That’s why it’s not weird that a revival of a 1991 game reflects the time of the 90s
Also I know what you’re getting at but you could also update it for 2k18 if you wanted to go that way. Just have the protags beat antifa or whatever. It’s not like there aren’t contemporary milieus for a belt scroller if, for some reason you really wanted one.
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Escalating difficulties of chinless dough bros in colour-ranked polo shirts
Tiki-torch pickups
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haha i just came here to post that
EDIT?
https://twitter.com/HEALTH/status/1034366399836184576
edit: nope, mine neither haha. how do you embed tweets?
further edit: anyway, even though i don’t put HEALTH in the category of underground club music, they are adjacent and thus further prove my point that the right people have played SoR
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Well my link doesn’t work so!
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here
or here
or here
idk
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I’m going to be stupid and wade into the street gang thing by saying that, much like Final Fight, the game is cribbing liberally from The Warriors and Streets of Fire (moreso the latter since SoR always lacked the sheer amount of grunge that FF has, which also owes a debt to the Republican Action Film cycle of the 80s where NYC is a fetid hellhole and you can’t go 5 steps without being mugged or other assaulted because Middle American values (if you told me FF was a Death Wish 3 game that lost the license, I would believe you) and by the time we get to 2, the whole street gang thing has gone off the rails since Mr. X is a rich dude with a robot factory, an amusement park, several fat boxers, dudes with jetpacks, trained assassins/ninjas and women who had one of their hands replaced with an electric whip on his payroll. This isn’t even getting into 3, which has a weird sci-fi angle with robot clones and a bombing plot and a whole lot of the gang stuff is like that bit in RoboCop 3 (the one we don’t talk about) where the bad cops (you know they’re bad because they’re a PMC (I mean, technically so are the good cops because they’re owned by OCP but we’re only talking about the shaky politics of one franchise at a time here)) give the Splatterpunks guns to help them enforce gentrification (again, let’s save that conversation for another time) where Mr. X is just some asshole rich dude throwing money out and getting thugs in return and I don’t think the city is inherently a hellhole vision borne out of Moral Majority-influenced media being read by developers with no context and the gangs are crazy themed monstrosities seemingly couched in real examples like King Willie’s voodoo gang from Predator 2 (although I think it’s a joke there (I want to believe it’s a joke)) but just that the wheelhouse of the belt scroller in modern settings is you beating up gangs
I mean, it can certainly be more problematic, like Spikeout, where you’re a gang fighting another gang (who have connections to money because look, these games aren’t fucking Shakespeare, they aren’t even fucking Bayheimmer) but it’s okay because your gang is for peace
my point is that 3 has a boss fight against a clown and his pet kangaroo, who you can liberate and then select as a character
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you can’t palette swap the black bloc though
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why would you have the protagonists beat up antifa when you can have them be antifa?
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they’re ex-cops beating up the organization of a man who wants to take over the world and who also produces weapons of war
they’re maybe a few steps away from being antifa already
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When are we watching Death Wish 3 in Violence Club, bov
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I showed it on a Friday night months ago
I even trigger warning-ed the unpleasant thing that happens, that’s how badly I was trying to get people to watch it
I missed it then and I’m in
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I know I missed it cuz I was sick! We should do it again.
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The late 80’s NYC thing is only partially the moral aspect of it, part of it is just how uninspiring I find that setting these days. Mother Russia Bleeds may have been a piece of shit but it at least had that going for it
Beltscroll’s absolute curtain call was God Hand, all since has been impure
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if we’re being hardline, even godhand was impure, having stat upgrades and a skill shop
it gets a pass though because it’s balanced well enough that playing through can still be enjoyable and of a reasonable difficulty if you don’t use them.
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I would say “make the game post-apocalyptic!” but then I remember that the popular mode of post-apocalypse in belt scrollers is like if Mad Max and Gor got really drunk and had a child
Is there actually not a zombie apocalypse belt scroller that seems so obvious