Quality Control – Rock & Roll Racing

To be absolutely blunt, Rock & Roll Racing is like RC Pro-Am with some Heavy Metal & Hard Rock music, plus a psychotic announcer. To be fair, this isn’t totally a bad thing – RC Pro-Am is one of the best racing games of its period, with pretty solid controls, a game-play style that keeps you hooked, and decent racing, though the game had some problems with its learning curve.

Rock & Roll Racing basically fixes those learning curve problems and makes the gameplay a little more combat focused. You get more weapons for your car, and they automatically re-stock every lap. The majority of upgrades you can purchase between races are more ammunition capacity for your weapons, plus additional armor.

Quality Control – Goof Troop

Capcom’s 16-bit Disney licensed games are widely regarded as being among the best platformers in the 16-bit console generation. However, of the successful titles, like Mickey Mousecapade, that they released, lurking in their shadow was a little game called Goof Troop, which has remained fairly obscure to this day. The reasons for the title’s obscurity are two-fold.

1. It was based on a show that was only broadcast on cable (Goof Troop aired only on the Disney Channel).
2. While all the other Disney licensed games were platformers, Goof Troop was a top-down puzzle game.

Quality Control – Mighty Final Fight

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On multiple occasions, I’ve heard the expression mentioned that restrictions breed creativity. Sometimes that doesn’t hold true. My last Quality Control pick, Raging Fighter, was a great example of this. The game was a fighting game that just didn’t hold up well on what was essentially a 4-bit hand-held system. Such is the opposite with this Quality Control pick, Mighty Final Fight, from Capcom for the NES. Capcom was basically given the task of porting the SNES (and arcade) classic brawler Final Fight to an 8-bit platform. I would say that they succeeded admirably.

Now, to be fair, Final Fight wasn’t a particularly complex brawler – and the brawler genre in general doesn’t have as much complexity to it as fighting games do. That said, Capcom handled the port very well. As the game couldn’t support the same size of sprites that the original game used, characters are instead depicted in a “Super Deformed” style. To tie in with the change in art style, the story has been altered to something more comedic. This in turn really helps to differentiate this version of the game from the original and give it a sense of identity.

Similarly to the original game, Mayor Mike Haggar‘s daughter, Jessica has been kidnapped by the sinister leader of the Mad Gear Gang, who has gone absolutely gaga for her. Haggar, Jessica’s beau, Cody, and Cody’s friend and training partner, Guy (yes, Guy is in this game), must fight through all the members of the Mad Gear Gang before the wedding ceremony. The game only has a single player mode, instead of an alternating two-player mode like in Double Dragon. However, similarly to Double Dragon, only two enemies can be depicted on-screen at any one time, making crowd control a little simpler.

The game also borrows the sort of “leveling” system used by Double Dragon, among other similar games, of gaining experience points by defeating enemies, which in turn, in theory, unlocks additional moves. I say in theory because, really, you can only unlock one move, and that’s at level 4. Each fighter has a special move that can be unlocked, and is performed by hitting the attack button and a direction on the D-Pad. This move gets you a little extra XP if you defeat an enemy with it. However, by this point you really don’t need to level up any further and the move itself does less damage on average than your regular combo, and you gain no other benefits, like life bar increases or anything else). Power-ups are also moderately scarce, as are weapons (there’s one dropped weapon in the whole game, at the obligatory Elevator level).

All in all, this is a decent classic style brawler, and I would say that I like it better than the original Final Fight, blasphemy though that may be. I would recommend picking it up, if you can find a copy, either as the NES cart or in the GBA collection “Capcom Classics Mini-Mix”.

Quality Control – Raging Fighter

For this review of Raging Fighter for the Game Boy, I have to admit that I didn’t get into the game as much as I’d like. By “get into the game” I don’t mean get interested in the game, as much as I mean make progress in the game.

For those unfamiliar with the title, and there probably are a lot of you, this game is a fighting game for the Game Boy, published by Konami. In the game you play one of several martial artists, who beat each other up in a martial arts tournament. I can’t really put a premise to this game, because, even though this game has a “Story Mode” on the menu, there’s no story to speak of in the game. The story mode can best be described as a 3-on-3 endurance match. You play as the three good guys, and your opponent has the three bad guys. You fight the bad guys, and as you beat one, your exact health amount you have at the end of that round carries over to the next round, where you fight the next member of their team. Now, if the fighting was good, that wouldn’t be too much of a problem. However, the fighting isn’t good.

Now, I’m a fan of fighting games. I’m not great at them, and I’ll certainly never be able to play them at the tournament level. Still, I enjoy them nonetheless. So, while I’m not necessarily capable of doing high level play, I’m not exactly a button masher, and I can usually figure out some sort of technique, even if I can’t work a character’s special moves. The problem is, even at its easiest difficulty, Raging Fighter isn’t particularly friendly. There are special moves, but it’s not clear how to use them, as there’s no move list in the game (which isn’t surprising), nor is there any sort of move list online, or even, for that matter, in the Nintendo Power article I discussed in the magazine’s last issue.

The character design is fairly generic. Aside from the token woman, and the token fat guy, everyone else pretty much looks like “generic character from Fist of the North Star“. It doesn’t help that the characters all seem to control the same – sluggishly and not very responsively. Except, of course, for the computer, which has no problem pulling off multiple slide kicks in a row or deftly jumping over the one projectile attack I was able to pull off (which, while it used the standard Fireball motion, was also sluggish enough that it shouldn’t have been difficult to jump over – unless, of course, you were the player).

If you see this, you're screwed.

It doesn’t help that there isn’t particularly any sort of concept of “interrupts” in this game. If you’re unfamiliar with fighting game theory, and “Interrupt” in the context of a fighting game it’s when your move interrupts their move animation. For example, in Mortal Kombat 1, the move animation for Raiden’s torpedo move could be interrupted by a carefully timed uppercut. There’s a lot more to this, related to character’s hitboxes and other things, but that’s a matter for a dedicated fighting game forum. The point of the matter is, though, you cannot interrupt opposing characters moves. In Street Fighter, you can break a hurricane kick attack with a dragon punch, a fireball, or even just a well-timed regular attack, if you know what you’re doing. In Raging Fighter, all you can do is turtle.

Other than this, if you find someone else who has this game, and you still have your Game Boy system Link Cable, you could, in theory, get in a two-player match. There’s also a single player tournament mode, and by tournament mode I mean it’s a ladder ala Mortal Kombat. However, I made very little progress there as well, and I really didn’t find it very interesting.

Ultimately, I cannot consider this game as being worth the hype. If you’re looking for a fighting game, there are better fighting games available for current or even earlier gen handheld systems. And, to be absolutely honest, did you seriously think a two-button fighting game could turn out well?

Quality Control – Kendo Rage

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Kendo Rage is a bit of an odd duck, or perhaps rather an ugly duckling. The game takes the action-platforming style of the Valis series, gives the game the sense of humor (both in terms of tone and in terms of level and monster designs) of the Parodius series, and the persistent timer of Prince of Persia, and it kind of works.