River City Ransom Ex (Game Boy Advance)
Developed by: Million Inc.Published by: Atlus Games

Once again the Gameboy Advance is the platform of choice for reliving old school games,only this time it’s not Nintendo who are cashing in with another remake, it’s a company called Atlus.A few years ago they obtained the assets of Technos Japan and relocated the staff to Million Inc, at which point they wereable to produce updated versions of some true NES classics for the GBA,including Double Dragon and Super Dogdeball. Now they have turned their attention to another Technos-developed favourite: River City Ransom.

I won’t bother spending much time explaining why I thought the original RCR was a classic. (You can read myretro review of that game here.) It was a beat-em-up brawler with an enormous amount of depth for its day,mainly due to the RPG attribute progression, realistic physics, and the quirky humour it contained.Needless to say, I have fond memories of it and was interested to see howit would translate to the GBA.

The problem with remakes is that no one wants to buy an exact replica all over again (especiallywhen you have newer, more powerful hardware to work with) but it’s a big risk to make any significantchanges to something that people have an attachment to. Surprisingly I think Atlus have succeeded wherefew others have, as they have updated and enhanced the game in a lot of ways without taking away any of the coreelements or the atmosphere of the game.

The story is still as simple as you remember it. An evil guy named Slick has taken over River City with his ruthlessgangs and kidnapped Ryan’s girlfriend. Ryan and his cross-town rival Alex put aside their differencesto take down Slick and his goons once and for all. Million have tried to play up the tension betweenAlex and Ryan a little more, starting with the extremely verbose opening dialogue between them. “Alex: Cyndi’s in trouble, I’ll help you. Ryan: Hmph, whatever.”There is an extra surprise on this note later in the game as well.

Once again you have the choice toplay as either Alex or Ryan, although unfortunately there is no link capability to participate in the co-op mode that made River City Ransom a blast with a friend. (You can, however, link up with someone else to trade save games. Boo.)In an attempt to make for this, one of the new options in the game is that you can have an A.I. controlled ally playing with you –actually, up to 3 of them. You can recruit a posse along the way, based on your “reputation”which is molded by how you fight during the game. Don’t fight dirty if you want people to respect you;for starters, don’t kick people when they’re down, and don’t cheap shot bosses while they are deliveringtheir speeches.You can even get defeated bosses to join your posse, although I have yet to witness this myself(maybe because I keep hitting them in the chops while they are talking). This was a cool idea butthe A.I. is generally a poor substitute for human accompaniment, as it tends to beat on you just as often asthe enemy. On the other hand, it seems like they made up for the A.I.’s lack of intelligence by maxing outtheir attributes and making it impossible for them to die. Interesting trade-off.

The area where they got most creative with the new game are the combat moves and techniques.In addition to the standard punch, jump and kick, you begin with theability to pull off an uppercut, roundhouse kick, and a host of other extra moves. These add variety tothe fighting and make the combat even more enjoyable. The original River City Ransom also had techniquesthat you could learn by buying special books along the way. In RCR Ex, there are over 35 of these techniques, asopposed to the mere 6 that the 8-bit game had. There are so many of these techniques now that theyeven decided to give you a freebie at the beginning of the game — Alex starts with the”Dragon Feet” technique while Ryan has “Stone Hands” (renamed “Mach Punch”).Granted, this little concession was probably given because these techniques area LOT more expensive than they were in the original game.

There is a lot of variety (and a little bit of weirdness) to the new techniques they’ve dreamed up. Some of the additions include Nitro Port (teleports you close to an enemy and launches a knee attack), Kickstand (delivers a flurry of kicks to the crotch while your opponent is down), and Big Bang (while you are stunned it releases a noxious fart that damages everyone around you — no seriously!). The controls for these new moves are pretty simple, butfor some strange reason they decided not to use the L and R buttons on the GBA at all, which reallywould have helped.I always thought that double-tapping forward to run was particularly annoying and I wish they would havefixed it here, although I guess it probably wouldn’t feel like River City Ransom without it.

There are also new weapons in the game, including construction pilons, ladders, and long poles. Some of the old weapons have new interactions too, such as the garbage can which has the ability to restrain an enemy (or yourself) by having it slamming it down over their head.

The graphics have been updated slightly. They haven’t changed all that much (the characters are still2-D sprites obviously) but they are higher resolution and more detailed, even on the GBA’s smallscreen.The characters still have that distinctive short and blocky look to them though and the sameamusing animations like the bulging eyes when they get hit.Since it’s basically the same development team, they’ve done an excellent job keeping the tone andhumour consistent with the original game. They have added and updated some of the hidden jokes in the gametoo. For example, the Home Boys gang has members with names such as “Slim”, “Dre” and “6pac”, while theRockers have “Ozzy” and “Chino”.The gang’s dialogue snippets have been given a modern make-over as well, from “Ohh, Snap!” and “Cheese It!”,to the clever “Biz-arf!” If you pay attention there are all kinds of other updates throughout,such as a toy store called “Toys ‘B’ We” or an “Emo” cd for sale at the music store.

To be fair, there are some parts of this game that definitely lack polish.For instance, the game area is letterboxed, but when you move towards the upper half of the screen,characters that are below you will appear overlapping the letterbox frame.

The biggest problem with the game, though, has got to be the user interface. It’s extremely clunky, unclear and just plain frustrating to use. Right from the first time you turn on the game, you can customize a ton of different options in the game like the difficulty level, number of enemies, gravity, speed, store restocking behaviour… you can even turn off the ability for your allies to damage you. While these customization possibilities greatly enhance the game’s replay factor, it’s simply overwhelming to be presented with a list of them the minute you start the game. And considering the vague and confusing captions in the menus, it’s almost unforgiveable. It would have been a lot cooler to make these extra options unlockable in some way.

Saving your progress in the game is also very unintuitive. You can save up to 10 character records at a time, but once you reach the limit you will have to manually delete a record on your own in order to free up space. Is an overwrite feature too much to ask? The other weird thing is that these character records are basically just a simplified version of the password system from the original NES game. The records store your stats and inventory but not your progress in the game. In other words, when start up the game and load a save file, you still have to start from the very beginning of the game and work your way through all the bosses even if you previously beat them. Essentially, if you want to clear the game, you have to play through it all in one sitting. This isn’t as crazy as it sounds though, since the game itself has a pretty limited number of locations, and once you have built up your stats for a while, the earlier bosses are a walk in the park.

There has been some outcry from fans because of the fact that the game becomes rather easy once you have learned a few of the techniques. If I remember correctly, the original had the same problem. If anything I think they’ve actually upped the difficulty a little bit in this one because the bosses in the game also have some of their own special techniques, plus the techniques are so much more expensive to buy. You will spend a lot of time hunting down a gang called The Entrees, because they carry a lot more money than the others. Unfortunately they are also a bunch of wimps who tend to run away before you can kick their asses and empty their pockets!

There is little in this game that will make it more accessible to gamers who have never played the original River City Ransom, and in fact, all of the user interface woes may be enough to turn people away and make them wonder what all the fuss was about in the first place. Still, as a remake and a tribute to the original I think River City Ransom Ex is a huge success. For the most part it’s a really faithful adaptation, but it brings back the memories while also giving you a whole new experience at the same time.

Even if this game doesn’t find an audience beyond the old school fans, I can only hope that it will spark enough interest to lead to a sequel of some sort. I’d really love to see an update of this on a next-gen console with 4 player co-op capabilities, now that would be something to get excited about. As it is, I highly recommend this to anyone who played it back in the day… it will just make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside.– Sean