Addy's NES Pages - Section IV
River City Ransom. This game is the true epitome of Nintendo. Flat, cartoony graphics come to life in a world where the root plot doesn't hold up under even casual scrutiny, and everything's fine because, dammit, you're running around beating the hell out of people the game cheerily identifies as Jocks, Cowboys, and Frat Guys - but they all return to life when you come back later, so no one gets hurt. It's essentially every geek's fantasy life come true, and since you can team up with a friend and go on a rampage, it's really amazing no one ever tried to pull this sucker from the shelves. Honestly, in retrospect it seems more than a little worrisome that I spent my childhood learning techniques like "Fatal Steps" so as to better stomp a gang of Generic Dudes.
But River City Ransom also teaches a number of socially positive messages. For example, the opening plot tells us that the evil Slick has kidnapped Ryan's girlfriend and taken control of River City High. But the first player isn't Ryan - it's his friend Alex! Even though Ryan knew Alex was trying to hog all the attention, he humbly stepped down to the 2nd player position for the good of all. Also, in the end, after you've beaten up every gang member for miles, you learn that they turn themselves around and become honor students. However, even with these socially conscious messages, the game has a definite subversive side, brought out by the more RPG-tinged parts of the game.
| The way you advance in RCR is, you go into shops and buy stuff to raise your skills levels. What's disturbing is that none of the stuff you buy has any relation to what it actually does. Mint Gum raises your strength, I believe Maze Craze raises your maximum power, and eating donuts paradoxically improves your will power. The message of River City Ransom, then, is to do anything you can to get money so that you can purchase needless material goods, which will somehow make you a more complete person. |  |
This is pretty disgusting, but I'm willing to put up with it because the programmers
really went out of their way to temper this consumerist approach with more of those moral
lessons, with pro-social messages set to display on the use of particular items. The
most stirring case I have in mind is the Gold Medal, which you can acquire at a secret
store inside of a tunnel. When you use the Gold Medal, the game tells you:
Alex used the Gold Medal. And was allowed to keep it after passing a drug test.
Perhaps because of the goody-goody nature of some of the messages, or maybe because all the bad guys say psycho stuff like "BARF!" when you kill them, RCR never became the super-enormous hit it was destined to be. But to the company that made it, this game was the equivalent of a mega hit, because believe me, they had some really obscure games...like Riki and Kunio, an action-packed super tournament game where you spend most of your time getting your brains beaten out by your inept computer-controlled partner.
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Sadly, the game was never released in the US, until a band of 133+ haX0rs decided to translate it, in the process removing the characters' hair (most of the time; it seems to come and go) and renaming it Skinhead Fighter. |  |
I don't really mind how much they screwed up this game; the translation,
while scattered with strange blips of odd characters (What º in my box!), enables me to
view the game's super plot. Hang on tight, because this one will knock your socks
off: There's a tournament, and you're going to fight in it!
...yeah, so beat-em-ups probably fall under the Arkanoid rule of not needing that much plot. On the other hand, Riki & Kunio might have needed the help, as it's kind of a mediocre game, lacking River City Ransom's RPG elements. Or at least it seems that way. After every fight, you get a message that reads like this one (assuming your partner's name is Ben):
You gain 1 level. Ben gain 2 level.
But unlike RPGs, R&K offers no real reason for these differing level gains. In River City Ransom, I at least knew that my sudden explosive ability to smack people over the head was because I had some Nero Pizza. In this game, it's almost spitefulness - the game always seems to give Ben a better deal, so some sort of nepotism is at work. This may partly be the fault of the Skinhead Fighter translation team, who didn't think this part of the game was worth spending much time on getting right. "Hee hee...skinheads...fight.. is all that matters."
And in a way they have a point. I think they would agree with me that the real point of playing Riki & Kunio is to have the pleasure of teaming up with a buddy and using complex teamwork (throwing the second player into an electrified grid so he flies around and beats everyone in the place) to achieve success. Ultimately, though, it just isn't as fun as River City Ransom. But it does have a better introduction, and a really large selection of losers to have as your assistant.
Let me zoom in on a particular point. As I said, most of the damage I incur in Riki & Kunio comes from the computer-controlled "assistant" named Ben that I'm inevitably saddled with. People don't make games like R&K anymore, though, and lately there's a big push to make the people you meet in video games more like real people. This trend is called "artificial intelligence," but if they really want to mimic reality, it should be "artificial stupidity," because, let's face it, the people we play against in video games are usually much, much stupider than ourselves. Unless it's one of those The Wizard-type kids that beats you silly in the arcade, playing by sense of smell.
| But honestly. Lately I've been playing a lot of Unreal Tournament, a game where you shoot people, and the single-player version takes pains to see that everyone you fight does so the way a real person would if they were being played by a computer. I think this should be taken a step further - in order to complete the illusion that I'm playing with real Internet junkies who want to shoot me, they should have names like "Fat_Bastard05 [K0D]" and spend more time saying "ur fat" over and over than actually fighting me. Granted, I probably would pitch the game, but at least while I was playing it, I'd be convinced I was playing against someone real. |  |
But is this something that we really want? All this Unreal Tournament and Skinhead Fighter speculation brings us to a very crucial point: when I'm playing against a video game's complex internal brain, I'm doing so by choice. I don't want to play against real people. I want to play against giant dead spiders that inform me that reports of their deaths were not greatly exagerrated, as in the Monster Party screenshot above. And there are other reasons why you don't want video games to mimic reality; our next game gives us a significant look at one of them.