit.

The emphasis on racing the clock to achieve the good ending can be a double-edged sword, however, as it sharply limits your options in battle. This is where that spin kick I mentioned comes in. This sucker is godlike. It has a huge hit radius, strikes foes on all sides, deals twice the damage of a full punch combo, and renders Rick invincible during the whole of the animation. If you’re serious about clearing a level quickly, you really need to be using this kick almost exclusively. The problem with this is two-fold. First, and most obviously, executing the same attack over and over gets old fast. Second, the kick isn’t as easy to pull off as you might hope. It requires a fighting game type forward-back-forward motion with very specific timing and botching it can leave you open to enemy reprisal. I was still only able to nail it around 75% of the time by the end of my playthrough. The cumulative effect is one overpowered-yet-finicky move completely overshadowing the remainder of Rick’s arsenal. Though not totally game-breaking, it is unfortunate.

While undoubtedly different, Splatterhouse 3 ultimately doesn’t lose sight of what made its predecessors so memorable: Ghoul smashing galore backed up with eerie music and gleefully gory pixel art. Its maze-like structure leads to less focus on arcade style set pieces, but the signature brutal combat and diabolic atmosphere come through loud and clear. Pity it marked the beginning of a franchise drought that lingered well into the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 era. Sadly, this means it’ll be the last Splatterhouse entry I’ll be covering here. It’s been a long, blood-spattered road; one I’ll be retreading often in Halloween seasons to come. Adieu, Rick. We’ll always have Paris.

Splatterhouse 2 (Genesis)

Step one: Splatter. Step two: Snuggle.

Namco’s Splatterhouse must rank among the most consistent franchises in all of video gaming. Each installment has everyman protagonist Rick Taylor donning a haunted Terror Mask that imbues him with supernatural strength and setting off to rescue his sweetheart Jennifer from the clutches of demons. What follows feels like a gore-drenched extended homage to ’80s horror cinema with a basic beat-’em-up game tacked onto it.

That’s not to say I don’t enjoy playing through these suckers. On the contrary, their artful layering of macabre atmosphere on top of simple yet solid mechanics lends them a certain timeless appeal in my eyes. It helps that they capture the mood of the Halloween season uncannily well with their pitch-perfect blend of gruesome imagery and adolescent glee. Rarely, if ever, has a style over substance exercise paid off so well.

Despite being a home console exclusive for the Genesis, 1992’s Splatterhouse 2 is a virtual carbon copy of the 1988 arcade original. Rick is on a mission to retrieve Jennifer’s soul from the underworld after ultimately failing to save her life last time. This requires literally trekking to hell and back over the course of eight side-scrolling levels. Think the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, except with 1000% more chainsaw mayhem. Apart from that one little tweak to our hero’s motivation, the two games look, sound, and play incredibly similar, right down to minute details like the layout of the status bars along the top and bottom of the screen. I’d venture to say that you could swap whole sections between the two and an inexperienced player would never spot the change.

The zero risk expansion pack nature of Splatterhouse 2 makes it a surprisingly tricky game to assess. On the surface, it really is just more Splatterhouse. Rick retains the same pokey walk speed and floaty jump. He lashes out with the same small array of punches and kicks, supplemented by rare and fleeting weapon pickups. Stages have the same “trudge right and whack monsters while jumping the occasional trap” flow to them. It’s tempting to simply point you to my own prior Splatterhouse review and call it a day. That would be a cop-out, though, so I’ll dig a bit deeper.

Let’s start with the difficulty balancing. The TurboGrafx-16 home port of the first Splatterhouse gave you finite continues to work with, meaning that you’d likely be forced to restart from scratch several times before finally memorizing enough to finish it in one clean go. Splatterhouse 2 offers both unlimited continues and a password feature. As if to compensate, however, levels are slightly longer and enemy patterns, particularly those of the bosses, are a tad more complex. I died more frequently in Splatterhouse 2 and it took me a good couple extra hours to finish the first time. It manages to be tougher than its predecessor even without the threat of forced restarts.

We also see a slight increase in the quantity and quality of the in-game storytelling this time around. There’s a proper prologue where the voice of the mask sets up the idea of resurrecting Jennifer as well as a smattering of between-stage dialogue from Rick. It’s certainly not much, but it’s nice to not have to rely entirely on an instruction manual for context.

While these small improvements are appreciated, Splatterhouse 2 remains about as unambitious a sequel as can be. Next to no effort went into tinkering with the old formula, resulting in a ’90s console release that could have come straight out of an ’80s arcade. You need look no further than its cutting edge Genesis contemporary Streets of Rage 2 for proof of that. You know what, though? Bare bones throwback that it is, I’ll still reach for this over any Streets of Rage title on a blustery October eve. Presentation counts.

Downtown Special: Kunio-kun no Jidaigeki da yo Zen’in Shūgō! (Famicom)

A few years back, I took at look at the NES classic River City Ransom. This comical 1989 beat-’em-up/RPG hybrid by Technōs Japan is a singular experience on the system and a favorite of many. Despite this, gamers outside Japan wouldn’t be treated to a direct sequel until River City: Tokyo Rumble arrived on the 3DS in 2016. Famicom owners got a much better deal. They only needed to wait two years for Downtown Special: Kunio-kun no Jidaigeki da yo Zen’in Shūgō! (“Downtown Special: It’s Kunio’s Period Piece, Assemble Everyone!”). As its mouthful of a title implies, this is the Kunio-kun franchise’s wacky take on a jidaigeki, or Japanese historical drama. If you’ve ever wondered how River City Ransom would have played out in the 17th century, here’s your chance to find out.

I played the original Famicom version of Kunio-kun no Jidaigeki in conjunction with the unofficial English translation patch by Technōs Samurai Translation Project. There is another option in the form of the Double Dragon & Kunio-kun Retro Brawler Bundle, which went up for sale on the PlayStation 4 and Switch download services in February of this year. It includes official English versions of this and many other older Technōs games. Digital storefronts are notoriously fickle, so here’s hoping it’s still available by the time you read this.

There’s a plot going on in this one, although it’s mostly a paper thin excuse to dash around the countryside punching and kicking everyone you meet. Our tale begins with tough guy hero Kunio and his dorky brother responding to a request for aid from the head of the friendly Bunzō clan, who’s taken ill and requires a rare medicinal herb. The brothers set off to find it and this leads to betrayal, kidnapping, and other assorted intrigue courtesy of rival clans. While this clearly wasn’t a major focus and none of it stuck with me, I do appreciate that there’s a bit more in the way of ongoing storytelling here than there was in River City Ransom.

