'Captain' Lou Albano, 1933-2009

'Do the Mario!'

#204: River City Ransom (1989, NES)

It's fairly incredible how dramatically simple RPG elements can enhance an otherwise simple genre like the beat-em-up, but it makes sense when one considers that conventions of the genre don't work. For me, those had always been things like difficulty being added by introducing harder enemies while not introducing more powerful means to confront them, and constant battling which had little reward besides progress through the game (which considering the quality of plots here, was little reward). Now toss the ability to build character stats in there and suddenly difficulty can be overcome by constant character development and a lack of reward is replaced by the reward of experience that can be used to further build the character - making the conflicts easier and thus encouraging it even more.

What's interesting is that River City Ransom, even if it had no character building at all, would already be pretty easily the best beat-em-up on the NES (and would be something I'd still take over anything from the golden age of Capcop and Konami seen in the early 90s). That it came from the same developers as the Double Dragon series - it of stiff and obtuse controls - is really quite increidble. RCR manages to add a sense of fluidity just not seen in other titles (the closest that would come to mind would be the Ninja Turtle games).

The key to this fluidity would probably be the ability to dash. This is something often omitted in other beat-em-ups due to the nature of the gameplay - one is usually only ever moving a few feet before the screen locks as more enemies appear. In River City Ransom, as one will be backtracking and navigating the mean streets, the need to navigate quickly became something of a nesseccity.

The RPG elements are still what makes this game. The towns grant players proper breaks in the action, the leveling system is fun, albeit inefficient (as one must consume huge quanities of foodstuffs using a typically clunky NES menu interface) and also obscure (as there is no way to guage item benefits before purchase, and it's not like one can easily guess whether coffee will improve kicking or punching ability). With proper know-how, the leveling system becomes flexible and (importantly), quite easy to game to ones own advantage. Once a character is sufficiently grinded (in other words, sufficiently stuffed full of candy), the quest itself can be approached, where it does a pretty good job of keeping the core gameplay (of beating up people) fresh through to the end. And because the quest is relatively short (for a leveled character), it becomes fun to race through after the fact.

Finally, a wonderful veneer of charm helps solidify RCR's status as one of the few NES titles that legitimately hold up well in the present day. The stylized super deformed characters manage to to be pretty much perfectly designed for the limitations of the hardware and remain amongst the most appealing NES sprites this side of Mega Man or the Mario from Mario 3. Toss in dialogue that seems to be delibretly ridiculous and you have some real grounds for success.

Technos is in fact responsible for several of the NES's best offerings (especcially in terms of holding up to current standards). Other Kunio titles like Super Dodge Ball and Nintendo World Cup still make for a good game, owing - along with RCR - the advantage of not having seen real competition during the 16-bit era. Not having superior 16-bit analogues is actually the key to most of my best remembered NES titles: RCR, Tecmo Super Bowl and Dodge Ball didn't see real 16-bit replacements (well, Tecmo Bowl got a straight port, but it lacked the appealingly unbalanced rosters and had atrocious early-SNES music). By comparison, Metroid and the Legend of Zelda were totally eclipsed by their 16-bit sequels. Excellent genre-entries like Faxanadu or Crystalis are harmed by the later appearance of much better genre entries later on. Mario and Mega Man somewhat escape this by being roughly on par with (in Mario's case) or better than (in Mega Man's case), but even then one is still off put by the sorts of presentation issues that plagued these older titles because they know they were fixed in later games. River City Ransom fears no such comparison.



Some holdovers of the era mar the experience. Slowdown and flickering is crippling when playing co-op. The save system is a tad useless (saving only your stats, not your progress - not that the game is long). And the menus are very much a relic of the 8-bit era - being a tad slow and clunky, which is a problem when you need to eat a good 200 pieces of candy to max all your stats. Nothing here detracts from the charm, however.

River City Ransom
Publisher: Technos
Developer: Technos
Released: January 1989
Obtained: 10/24/2003

9.5/10

A New Experiment

Update for July 16, 2009: Successfully completed the list.

After watching my backlog of games to beat pile up (especially around Christmas-time), I've come up with an idea. I won't be buying another game until I can clear 15 from my pile (with one exception -- I've preordered Telltale's new Wallace & Gromit episodes).

The Fifteen in Question:

• #295: Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time (DS)
  
• #507: Punch-Out!!! (NES)
• #550: Mega Man 9 (XBLA)
• #551: Rez HD (XBLA)
  
• #556: Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts (X360)
• #565: Left 4 Dead (PC)
• #571: De Blob (Wii)
• #575: Prince of Persia (X360)
• #576: Mirror's Edge (X360)
• #577: Gears of War 2 (X360)
• #578: Chrono Trigger (DS)
• #580: World of Goo (WiiWare)
• #591: Elite Beat Agents (DS)
  
• #604: Resident Evil 5 (X360)
• #606: Boing! Docomodake (DS)

Subbed Out:

• #445: Mother 3 (GBA)
• #598: Retro Game Challenge (DS)
• #607: Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure (DS)
  

I kept things pretty easily doable - a lot of these I got quite far on and just stopped. The only hard ones should be Hatsworth and Mega Man, so this is mostly a question of time investment. Also I'll reserve the right to sub something out if it proves too difficult (Hatsworth) or perhaps too tedious (Retro Game Challenge's Guadia Quest) [ed. yes, on both counts]. My hope is to finish this up by the time Ghostbusters comes out [ed. close].

There's probably something coming sooner I'm excited about that I will now deprive myself of... actually I checked and there is -- Rhythm Heaven.