Caltrops - Gamerasutra





	[quote name="Bananadine"][quote name="Bradley Svedka"]Man. Saying that "River City Ransom" holds up today. That's just precious.[/quote] This prompted me to try River City Ransom again, because I used to love it and was curious. It holds up in some ways and fails badly in other ways. The engine lets you do lots of fun things. You can stand on anything that looks like you could stand on it, and pick up anything that's on the ground including people, and swing or throw anything you can pick up. You can beat on enemies anytime, even when they're knocked out or talking. Breaking up cutscenes by attacking early is actually a useful tactic. The characters are cute, even when they are barfing. But at its core, the fighting engine is about walking up to a dude and hitting him with one of your main attacks until he fails to block, and all three of your main attacks are basically the same. Your character has lots of stats, and it's stats, not skill, that determine whether an enemy fails to block. Stats upgrades can be purchased, but only after you've beaten lots of enemies weaker than you. So at its core, the game is a JRPG in which there's only one kind of enemy and you have only one useful command. That is a sucky core. Strangely, the stat-building is much more varied than most of the fighting is. There are many shops and tons of things to buy from them, and each kind of item provides a unique set of numerical boosts. Trying out new foods and magazines and toys and things is fun for a while. But the stats don't manifest concretely enough for you to actually customize your character by focusing on particular items. Your character behaves pretty much the same way at the end of the game as at the beginning... except in that he can fight high-level enemies instead of just low-level enemies. And also, by then he's probably read one of the three books that provide turbo-attack techniques, for punching, kicking, and weapon-swinging, respectively. These books are game-breaking. Once you get any one of them, your character becomes super-strong and suddenly the too-difficult grind of the early game becomes too easy. There is no enemy in the game that can stand up to a turbo-speed weapon attack. I beat the six or so strongest bosses, including the final one, without ever even learning what their moves were. You just walk up to them while they're still introducing themselves, and hit the button until you've won. It is a very poorly balanced game. Of course the Cables were playing cooperatively, so they each had somebody to entertain by messing around and throwing dudes and whatnot. The game doesn't really reward you for that, so there's little reason to do it alone, but it could be fun with a partner. Maybe that's why they thought it holds up today. Or maybe they were just trolling.[/quote]