Retro Views: River City Ransom (NES)

River City Ransom is awesome. It's a game all about punching and kicking other dudes in the face, and it's totally unapologetic about that. It's also tightly constructed and joyously fun to play, especially with a second player.

The game is an interesting example of a weird time in localization, too, in that it's abundantly clear that the game features Japanese characters, yet the game insists that the game takes place in America. If the preponderance of sushi joints that you can visit in the game's many malls (which are also outdoors, another signifier that this might not actually take place in the USA of the 80s) weren't a dead giveaway, the girls who walk around in Japanese schoolgirl uniforms might be. It's actually a bit of a testament to how far gaming has come that these days, gamers will boycott a game without a Japanese voice track – no one would even think to try to set a Japanese game in America.

You play as either Alex or Ryan, a teenaged brawler out for revenge against the gangs who have stolen away their girlfriends. The gangs of the game are much more in line with something out of Grease than out of Boyz N tha Hood – expect to see more than a few greasers and motorcycle enthusiasts, or at least their Japanese equivalents.

This is all a set-up for you (and possibly a friend) to kick some dudes' asses, and that's when the game naturally becomes glorious. The fights are anything but glamorous, but for a two-button control scheme, the game is surprisingly adept. In fact, I'd say that this setup is preferable, at least for me, as compared to the more complicated setups that most brawlers seem to go for these days. It's simple – the A button punches, the B button kicks, pressing both at the same time makes your character jump. But in those few button presses are myriad possibilities, especially when combined with the ability to pick up and use (or throw) items, weapons and people.

So the game's straightforward. But for a game from the mid-to-late-80s, I've been consistently impressed by some of the more modern design sensibilities (or perhaps they only seem modern because so much of this game was paid homage to in No More Heroes 2). The game employs a sort of "checkpoint" system, in that whenever you get to a mall, you get to continue from that point, as well as use your hard-earned dollars to upgrade or improve your health, your stats, or what have you. Most games from this era would just send you out into the world and be unapologetic about killing your ass, but this game doesn't do that, and has a much more well-developed world because of it. The mall segments actually play really well with the fighting bits, creating a somewhat-believable setting (even if it is identity-confused).

The game's not faultless, of course. Like a lot of late-80s media, like the Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles or Crash and the Boys, the game is a bit of a boy's club. It's squarely aimed at 10-year-old boys, and while the game does capture that kind of boyish rambunctiousness perfectly, it could just as well have a "No Girls Allowed" watermark across the game at all times. Well, at least it knows its audience and it's all pretty innocent fun, despite the presence of knuckle dusters and tire irons as weapons. From a more technical standpoint, the game shouldn't have tried to include any platforming segments – the jumping mechanic is fine for when you want to kick dudes in the face, but whenever it comes time to jump from platform to platform, the game makes it incredibly difficult to do so. It's thankfully much easier in the terrific co-op mode.

No denying it though, River City Ransom is one of the greatest brawlers of all time, and I'd expect to see them make a renaissance if the very-RCR-inspired Scott Pilgrim game takes off. The game is hard to find in cartridge form, but is available from the Virtual Console, so if you've got 500 Wii Points lying around, there are certainly worse ways to use them. If you were the kind of kid to get up early to watch crappily-animated action shows on Saturday morning, then River City Ransom should be right up your alley. And because I'm now going to go watch said shows, um, here's this!