If there isn’t an unlockable Data East mode, I’m going to be very disappointed.
i feel like the $40 price tag is a bit much, but i will definitely think about it when it’s on sale. i also heard that you can hitstun infinite most enemies, which i hope they don’t patch out (assuming this gets patches)
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that’s fair. I think it’s price point is actually not entirely unreasonable for the effort they’ve put into it, but I can also understand that price being too much to take a chance on the game.
so, having slept on it, I think a more-accurate way to describe the combat (rather than Fighting Force) is like “Die Hard Arcade/Dynamite Deka.” lots of juggling, lots of weapon drops, using the background and walls to your advantage, etc.
now, Die Hard Arcade is a better game. but this one isn’t bad! I don’t know if there’s a demo of the game, but there really should be, if they’re asking $40 for it
I think the biggest strike against this game is that Double Dragon One exists and I played that a lot before this came out.
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ok well I just tried online multiplayer for the first time and it was going great, but then we softlocked the game on Stage 2 because we were too good, so…
lol
all right well I met someone else who is a big DD fan while playing and, despite softlocking yet again, we restarted and actually beat the game together. I guess the nice thing of online multiplayer with this game is that anyone playing it is probably really into the series, so that was fun. the game is definitely better with two people playing. we talked about Tengo project games and Super Double Dragon a lot.
my overall verdict is that the game can be a little janky, but it has love poured into it and the people who made it definitely understand what makes the series unique in the world of beat’em ups
you have a lot of moves and ways to counter at your disposal, but it isn’t immediately clear on how to use them and when (despite the game trying to teach you). multiple playthroughs feel necessary to understand the systems properly. I think if you credit feed the game, it’s possible to miss the subtleties the devs put into the combat
The Steam version of the River City Girls Zero installs all its resources loose in the install folder on your hard drive, so you can browse around through the image, sound, video, Super Famicom game ROM, etc files.
There’s a separate .sfc ROM file for each language into which the game is localized, including two for English: an “original” fairly literal translation of the original Japanese game dialogue, and a “RCG” more liberal translation that changes the characters to the personalities they have in the Western-developed “River City Girls” games.
There’s no particular need or reason to play the game in the wrapper in which Steam delivers it; you can play the translated Super Famicom ROM file of your choice in the SNES/SFC emulator of your choice–such as my favorite emulator, Mesen. ^ _^
The loose files include a full scan of the Super Famicom box & manual of the original Super Famicom game, Shin Nekketsu Kouha: Kunio-tachi no Banka. (1) River City Girls Zero is a new text translation of that game.
Shin Nekketsu Kouha: Kunio-tachi no Banka for Super Famicom was directed by Technos Japan’s Yoshihisa Kishimoto, the guy who created the Kunio-kun and Double Dragon game series, and with them the isometric beat-em-up genre; Kishimoto based the character Kunio on his own rough and tumble high school years.
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if you play the river city melee games, you’ll be astounded by the kof-rivalling amount of characters and lore the kunio/river city series has
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Hm well unfortunately the fighting in RCGZ, mediocre to start with, goes to heck in the second half as the bad guys are too tough to punch/kick safely so you have to do cheap hit and run moves that take forever. Dreckish.
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熱血硬派くにおくん
Nekketsu Kouha Kunio-kun
(~“Hot-Blooded Tough Guy Kunio-kun”)
The first isometric beat-em-up. Side-scrolling beat em up “Kung-Fu Master” inspired director Yoshihisa Kishimoto, but he wanted knock-down, drag-out fights, so he added a health meter to let the hero survive multiple hits.
Programmer Noriyuki Tomiyama had programmed and directed isometric wrestling game “Mat Mania” the year prior–and 2 years before that, Technos Japan created the wrestling game genre with the isometric “Tag Team Wrestling” (“Big Pro Wrestling!” in Japan). Seems likely the isometric part of the isometric beat-em-up came from those wrestling games.
(^ Mat Mania (left), Tag Team Wrestling (right); screenshots from MobyGames)
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Kung-Fu Master took the player on a scrolling adventure from left to right or vice versa in each stage; Double Dragon and all of its followers would elaborate on that scheme. Nekketsu Kouha Kunio-kun though does something different: the player generally starts in the middle of a single several-screens-wide area–sometimes with a deadly cliff on one side–assailed from all directions by a gang in 1-to-3-ish waves.
After defeating a boss, their portrait appears in the lower right. The game doesn’t end after you clear it–at least the first time–and if you then defeat a boss again, another portrait of them stacks up. ; D How high do the stacks go? Does it just keep looping? Do you ever hit credits? = ooo
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Along with hero Kunio, most of the game’s characters, particularly the bosses, go on to appear regularly in other Kunio-kun games. I hadn’t recognized him here, but according to the Kunio-Kun fandom wiki, the stage 1 boss is Kunio’s best frenemy, Riki! And the other bosses–stage 2’s brooding Shinji, stage 3’s giant Misuzu, and stage 5’s trigger-happy Sabu–all appear for instance in “River City Girls Zero,” a ROM translation of Super Famicom game “Shin Nekketsu Kouha: Kunio-tachi no Banka.”
I’ve been playing the PS2 version, “Oretachi Game Center Zoku: Nekketsu Kouha Kunio-kun.” It was oddly washed out and I was very disappointed with the game back in the day on my actual PS2. Thankfully now there’s PCSX2, in which raising gamma from default 50 to 69 restores the game’s vivid arcade palettes, and disabling bilinear filtering cures the heavy PS2 blur.
Hamster would go on to emulate Nekketsu Kouha Kunio-kun (Japan only) / Renegade (Western name, with graphics converted from Japanese high school delinquents to American street gangs) again in their “Arcade Archives” series on PS4 etc.
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Even though the same principle devs worked on the Famicom/NES versions, their combat balance came out all messed up, and for the most part you can just spam standing jump kicks to win. They broke up the single-area gang fights into separate areas, inserted a not-so-hot motorcycling segment after stage 2, axed the stage 3 boss, and replaced stages 4 and 5 with an obnoxious maze. On difficulty 3, you fight the end boss 3 times in a row. ; D
On default difficulty 1 it’s still some breezy fun though, at least as long as you know the route through the end maze. (Outside, R, 3 punks, L, 2 Jacks, L, bikers, M, bikers, R, boss. – That’s only for the difficulty 1 maze; it’s different and longer on higher difficulty settings, and on those settings a wrong turn sends you back to the start of the maze.)
^ Famicom (w/ Vice Translations romhack translation, because the newer translation doesn’t work with my cart dump)
.
^ NES
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there’s also a “girls version” hack for the famicom port, if you want to play as a sukeban
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This guy just before the last room in arcade Double Dragon has frozen on me twice, as far as I can recall: once in the Arcade Archives version on PS4, and just in the past couple days in MAME 0.265 (last MAME version that runs this the ROM from the Steam version of Double Dragon Trilogy). Once he’s frozen, the game won’t advance to the final room.
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Mug Smashers
previously
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Neo Geo 2024 Homebrew.
If you guessed every video of this game contains the phrase “a unique spin on the formula” you’d be right! Turns out you can’t just punch in this game.
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