This game’s interpretation of ancient Japan comprises ten interconnected zones. Each is relatively compact, consisting of a dozen or so screens at most. There’s a lot more variety to these than we saw in River City’s various neighborhoods, both in terms of visuals and gameplay. Some are urban, others mountainous, icy, water filled, etc. This allows for a number of environmental conditions which can affect combat. Having to worry about falling into lava or getting pushed around by powerful river currents is an oddly welcome addition to the conventional brawling.

As for that brawling, it’s where Kunio-kun no Jidaigeki really shines. This will come as no surprise to lovers of the series, but it still bears mentioning because of how much its predecessor’s already impressive martial arts mayhem was refined and expanded upon. Kunio’s standard compliment of kicks, punches, throws, and ground attacks can be supplemented by up to 25 additional special techniques and a host of melee weapons. In short, you’re constantly gaining new ways to kick ass. Some of these special moves are pretty dang wild, too. I’m especially fond of the lethal fart that knocks down every enemy on the screen. If you’re looking for a game that pushes the console’s two-button controller to its limits, look no further.

The RPG mechanics underlying the fisticuffs have received an overhaul as well. Characters have the same set of ten statistics as before. These govern health, defense, how much damage they deal with specific attacks, and so on. Unlike in River City Ransom, stat growth isn’t predicated on purchasing food items in shops. Rather, it’s tied directly the experience points obtained from defeated enemies. This distinction is important, since the in-game menu lets you manually tweak what percentage of a character’s total earned experience is allocated to a given stat. If you’re in a hurry to boost your dude’s kick damage, for example, you can re-direct as many points as you wish from the other nine stats to make it happen. Most “serious” RPGs don’t even allow for this much fine-tuning of character progression. Oh, and the last game’s lengthy password saves have been replaced with a battery backup this time. Very cool.

Inasmuch as Kunio-kun no Jidaigeki lives up to its billing as an enhanced River City Ransom in period garb, I can’t say enough good things about it. Regrettably, however, a few of its stabs at innovation turned out to be mixed blessings at best. The biggest offender has to be the partner system. Remember how I mentioned that Kunio was accompanied on the journey by his brother? Well, that’s not just for story purposes. If you’re playing alone, you’ll have a computer-controlled ally fighting alongside you at all times, whether you like it or not. You’ll recruit a whole stable of them over the course of the adventure, in fact, and can switch them out as desired back at your home base. What sounds like a very neat mechanic is ultimately more of a pain than anything. Your “helpers” are as dumb as can be, continually swooping in at the least opportune moments to get in your way, pelt you with objects, and steal your hard-earned cash drops. There’s no way to ditch them, either. Believe me, I tried. Let the bad guys kill them off and they’ll simply reappear after the next screen transition. If a second player is present, he or she will control the other character, which naturally works out much better. This arguably makes Kunio-kun no Jidaigeki more fun than River City Ransom for two players and less so for one. An option to fight solo and devote the extra system memory to enabling a third enemy on screen instead would have been amazing. Alas.

Slowdown is another sore point. The action slows to crawl on a fairly regular basis. The prevalence of this seems to be at least partly dependent on your location in the game world. One area in particular has a very attractive orange sunset in the background and virtually every fight that takes place in it runs at around 50% speed. This is where I ended up facing off against the game’s two final bosses and the choppy nature of the exchange greatly undermined what should have been a satisfying climax.

Though these are significant, pervasive flaws, I wouldn’t go so far as to call them fatal ones. Kunio-kun no Jidaigeki largely succeeds at its mission to deepen both the beat-’em-up and RPG aspects of River City Ransom. It also stays true to the goofy tone the saga is so beloved for. Seeing Kunio, Riki, and the rest of these familiar characters transported into an entirely new setting is a treat for fans like myself. I even spotted a couple of the team captains from Super Dodge Ball rounding out the cast. This is a quality work and certainly deserved better than to be condemned to obscurity in the West over some old-timey Japanese set dressing. Barf!

Splatterhouse (PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16)

Burning down the house!

Of all the bone-chilling titles in this year’s October roundup, Namco’s Splatterhouse holds the strongest claim to true historical significance as mainstream gaming’s introduction to gore. Suspect I might oversimplifying there? That’s fair. 1988 does seem awfully late for such a milestone. I don’t maintain that Splatterhouse was the first gory game, however, only the first to enjoy a number of advantages that collectively gave it the edge in breaking through to the public consciousness. Unlike Exidy’s 1986 light gun oddity Chiller, it received a massive marketing push from its A-list developer/publisher. Its 16-bit graphics allowed for much more in the way of shocking detail than Wizard Video’s blocky 1983 renditions of Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre on the Atari 2600. Finally, being an arcade and console release, it had a much wider built-in audience than home computer offerings like 1987’s Barbarian: The Ultimate Warrior.

Eschewing the ancient Universal homages of many other early horror games, Splatterhouse leaned into edgier contemporary influences. Its musclebound hero, Rick Taylor, donned a Jason-esque “Terror Mask” and blue jumpsuit ensemble, simultaneously paying tribute to two of the period’s most iconic big screen slashers. And he splattered things. Loads of things. Zombies, bloodsucking worms, flying severed heads, misshapen killer fetuses, you name it, all in his frenzied rush to rescue his love Jennifer from the unholy depths of West Mansion. No wonder this 1989 port to the TurboGrafx-16 became the first game to bear a violence warning, which declared it “inappropriate for young children…and cowards.” From the makers of Pac-Man and Dig Dug came the blood-drenched beat-’em-up Evil Dead and Reanimator fans had been waiting for. Go figure.

So, having established Splatterhouse as very important and very cool, how does it play? Well, what you see really is what you get with this one. Even by 1988 standards, the gameplay here is basic. At a point in arcade history when Double Dragon’s eight-directional movement represented the cutting edge in beat-’em-up design, Splatterhouse confines Rick to a single horizontal plane and thus more closely resembles Irem’s Kung-Fu Master from 1984. Simply walk to the right, hop over the occasional spike or other ground hazard, and smack down every twisted monstrosity that gets in your way. Persevere through seven stages of this of this without running out of lives and you win. A couple stages do offer short branching paths to the boss room, but this idea is sadly underutilized.

