RETRO GLORY: The Streets of Rage Trilogy

Here is a somewhat surprising thing I have to tell you. I fucking HATE streets of rage. Hate, hate hate it. But I love it. I loves it I loves it. This is somewhat schizophrenic I admit, but playing Streets of Rage is somewhat like being in an abusive relationship in that rarely do two conflicting emotions struggle for expression like they do here. The trilogy of games, originally mega drive classics but now released on iPhone, are really old-school Sega side scrollers. The first game doesn't even bother with a story it's so basic, the second involves kidnap (they always do) and the third involves killer robots. But of course. The joy of these games is the simplicity of play, the feeling of kicking arse in a morally and ethically dubious fashion not epic tales of blood and villainy. The titular streets of rage are in an unnamed city in the 'future' in which a 'syndicate' has infiltrated all levels of government and now the city is a corrupt, unsafe place that needs cleaning up. I always wondered what it must be like to live in these cities. How on earth does its economy survive? Every street is a bloody warzone; want to get onions for that stir fry? If you can dodge the bat wielding motorcyclists and the electric-whip wielding dominatrixes, then good luck because I'm ordering in. Sheesh, and there was me thinking the cities in Just Cause 2 had it bad.

 'Seriously dude, I'm just trying to get to the frigging Chinese!'

So yeah, you beat up a huge range of bad guys and take down a shit ton of aggravating bosses. Each game is slightly different, the best and most possible one being number two. This is because the designers thought that maybe it would be quite nice for it to be possible in single-player, which is more than can be said for the first or third instalments.

The first game is bastard tough; your character being unable to move with any celerity makes boss battles less of a battle of skill and more a test of how quickly you can reverse your character's lazy butt out of the way of a debilitating special attack. Unfortunately because this game was quite an early generation Mega Drive game (screw you, it's the Mega Drive, not the Genesis) the controls are stickier than a stick insect's treacle factory on Sticky street. The purpose of bosses in SOR1 was to make you feel inadequate as a human being, and make you wonder why you didn't just bring a fecking gun to fight men who can breathe fire at you.

Like this image? You will see it a hell of a lot.

There is also the niggling fact that the common enemies in SOR1 often have attacks or defences that your character has no real way of countering. A particularly ludicrous version of this is the whip wielding harpies who can dodge any attack you throw at them by crouching. Fucking crouching. The worst part is you can't inflict a single blow on them when they're in a crouch, and the moment your back is turned they quite literally whip your arse. Although the challenge of the game is reduced in two player mode, you will spend the majority of your time accidentally kicking your co-op partner in the face thanks in no part to extremely strange collision detection, which goes numb when you're trying to make a hit connect, and sensitive as a toothache when you happen to be in spitting distance of the guy you're trying to save the city with but, gosh, he just really wants a hug. While special moves become the preserve of instalments two and three, the first had none. What it did have was a special attack which, when you hit the A button, summoned a police car from offscreen to rain explosive death upon your enemies. Ignoring the fact it was annoyingly easy to unleash this attack totally by accident courtesy of a slipped thumb, it was immensely useful for thinning down the crowd. So of course it never appeared in any Streets of Rage game ever again.

Pictured: A useful feature.

Well, obviously. Streets of Rage 2 really varied the level design, with more interesting sub bosses and a greater variety of characters and moves. The only unwelcome addition is Skate, a gobby skating child who is the cousin of Adam from game number one. He is the the Jar Jar Binks of the Streets of Rage franchise.

FUCK YOU KID, FUCK YOOOOOOUUU!!!!

This more imaginative instalment is possibly my favourite of the games. Whatever SOR1 lacked it improved on, and lacks the deliberately mean-spirited toughness of SOR3. Its balance is perfect really, and thus suffers a bare minimum of my wrath. Well, some weird character names aside - bad guys called Donovan and Bono for example.

Or Slag. Um. Yeah.

It is a hard game but in an enjoyable way, and calls on you to kick phenomenal quantities of arse. It may sound as if I have nothing to say about it, and to be honest, I don't really. No it's not what you'd call revolutionary, but if it ain't broke then you don't fix it. And talking of messing with a perfect formula, this brings me with some reluctance to Streets of Rage 3. It is not a bad game, don't get me wrong, but it is utterly evil. Sega's development team hated your guts in the third game. Oh sure, they brought in the ability to run and the forward roll but SOR3 suffers from the same problem Golden Axe 3 had, in that the game is so ludicrously difficult that it quite takes the pleasure out of playing it. SOR3 pelts you with rancid shit from minute one - your enemies have projectiles, one of the first games bosses is a regular enemy here (the fire breathing fat man) and the first boss is utterly hateful. Oh sure, I love the first damned boss to have every advantage over you imaginable - the ability to fly and twice the health bar you have to name only two. Did I also mention he is able to counter most of your standard moves? This is the first boss, mind. The FIRST BOSS.