Rick’s rampage is as brief as it is straightforward. After you’ve come to grips with the level layouts and enemy behaviors, an entire playthrough can be wrapped up in under twenty minutes. This makes Splatterhouse a rare example of a “hot tea game” for me. See, I’ve unintentionally developed a tradition over the years of brewing up a piping hot mug of tea at the start of a gaming session. I then immediately get lost in the flow, forgetting all about my poor beverage until hours have passed, by which time it’s ice cold. Imagine my surprise when I cleared the TurboGrafx Splatterhouse for the first time and had a nice, warm mug awaiting me for a change! I had so much play time to spare that I threw on the Japanese PC Engine version and ran all the way through it, too. Turns out the two are almost identical. The North American edition merely changed Rick’s mask from white to red (presumably to head off any Paramount Pictures lawsuits) and took out all the crosses. Because shredding zombies in twain with a wooden plank is fine, provided you leave Jesus out of it.

Pointing out that these home editions of Splatterhouse are dead simple and light on content shouldn’t be construed as condemnation. On the contrary. As they’re intended to be faithful adaptations of the arcade original, they must be reckoned great successes. Every key location and play element is present and accounted for. The graphics, particularly the backgrounds, are scaled back somewhat, yet still convey the same hellish effect. The eerie music holds up equally well. This series in general has a reputation for style over substance, which is both technically true and frequently unfair. The entirety of Splatterhouse is positively bursting with ghoulish ambience and diabolic verve, resulting in an unforgettable experience for any classic gaming or classic horror enthusiast. What’s the sense in glossing over that as if it’s some small thing that comes standard with any random game?

Splatterhouse made enough of a splash to warrant two direct sequels on the Sega Genesis and a delightfully silly Famicom spin-off (Wanpaku Graffiti). As of this writing, an ill-fated 2010 reboot attempt is the last we’ve heard from Rick, Jennifer, and the eldritch Terror Mask. Perhaps that’s for the best. Splatterhouse’s once transgressive grue factor comes across almost naive in an age of fully-voiced interactive torture scenes (Grand Theft Auto V) and near photorealistic dismemberment (Mortal Kombat 11). Shifts in popular culture and the inexorable march of technology have rendered this former controversy magnet quaint as a caped Bela Lugosi in its own way. Its infectiously likable pick-up-and-play action, on the other hand? That’s timeless.

Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker (Genesis)

Just beat it.

One entire class of video game that’s all but extinct these days is the celebrity vanity project. For the purposes of this review, I’ll go ahead and define this as any game that stars an idealized version of a real world celebrity and depicts its subject engaging in a variety of fantastical exploits unrelated to his or her day job. The celebrity in question is almost always a musician or athlete, as actors who appear in games are typically just lending their likenesses to various fictional characters as opposed to portraying themselves. I remember games like these serving as a constant source of befuddled amusement for my friends and I throughout the ’80s and ’90s. Who actually wanted to platform across alien planets as the members of the band Journey or punch mummies as Shaquille O’Neal? Even in a much less jaded age these titles were seen as punchlines rather than viable gaming options by most and usually proved to have much less of a built-in audience than their deluded creators anticipated. It certainly didn’t help that some prominent examples (looking at you, Shaq-Fu) were saddled with gameplay every bit as dire as their tortured premises.

This widespread consumer contempt combined with skyrocketing development costs neatly explains why the classic vanity project has become a thing of the past in recent years. Most gamers who experienced the trend in its heyday would agree that this is a case of good riddance to bad rubbish. If pressed, though, many of those same individuals would also agree that there’s one shining exception to almost every common criticism leveled above; one silly 16-bit ego trip which beat the odds and remains a well-loved part of countless childhoods: Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker. Both of them, really, but I’ll be looking at the home console version for the Genesis today and not the completely distinct arcade release it shares its name with.

What does this 1990 platformer with light beat-’em-up elements have going for it that its pilloried peers don’t? How about Michael freakin’ Jackson for starters? A ferociously talented singer, songwriter, dancer, choreographer, music video pioneer, and occasional movie star, he was still holding fast to his position as the one and only King of Pop. While perhaps just beginning to see the slightest dip in stature compared to his peak in the mid-’80s, it would be several more years before his many personal eccentricities and some shocking criminal allegations would truly begin to overshadow his musical accomplishments. Let’s be frank here: Shaq may be one of the best centers the NBA has ever seen, but you’d never mistake him for the coolest man on the planet. It anyone could present himself to the world as a nigh-omnipotent musical superhero with a straight face and get away with it, it was M.J.

There’s also the fact it was made by Sega themselves. More specifically by a scrappy little internal development team then called AM8. You probably know them better by the moniker they adopted for their breakout release the following year and have stuck with ever since: Sonic Team. It’s no exaggeration to say that Jackson was working with the very best in the field to bring Moonwalker to fruition, as no other group of developers had a better grasp of the Genesis hardware in the platform’s early days.

The game’s story is a straightforward adaptation of the one featured in the “Smooth Criminal” segment of the 1988 Moonwalker film. Michael must use his magic dance powers to rescue children who’ve been kidnapped by the evil drug kingpin Mr. Big (memorably portrayed in the movie by a frenzied Joe Pesci rocking shades and a topknot). Since this is a video game, the number of endangered kids has been upped from three to at least a hundred scattered across a total of fifteen stages. The stages themselves have fairly open layouts and scroll both vertically and horizontally, so there’s a bit of a scavenger hunt element involved in locating all the hostages tucked away in the countless hiding places that dot each map. After doing so, Michael is able to trigger a boss fight (with a little help from Bubbles the chimp!) and then move on to the next area. In essence, it’s a more free-roaming take on Sega’s own 1987 arcade title Shinobi.

Opposing Michael are Mr. Big’s gun-toting thugs as well as a few other baddies who are clear references to other Jackson projects. You have bandanna-clad street thugs right out of “Beat It” or “Bad” and some “Thriller” zombies. Rounding out the rogue’s gallery are a handful of ornery dogs, birds, and spiders. That’s about it. All considered, there’s a distinct lack of enemy variety in Moonwalker. Even the boss encounters at the end of each stage tend to pit Michael against either a large number of standard foes attacking from all sides, a powered-up version of a regular enemy, or both. I’m not counting the final confrontation with Mr. Big himself, as it takes the form of a tacked-on and thoroughly awful first-person space shooting section for some reason. If you’ve ever wondered how Wing Commander would have turned out if it had been dropped on its head as a baby, here you go.

Although you’re not furnished with that great a variety of threats to smack down, the combat itself is still a lot of fun. Instead of normal punches and kicks, Michael’s attacks are made to resemble some of his most iconic dance moves. Every elegant wrist flick and high kick emits a shower of glittering pixie dust which looks harmless, but hits like a ton of bricks! The contrast between how feeble these assaults appear and the way they cause enemies to go blasting off into the sky or ricocheting between the floor and ceiling like human pinballs is absolutely hilarious and never seems to get old. Nailing an enemy while airborne is pretty wild, too. They shoot down to the ground in a split-second and land flat on their faces like they’ve just been whacked by a giant invisible mallet. Priceless.

Holding down the attack button will cause Michael to perform an invincible Spin Attack at the cost of some of his own health. The longer he spins, the more health is lost. Spinning in one place long enough to consume 50% of his maximum health will unleash Michael’s ultimate weapon: The Dance Attack, in which he launches into one of a variety of different dance routines and every enemy on-screen (including dogs and spiders!) is compelled to join in. Most regular enemies are killed instantly at the dance’s conclusion and bosses will sustain a large chunk of damage. A special move that costs this much energy to use would be useless in most games, but the makers of Moonwalker generously made it so that each child rescued restores up to 50% of Michael’s lost health, meaning you can actually get away with using the Dance Attack fairly often if you like.

This is really about all there is to Moonwalker’s gameplay. It’s a short game with a single basic goal to accomplish and it boasts a relatively small number of unique enemies and ways of dispatching them. Michael does have one other special power in the ability to temporarily transform into a giant flying robot that shoots homing missile and laser beams. Yes, really. He accomplishes this by catching a shooting star which appears under certain special circumstances. Unfortunately, this doesn’t impact player progression as much as you’d think it would. Since Robo-Jackson can’t rescue hostages and any enemies he destroys will tend to re-spawn right away, there’s not much point to transforming in most levels except to rack up some extra points. High scores don’t seem to award any extra lives or other benefits, either, so it really doesn’t amount to much in the end. Looks cool, though. It would have been nice if some more permanent power-ups had been included, like hidden health bar extensions or extra weapons. Finding and holding onto these would have added a bit more intrigue and strategy to the proceedings.

Okay, so the gameplay isn’t really best in class. The upside is that it’s supported by some of the best graphics and music the early Genesis library had to offer. The character sprites for Michael and his enemies are large for the time and feature very smooth animation, befitting a game built around replicating flashy dance routines. The soundtrack consists of instrumental versions of Jackson standards like “Billie Jean,” “Smooth Criminal,” “Another Part of Me,” and more, all rendered to the utmost quality the console’s FM synth sound chip is capable of. Every track is remarkably listenable in this format and just as likely to get stuck in your head for hours as the album versions. Moonwalker’s audio and visuals may not seem revelatory nearly three decades on, but it’s important to remember that the Genesis was the first 16-bit game console to hit the market outside of Japan and games like this one, Strider, and the pack-in Altered Beast were jaw-dropping to an audience primarily acclimated to the NES and Master System. Home games with such lush presentations simply weren’t an option before this unless you were willing and able to dive into comparatively expensive niche computing platforms like the Amiga. Even for kids like me who opted to stick it out for two more years waiting on the Super Nintendo, there was still some envy involved whenever one of those ubiquitous “Genesis does…” ads would pop up. It was a big deal.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Moonwalker is strictly all style, no substance. It certainty does lean that way, however. As far as platformers go, it doesn’t offer anywhere near the length, breadth, or depth of a Sonic or Mario and there’s little incentive to keep playing after you’ve cleared it once. In retrospect, it’s easy enough to point out that it would have benefited greatly from the addition of more enemy types, better boss fights, more power-ups, and some hidden areas or other secrets to discover. That said, there’s nothing wrong with a simple arcadey punch-up and this one has far more charm than most, thanks to those amazing tunes and the goofy-cool crotch grabbing antics of its unlikely action star. If you come across anyone claiming it’s a bad game, just tell ’em I said their hearts are full of greed and they have doo-doo in their souls.

RollerGames (NES)

Donald? Is that you?

Konami really were miracle workers back in the day. Case in point: 1990’s RollerGames, in which they managed to take a short-lived cross between roller derby and pro wrestling that also included dance numbers and a pit of live alligators and somehow turn it into an even stupider NES game. That takes vision.

I have no recollection at all of the RollerGames television show from 1989. Looking up clips in preparation for this review, it’s clear I was missing out. It’s a prime slice of vintage cheese that certainly couldn’t exist as it did in our present jaded age. If you’re looking for an old school “sports entertainment” companion piece to G.L.O.W. and the golden age WWF, look no further. It also drew big ratings. Despite this, several of the producers still managed to go bankrupt and the show abruptly vanished from the airwaves after only one season.

RollerGames’ brief moment in the sun was somehow still enough to inspire not just one, but three game adaptations, all of which were doomed to reach the general public after the tv show itself had already been consigned to the pop culture memory hole. Williams put out a pinball table and Konami released two completely distinct video games. The arcade RollerGames was a straightforward attempt to replicate the roller derby action of the show. Since it relied heavily on powerful arcade hardware to dynamically shift the player’s view of the track around during play, however, it was clearly unsuitable for conversion to the humble NES. Instead, Konami (in the paper-thin guise of their front company Ultra Games) took things in an entirely different, much less sane direction and gave us this off-kilter platformer/beat-’em-up hybrid where your favorite prime time derby heroes strap on their skates to do battle with terrorists.

Yes, it seems the sinister criminal organization V.I.P.E.R. (Vicious International Punks and Eternal Renegades) has joined forces with three “evil” derby teams and abducted RollerGames league commissioner Emerson “Skeeter” Bankhead. Oh no! Not Skeeter! Only members of the three remaining “good” teams have what it takes to rescue their boss. Why? According to the manual, “the CIA and FBI lack the speed, cunning, and sheer brute force for this job.” Huh. Well, I suppose I never have seen them do much in the way of skating, so…fair enough.

Naturally, I love this premise. It’s stupid in the best possible way and one of the high points of the whole package. RollerGames isn’t a top tier NES title by any means, but everything it does well stems directly from this decision to not even attempt to be a proper roller derby game. While I’m on the subject, just imagine how much more fun all those terrible WWF games for the NES could have been if they’d abandoned all pretense of delivering a realistic ringside experience and just had Andre the Giant fight an attack helicopter. Alas.