Welcome to the third screen of Streets of Rage 3.

It suffers from a problem of quantity over quality; you are simply overwhelmed by the sheer number of obstacles and bad guys thrown at you and there are no extra lives in the early levels.
It is also the first of the trilogy to include cutscenes, with predictably laughable results. Here is a verbatim conversation from one of the game's cutscenes.

Skate: 'I can't believe it. No one told me a thing.'

Dr Zen: 'We're wasting time fighting these punks.'

Blaze: 'I think I have an idea of where to go now.

Dr Zen: 'I hope you're right.'

You wouldn't believe these characters were having conversations on the same planet let alone in the same room. I know it's only text, but if you do insist on unskippable cut scenes then the least you could do is write dialogue that sounds like humans would actually speak it. Oh and Skate now plays an even bigger role in this game. Joyful. Ironically, on a technical level it is definitely the best game. The controls are smooth and responsive, hit detection is crisp and the levels are gorgeous to look at - well for 16 bit graphics anyway. It's just too damn hard. I'm sure some of the more hardcore nerds out there could beat this game using only their penises, but to them I say only this: If your idea of fun is getting your genitalia skewered by a kangaroo in denim shorts and fetish jewellery, then be my guest and enjoy - but don't think that waving your amazing *snort* skill will impress me much.

You thought I was kidding about the kangaroo, didn't you?

Streets of Rage was pretty much the high point of the side scroller beat 'em up, though Final Fight and others were other contenders for its crown. The genre pretty much gave out after the birth of the 32 bit era, and various attempts to resurrect the series have failed with even fan versions not really going anywhere. Taken as a whole, the Streets of Rage trilogy is rather fun. They're classics to be sure, but if you're going to play one, I'd suggest playing the second as it has the best of the other instalments in the one game. It's a damn sight better than bloody Golden Axe any which way you slice it.

VINTAGE GAMES - Unreal Tournament

Here's a surprising confession from me: I am not very good at first person shooters. I can do a passable job on normal mode, and without selling myself short I have decent enough reflexes to shoot my way through most games with only the minimal amount of creative swearing. When you start going into games with hard and expert modes however, then I struggle like a chimp trying to grasp relativity. The problem is, I cannot aim too well and often take too long over shots. It is also probable I do not see a lot of the enemies around me – in Far Cry 1 & 2 this is less a probability and more an iron-cast certainty where most enemies can hit you from the other side of the world.
    But I digress. In single player this is not quite so important but suddenly gets an urgent wake up call the moment multi-player comes into play. I am not a gracious loser unfortunately, but then the people I play more often than not are not gracious winners. The people I often end up pitted against are so good it is actually embarrassing, even when you take into account you are fighting people who match your 'skill' level, but who then go away and do a Rocky-esque training montage to absolutely slaughter you the next time around. Since I have lots of money to smoke in a huge pound-note reefer and lots of models to sit in hot tubs with, I have no time for such things really. Which is why I have never played shooters online. The ideal situation for me therefore was the feeling of playing online without the inconvenience of actually fighting all the low-vocabulary fuckwits you often meet online. Hence, Unreal Tournament.

     Oh, the game does its best with the smack talk, but at least it isn't 'U SUXORRZ! LOLZ' and nobody tries to teabag your corpse afterwards. The game is pretty old now, and shows it. Skyboxes that looked so sophisticated back in the day glitch hilariously when you fly the camera into them, and the random pointless types of coloured lighting that the Unreal engine loved to use in such abundance are present and correct, making the game feel less like a deathmatch arena and more like an industrial discotheque. It is however, still the most demonically fast deathmatch game in history and is balanced to an absolute tee. I am quite serious.

This is completely and totally awesome.