You’ll start out in RollerGames by choosing one of three teams, which functions as a character select. The three available characters are based on the Holy Trinity of beat-’em-ups: Ice Box of the T-Birds is the strong and slow one, Rolling Thunder of Hot Flash is the weak and fast one, and California Kid of the Rockers is the balanced one. In theory, the game’s mixture of platforming and hand-to-hand combat should mean all the characters are viable, but do yourself a favor and avoid Ice Box. The jumps in this game are far deadlier than the brawling and he really struggles to clear some of the trickier obstacles. Thankfully, you’re able to change characters any time you lose all your lives and use a continue, so you’ll never be stuck using a character you don’t like all the way through the game.

RollerGames has a total of twelve stages, with the action unfolding in the sort of 3/4 view typical of post-Renegade brawlers. Most of the time, however, you’re not engaging in fisticuffs, but instead skating over, around, and through a bevy of environmental hazards which function as sadistic obstacle courses. The threats placed in your path can be divided up into two broad categories: Stuff that kills you outright (pits, bodies of water, spikes) and stuff that will just knock you down and deplete a small chunk of your health on contact (barrels, oil slicks, flamethrowers). Your character’s health bar is quite large, so you’re able to make quite a few missteps around lesser dangers before the cumulative damage does you in. It’s the instant kill stuff you really need to worry about, since none of the stages in RollerGames have checkpoints. Fall in a hole and you start the whole stage over from the beginning. At least the stages themselves are fairly short and the continues unlimited.

Every now and then, usually around twice per stage, you’ll reach a point where the scrolling halts for a time and you transition into a “fight scene.” Here, the movement controls you use in the rest of the stage are temporarily replaced by new ones that handle more like a standard beat-’em-up and you’ll have to fight off several waves of enemy skaters before you’ll be allowed to move on. Combat is fairly basic, with typical punches and kicks, a jumping kick, and a “hair pull into throw” attack straight out of Double Dragon. You also have a lunging super attack activated by pressing A and B simultaneously that deals extra damage, but can only be used three times in a given stage. Most of the game’s boss fights also take place in this mode.

Just to add a little more variety, the game also includes two highway stages, which are auto-scrolling affairs where your character has to navigate a hazard-strewn roadway on the way to the next main stage. Other than not being able to set the place yourself, these don’t really play that differently from the normal platforming segments. They do end with some rather odd boss fights, though: A huge vehicle shows up and hurls projectiles at your character until it just sort of gets bored and leaves. You can’t actually attack these guys. You just dodge the crap they chuck your way for an arbitrary amount of time and then you win. That’s a new one on me!

Like I mentioned above, RollerGames is far from a perfect action game. The biggest issue by far is that the gameplay is wildly unbalanced. The designers clearly went out of their way to throw many different types of challenge at the player, but only one type (the insta-kill pits and spikes) ultimately matters and ends up defining the experience. The non-lethal obstacles in the platforming sections are nuisances at worst and the beat-’em-up combat is extremely simple and easy, with brain dead enemies all too happy to repeatedly march face first into your hero’s waiting fists.

Another aspect of the gameplay that seems to annoy many (at least based on other reviews I’ve seen) is the control. Specifically, the loose, slippery movement. Your character can’t really stop or turn on a dime, nor can they accelerate to full speed instantly. Many jumps also require just the right amount of momentum, otherwise you’ll over or under-shoot your landing and pay for it with a life. Basically, every stage here feels like the ice level from most other platformers. While I understand the frustration stemming from this, I also recognize it’s what sets RollerGames apart from the crowd and hesitate to call it an outright flaw. Your characters are supposed to be zipping around on skates, after all, so it’s only fitting their movement reflects that. Even if it is defensible as a design choice, the resulting learning curve is steep and you can expect to die a lot at first.

As unbalanced and awkward as it can be, RollerGames still packs a lot of charm into one dirt cheap cartridge. Beyond just the glorious absurdity of roller skating through a jungle dodging giant piranhas, the visuals and audio both demostrate a level of quality befitting a world class developer. There’s some very good use of color and the character sprites are large and detailed, with the exception of the distinctive blank faces seen in many other 8-bit Konami titles like Castlevania and Contra. The music is also above average thanks to some catchy melodies and punchy drum samples. If you don’t mind putting in the time needed to master its finicky controls, this one is more than worth its current Starbucks latte asking price.

Besides, why just skate or die when you can do both?

Double Dragon (NES)

“Fifty thousand!? You got fifty thousand on Double Dragon!?”

Technōs Japan had a groundbreaking hit on their hands with the first entry in their Kunio-kun series, 1986’s Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-kun. Also known as Renegade outside Japan, it introduced a crucial element other martial arts-themed action games of the time lacked: The ability for characters to maneuver around the screen both horizontally and vertically in their ceaseless quest to pound the everloving crap out of each other.

When it came time to craft a follow-up, producer/director Yoshihisa Kishimoto wanted to advance the genre again while also ensuring that the setting and characters would be more palatable to an international audience than the rival Japanese high schoolers plot of the Kunio-kun games. The end result was an even bigger smash in the form of 1987’s Double Dragon.

Introduced here was the now standard ability to pick up and wield enemy weapons. Even more significant, however, was Double Dragon’s titular two player simultaneous gameplay. As much as we think of games like this as natural multiplayer experiences today, kicking street punk ass side-by-side with a buddy was a new and electrifying concept at the time. Of course, two players at once also meant twice the quarters for arcade operators. It was the start of a beat-‘em-up boom that would persist well into the next decade.

The story is set in a post-apocalyptic future New York City, after a nuclear war has resulted in the breakdown of law and order among the survivors. The action follows two initially unnamed twin martial artists (later dubbed Billy and Jimmy Lee) as they take to the streets to rescue their shared (!?) love interest Marian from her abductors, the Black Warriors gang.

Home conversions for every console and computer of the time were inevitable. Some were pretty good, others dismal. The best-selling, most influential, and weirdest of them all was this one for Nintendo’s flagship machine. I never played it much back in my youth, but I’ve been intrigued by it ever since I saw it featured prominently in the very first issue of Nintendo Power magazine.

I might as well lead with the bad news: The trademark two-player cooperative gameplay of the arcade original is nowhere to be found on the NES. This was presumably done for performance reasons. In other words, to keep the game running at a reasonable pace. Whether this was really due to insurmountable technical limitations or programmer inexperience is debatable when you consider that both Double Dragon II and III on the NES do allow for simultaneous play. At least the designers actually went so far as to tweak the storyline in order to justify the second Lee brother’s absence as a playable character. In video gaming’s most shocking heel turn since Donkey Kong Jr., a jealous Jimmy is behind Marian’s kidnapping in this version and poor Billy is on a dual mission to rescue his sweetheart and put an end to his brother’s evil ways once and for all. Pretty dark there, guys. Or I guess it would be if Jimbo wasn’t alive and a good guy again in all the sequels. Oh, well. I still appreciate the effort.

Technōs threw in multiple new gameplay elements in order to (hopefully) make up for the loss of the game’s signature feature. The most obvious is Mode B, a rather crude stab at an early head-to-head fighting game for one or two players. There are six selectable fighters on offer, but each combatant isn’t allowed to choose from them independently, so all fights are “mirror matches” where two differently colored version of the same character square off. With its awkward movement, stiff controls, limited moves, and only six possible matchups, Mode B is certainly no Street Fighter II. It is, at the very least, curiously forward-thinking. Here you have a port of the game set the gold standard for martial arts action in its day anticipating, albeit in a very limited capacity, the next title to come along and do the same three years later.

In terms of the main game, a simple experience system has been implemented. Billy starts out with a single heart icon below his health bar and only basic punch and kick attacks. Every 1,000 experience points earned by attacking enemies adds another heart and another move to Billy’s arsenal, up to a maximum of seven. This addition is, again, more interesting than it is enjoyable. It’s clearly a forerunner of the RPG/brawler hybrid playstyle that would be much more fully realized later on in Technōs’ own River City Ransom. Here, though, it mostly just functions as a time sink. Since the player has a much better chance in the later levels with a full repertoire of moves, it makes the most sense to run down the timer grinding out experience in the early stages by tediously pummeling weak enemies without finishing them off for as long as possible. This does add a few extra minutes of uneventful padding to a very short game, but that’s about all.

There are four stages total, just like in the arcade. They’re very similar to their original designs, broadly speaking, though stages three and four have been lengthened via the addition of some seriously dodgy platforming segments. Like the rest of the new material in this port, they fail to add anything of substance to the core game. Billy’s jump kick works fine as an attack, but it’s terrible for leaping over pits and onto moving platforms. It has a small arc, requires pressing two buttons at once, and seems to be slightly delayed. Here’s a tip: Resist your natural instinct to compensate for the short jump distance by waiting until you’re at the very edge of a gap before trying to leap over. Not only is the aforementioned delay a threat, being anywhere near the edge of a platform also seems to suck you inexorably down to your doom somehow. Once you get used to avoiding those edges and inputting your jumps a split second before you would in most other games, you can pass these sections relatively easily, but the learning curve is a killer. A particularly annoying one, I might add, when you’re only given three lives with which to complete all four stages.

If it sounds like I’m down on Double Dragon, I’m really not. Even as a single player experience, it’s still a damn fine action game for its time. While the various extra features may not amount to much, punching, kicking, headbutting, and elbow smashing your way through an endless conga line of dumb thugs is timeless fun. Billy has a ton of moves at his disposal once he’s fully leveled up and most of them are quite effective. This allows you a lot of freedom to experiment with taking out the opposition in different ways. A great game with a bunch of odd, superfluous junk grafted onto it is still a great game.

Double Dragon’s soundtrack is rightly remembered as one of the highlights of the system’s middle years. The songs themselves are taken straight from the arcade, but they sound even better played through the NES sound chip. Except for one rather discordant track that plays at the start of the third stage, everything here is legitimately iconic. The graphics are pretty sweet, too. Characters animate well and show a decent amount of expression on their faces as you bash them senseless. While the backgrounds could have benefitted from a bit more detail and some additional colors in many spots, this was one of the best looking 1988 releases for the console overall.

If you just want the best possible Double Dragon experience on the NES, I would direct you toward Double Dragon II: The Revenge. It includes the cooperative play that made the series famous and ditches the experience point system in favor of simply giving you all your moves at the outset. You still have to wrangle with some horrid platforming, but two out of three ain’t bad! The original is still an ass-whooping good time, though, and is arguably the more essential experience for NES aficionados due to its greater impact on the fan culture surrounding the console as a whole.

Besides, a little fratricide never hurt anyone, right?

The Adventures of Bayou Billy (NES)

Love, Cajun style. Tastes like crawdaddies!

In 1988, Konami released an ambitious multi-genre action title for the Famicom called Mad City. The game followed ragin’ Cajun vigilante Billy West on a mission to rescue his absurdly buxom girl, Annabelle, from the ruthless New Orleans crime boss, Godfather Gordon. While he may incidentally share a name with the famous Futurama voice actor, it’s obvious Billy’s appearance was deliberately modeled on the title character from the then-popular Crocodile Dundee movies. They just relocated the main character from Australia to Louisiana, swapped out the crocodiles for alligators, and threw in tons of that good old 8-bit violence.

It worked. Mad City was a pretty fun experience, if also a bit on the short and easy side. When it came time to release the game in North America the following year, things had…changed. Rumors persist this was due at least in part to the booming video game rental market in America. Nintendo and other game companies had lobbied Japanese lawmakers to effectively make the practice of game renting illegal there, while U.S. courts had decisively rejected their efforts to do the same on our side of the Pacific. Owing to this, it’s thought some developers made the international releases of their games more difficult specifically so gamers would be unlikely to be able to finish them as a weekend rental and would therefore be more likely to purchase the game outright.

Whatever the truth of this little conspiracy theory, there’s no doubt numerous NES releases were altered so as to be significantly more difficult than their Famicom counterparts, none more so than our version of Mad City: The Adventures of Bayou Billy.

As stated, Bayou Billy is a multi-genre game. The tv commercial featured a rubber alligator wrestling doofus portraying Billy who promised “hand-to-hand combat with drivin’, shootin’, and, of course, zappin’.” Of course. It was sold as a Konami caliber combination of Double Dragon, RoadBlasters, and Operation Wolf. In other words, a sure thing. Right?