Unreal Tournament is the creaky great great grandad of the current breed of Digital Extremes productions such as Gears of War, made back when they were the edgy challengers to Quake's crown and not what they are now, specifically corporate manufacturers of sludge brown low-wall crouching tedium. Now, I never really played the Quake games, so I will not compare them, but I shall mention that Unreal Tournament is still the best entry in the entire Unreal series. The first Unreal, though looking damn pretty for the day, has not aged well. It is a pretty boring and uninspiring game, the first levels containing so few enemies they might as well have just been tech showcases. The second Unreal, though looking absolutely luscious, was pretty mediocre. Yes, it had a few flashes of brilliance here and there but by and large it was just quietly bland.
            The Unreal Tournament games fared somewhat better. The successors to Unreal Tournament, specifically editions 2003 and 2004, amped up their graphics engines and level design to improve what made the original so good. And yet despite all the additions, the huge levels and new explosive weapons, they never quite recaptured the near perfect balance of the original Unreal Tournament. UT2003's big cock-up was the inexplicable removal of the sniper rifle, replacing it instead with the horrific lightning gun. Gee, thanks guys. It also wasn't anywhere near as fast as Unreal Tournament had been, and dropped the best deathmatch mode in the whole damned game, specifically Assault mode. Oh but they kept domination, so that's good...if you're a sadist.

The most satisfying feeling in the world is pictured just above.

Which is why I play Unreal Tournament mostly these days, and their successors lurk largely at the bottom of my dusty games boxes. Okay, so UT isn't looking too hot, but I cannot underestimate my main point; this game is fast. Make no mistake, thinking is barely an option. Find ammo, kill, choose spot, shoot bang bang bang. Each mode used this aspect in a different way, and I find it astonishing no game has done it like this since. You had standard deathmatch and capture the flag modes, but also two other variants which I have mentioned before, domination and assault. The weaker of the two is domination mode, essentially a 'king of the castle' game where the capturing of certain energy points on the map adds to a points score: the longer you hold them, the more points you get. The idea is to keep hold of them as long as possible, though there are three points so you have your work cut out. The point counting seems random at best however and occasionally you feel like you are playing the game yourself as your teammates run like headless chickens constantly getting their arses handed to them by superior enemy AI. Not that the mode isn't fun, I just mean be prepared to do most of the work yourself. Although why Digital Extremes decided to retain this mode and drop the far superior Assault mode is beyond me.
    Assault mode is brilliant fun. You and your teammates assault a frigate, castle or what have you and then you have to defend it for longer than it took you to attack them the last time round. Admittedly, when the team numbers grow it becomes less a strategic assault and more a bloodbath in a shopping centre, but hey, that's the fun of it. The weapons are largely souped up versions of weapons from Unreal, and thank goodness they are souped up. The ripper, a weapon that fires sawblades at high speed, is one of the happier weapons passed over, whereas the Ges-Bio rifle, a rifle that fires toxic sludge is just plain annoying. The rocket launcher is a brilliant little weapon that is capable of launching multiple rockets depending on how long you hold down the fire button (with a maximum of eight), and the sniper rifle is one of the best from any videogame ever. Which is logically why it was removed from the follow up game, we can't be having fun can we?

Pictured: Fun.

My memories of this game largely involve getting absolutely destroyed at it by my dorm-mates back in university, when we all needed a fast and furious game that worked on everybody's PCs. Needless to say, I preferred playing single-player. This is because the bots are surprisingly effective, all of them obeying the games' rules and having no more advantage over you than you would expect, and their skill level is completely scalable. This does lead to problems, given that I prefer to play at a slightly lower difficulty and therefore my teammates do the tactical equivalent of the charge of the light brigade because hey, what's an energy turret gun if not for charging at? Annoyingly however it does score the members of your teams individually, meaning there is little or no incentive to let anyone else capture the flag or whatever. So to avoid the embarrassment of an 'average' skilled bot actually scoring more highly than you at capture the flag you often find yourself crossing your fingers and hoping that they drop the buggered thing so you can pull a chariots of fire and run for your sodding life, flag in hand.

The Game of the Year edition had a ton of extra maps, which vary in quality, but which do manage to pass the time once you are done with the single-player campaign. It never quite recaptured the magic, even though UT 2004 reintroduced the sniper rifle, and once Half Life 2 came out online-only shooters of that scale were pretty much a thing of the past. True, there has been a reinvigoration courtesy of the Half Life creators themselves, but the 'pure deathmatch' game never really made much of a comeback. Plus the Unreal and Quake franchises pretty much gave up in their second and fourth instalments respectively. Now that the whole rivalry between the two franchises has died, its fascinating looking back. You should too, and at gog.com for barely £6...why the hell not?