Let’s start with the beat-’em-up action, since it comprises five out of the game’s nine stages. You start out in the bayou, naturally, and must plow through waves of Gordon’s men and the occasional pissed-off gator. Billy has a basic punch, kick, and jumping kick at the beginning. He can also pick up and use weapons if he can manage to disarm certain foes. It won’t take you long to realize these levels really don’t play much at all like they do in other games. Enemies recover very quickly from being hit and are able to retaliate almost immediately, so you can’t just mash the attack buttons to lock a baddie in place and repeatedly pummel him until he goes down. What will happen instead if you go toe-to-toe is that Billy and the enemy will take turns trading hits. This is a problem because most enemies require a good seven or eight hits to put down and so does Billy! The bottom line is that trying to play Bayou Billy like a normal beat-’em-up will invariably get you killed off on the first or second screen.

So what are you supposed to do instead? The best option I found was a very patient, methodical hit-and-run strategy. Typically for this style of game, enemies won’t initiate attacks unless they’re lined up with Billy on a horizontal axis. If you approach them on the vertical, fire off a quick punch or kick as you pass, and keep on going, they either won’t have time to retaliate or their counterattack will whiff. Just keep moving, pick your moments, and slowly grind them down. Fortunately, you don’t have a time limit. Later brawling stages introduce different enemy types and new weapons (like the almighty whip which lets you strike rapidly from a distance), but this basic strategy still applies through the end of the game. It’s kind of a drag, honestly.

How about the next mode, the first-person gallery shooting? Well, it’s actually quite cool. You’re able to use the Zapper light gun or aim with the controller and everything is smooth, precise, and decently challenging. Enemies rush onto the screen and you do your best to gun them all down before they can pop a shot off at you. Eventually, you’ll get to battle a big bullet sponge boss before moving on to the next stage. There are even power-ups like health packs, screen clearing bombs, and temporary invincibility. You have limited ammunition, but your stock of bullets will only decrease when you miss a target. As odd as that is, it does mean you generally don’t need to worry about running out of bullets as long as you exercise some minimal trigger discipline and don’t just try to spray the whole screen. Everything here looks, sounds, and plays just fine. These shooting sections, all two of them, are the high point of Billy’s adventures.

On the opposite end of the quality spectrum are the game’s two back-to-back driving levels. If Billy wants to save Annabelle, he has to ride his rickety jeep all the way from the swamps to Gordon’s mansion in New Orleans and he’s in for one hell of a bumpy ride. The basic gameplay is similar to Mach Rider, minus all the freedom of movement and fun. The biggest issue by far is that the roadways in the NES version of the game are only about half as wide as they are in the Famicom original, giving you almost no space to maneuver your vehicle and leaving you stuck in what amounts to a narrow corridor the whole time. Almost as detrimental is the fact that Billy’s health bar has now gone AWOL, making these driving sections the only part of the game where you’re subject to one hit deaths from hazards. Both levels are long, and between the time limit, the various hostile air and ground vehicles attacking you, and the static obstacles in the form of rocks and poles, you can expect to die early and often. Repetition and memorization will eventually see you through to Bourbon Street, but I exhausted my limited lives and continues several times over here before I was finally able to squeak past. These two stages are easily the most difficult and obnoxious stretch of the entire game.

I was very disappointed by The Adventures of Bayou Billy and not just because the game was made more difficult than Mad City. I firmly believe no respectable game reviewer will ever hold a game’s challenge level against it as such. Konami also altered one of my favorite games of all time, Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse, with the same goal in mind and I’ll defend that choice anytime. It’s perfectly fine for a game to be demanding as long as it’s also rewarding. Bayou Billy is not rewarding. Other tough titles I’ve enjoyed recently (Silver Surfer, ActRaiser 2) present a steep learning curve, but really open up to the player once that initial hurdle is overcome to reveal a fair amount of satisfying gameplay under the surface. Not so with Bayou Billy. You can adapt to the boring moveset and repetitive, time-consuming avoidance tactics of the brawling stages and even to the white-knuckle gauntlet that is the driving section, but there are no hidden depths waiting to reveal themselves to you then. It’s simply a superficial experience which gets easier without ever getting good. The two shooting gallery portions are solid enough for what they are, but they can’t carry the whole game. Not even close. Mad City made the right call by keeping the challenge low and the pace brisk, insuring the player would be too occupied with novelty and spectacle to dwell on the lack of substance.

In the interest of fairness, I’ll add that the graphics and music are pretty sweet for the hardware and definitely up to the high Konami standard. Beyond this, the most enjoyable things about Bayou Billy are probably the game manual and box, which is never a good sign. Whoever was in charge of writing the instructions really gave it their all in terms of selling the whole cornball Cajun bayou theme. Damsel in distress Annabelle is described as “a cross between Scarlett O’Hara and Ellie May Clampett” and “a three time cover girl for the glamour magazine – Swamp Digest.” Even the common thugs you fight are given punny names like Tolouse L’attack and the murderous scuba diver Jacques Killstow. My favorite of all is the cover art, which depicts Billy with the body of a super buff Crocodile Dundee and the head of…Jim Varney!? That’s right, there’s a ripped Ernest P. Worrell brandishing a giant knife right on the front of this game. Now that’s my idea of an awesome action hero! Know what I mean, Vern?

River City Ransom (NES)

Maxed-out password!

Dat pixelated azz, tho!

Kunio is the most important video game character most people outside Japan have never heard of. He was created by game designer Yoshihisa Kishimoto to star in Technōs Japan’s 1986 arcade game Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-kun (“Hot-Blooded Tough Guy Kunio”) and has since gone on to appear in nearly fifty assorted sequels and remakes, collectively comprising the Kunio-kun series. Kun is an informal Japanese honorific usually applied to young men and it definitely suits Kunio, a teenage badass who protects Nekketsu High School from rival gangs with his legendary street brawling skills. Supposedly, Kunio was inspired by Kishimoto himself, who states in interviews that he went through a bit of a juvenile delinquent phase following a bad breakup in high school and was getting into schoolyard brawls daily.

Kunio’s debut outing, known outside Japan as Renegade, was a huge deal and earned itself a place in the pantheon of most influential games of all time. It was the first arcade beat-’em-up game to add eight-directional multi-plane movement to the mix. With fighters no longer limited to walking left or right, a host of new combat tactics opened up. For example, players could attempt to maneuver their fighters so as to attack the enemy’s flanks or rear. Renegade’s core gameplay served as the basis for Kishimoto’s follow-up, Double Dragon, which proved even more popular worldwide and inspired hundreds of imitators until 2D beat-’em-ups in general finally fell out of mainstream favor around the mid-’90s.

But wait, aren’t I supposed to be reviewing River City Ransom here? What’s with all this Kunio crap? Well, as it happens, River City Ransom is a Kunio-kun game! Specifically, the third one: Dauntaun Nekketsu Monogatari (“Downtown Hot-Blooded Story”) from 1989. Since Japanese high school students in their characteristic uniforms wouldn’t connect as much with Western audiences, Kunio became an American high schooler named Alex and his arch-rival and occasional ally Riki became Ryan. The uniforms were replaced by jeans and t-shirts and this, combined with the black pompadour style haircuts on many of the characters, made them look more than a little like stereotypical 1950s greasers. It’s an interesting choice and gives River City Ransom a period piece feel the original version lacks.

All other Kunio games released outside Japan during the 8-bit era, like Super Dodge Ball and Crash ‘n’ the Boys: Street Challenge, received similar changes. In fact, the characteristic Kunio-kun art style with its squat, big-headed characters is the only overt hint these games are related at all.

In River City Ransom, players control Alex and Ryan as they roam across River City fighting off countless rival gang members on a mission to rescue Ryan’s kidnapped girlfriend Cyndi from a mysterious villain called Slick. Along the way, they’ll need to collect money from fallen foes in order to power themselves up by purchasing equipment, food, and other upgrades at the local malls.

That’s right: This is a beat-’em-up with those newfangled RPG elements that were worming their way into so many Japanese console games at the time. Items from the shops will enhance your strength, agility, stamina, and seven additional stats. Buying books can also teach you all new combat moves which will greatly enhance your standard punches and kicks.

Even on the harder of the game’s two difficulty settings, though, you won’t really need to worry about fully upgrading your character in order to complete the game. I did it anyway because I’m weird that way, but even just purchasing the rapid fire kick upgrade and the game’s best pair of boots will allow you to make mincemeat of the toughest bosses. I’ll come back to this later.

The gameplay fundamentals are handled well. Controls are tight and the punching and kicking feels just as good as it does in Double Dragon. A couple indoor sections have light platforming elements where you need to jump up on crates or ledges and these can be a little awkward. Thankfully, you’re not expected to jump over pits or other deadly hazards, so this doesn’t drag down the experience as a whole. A nice touch is how the specific gang members you’ll encounter on each screen are randomized. Since some gangs are tougher than others, this helps to keep things interesting on multiple trips through the same section of the city. There’s even an in-game help menu to explains how everything functions, which is really strange to see in a console game of this vintage.

River City Ransom’s graphics aren’t spectacular in the least. In fact, they’re pretty plain. Characters animate well, but that’s about the best you can say for the visuals on a purely technical level. One thing this doesn’t take into account, though, is the charm factor. The cutesy characters are really endearing and the bug-eyed, slack-jawed looks on defeated enemies’ faces as you send then flying never get old. Neither do the wacky quotes they recite as they’re knocked out. “Is this fun yet?” and the classic “Barf!” are some of my favorites. The character designs themselves are pretty restrained for the genre. Your heroes and all of their opposition are supposed to be high schoolers and that’s exactly what they look like. Don’t go in expecting any of the wild enemy designs from other brawlers like Final Fight, where everyone tends to look like sideshow performers who just got out of a rave. The music is energetic and catchy with a bit of a rockabilly flair and doesn’t wear out its welcome too quickly, which is good because there’s not a lot of it. If you enjoyed the music in the NES port of Double Dragon, you’ll be pleased with the tunes here.

So the game has a sterling pedigree, solid brawling action, RPG-like depth, and tons of charm. What’s not to like? Well, there are two significant flaws holding River City Ransom back and preventing it from realizing its potential as a great game for me: A tiny world and an overall lack of challenge.

For a game that offers ten different stats for your character, tons of shops and items, and an extensive password system, I would expect it to also have a bigger world with more to see and do in it than your typical beat-‘em-up, but it turns out River City is one minuscule municipality. What you get in the way of a game world is a few dozen screens laid-out in a mostly straight line. There are a couple of small cul-de-sacs off the main path where you’ll encounter enemies and bosses, but they’re dead ends. The potential for branching paths and richer open world gameplay built into the design was not capitalized upon by the designers and the game is easily beaten in under an hour once you grasp its fundamentals. At least you won’t get lost, I suppose.

The lack of challenge comes from the way enemy encounters are programmed. For starters, you’ll only ever face off against a maximum of two enemies at once. While this does naturally help performance by minimizing slowdown and sprite flicker, beat-‘em-up veterans know that coping with one or two enemies at a time in these sorts of games is child’s play. Things get tricky (and interesting) when you’re fending off a whole mob of foes and this will never happen here. Adding a second player into the mix makes things even tamer, since the enemy count isn’t boosted to compensate.

If the enemies were tough to defeat, this still might be a workable system. Regrettably, though, this is where River City Ransom’s truly terrible enemy AI programming lets the game down even further. Enemies, even bosses, are quite content to walk or run straight into your attacks and once you knock a foe down the first time, you can simply stand over them and continuously mash the attack buttons as they attempt to regain their footing. They’ll never succeed. Additionally, many sections of the game have walls or fences in the background that Alex and Ryan can jump up onto and this simple maneuver is enough to literally stop enemies in their tracks. They’ll never attempt follow you up there and continue the fight, but you can assault them from the high ground with impunity. I’m not going to say every game ever made has to be super hardcore and tough as nails, but the opposition you’ll encounter in River City Ransom is so feeble and dim that it almost doesn’t seem sporting. It certainly stops being very exciting once you’ve grasped the glaring weaknesses in the patterns.

River City Ransom is a very likable game. I’d even call it good. However, it’s the kind of good that’s so close to great that it just irks all the more. The potential was there for this to be an all-time classic and one of the top titles for the console, but the short quest and cramped game world thoroughly undermine the clever RPG elements and the underwhelming enemies do the same for the beat-‘em-up action. The humor and style are not to be missed, though, and every NES enthusiast should play through this one at least once just to savor its exuberant silliness.

In its own way, River City Ransom was almost as influential as its progenitor Renegade. Every beat-‘em-up game since that’s experimented with adding in statistics, character progression, and other RPG bits owes it a major debt, and titles like Odin Sphere, Dragon’s Crown, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game all qualify as direct descendants. There were several sequels, most recently River City: Tokyo Rumble in 2013 and River City Ransom: Underground in 2017. Technōs itself may be no more, but Kunio and friends fight on.

Is this fun yet? Hell, yes.