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River City Ransom: How an NES Classic Returned 20 Years On
An anonymous reader writes "River City Ransom: Underground is the latest high profile game campaign on Kickstarter but as an interview with the title's creators this week highlights, it's not exactly a new game. Rather, it's an official sequel to a Nintendo Entertainment System/Famicom classic, belt-scroller River City Ransom. Remarkably, getting the license and the help of original River City creator Yoshihisa Kishimoto proved easy for the team, indie developers who were submitting game designs to Atari in crayon, aged six. 'I asked for the license and I asked Kishimoto-san if he had an interest in helping us make a better Kunio-kun game,' producer Daniel Crenna says. 'It's not particularly dramatic to say that, but I asked.' As the author points out, it's interesting to imagine what other games could be resurrected with a little bit of polite curiosity.""
Thank you for being a friend
Traveled down the road and back again
Your heart is true, you're a pal and a cosmonaut.
And if you threw a party
Invited everyone you knew
You would see the biggest gift would be from me
And the card attached would say, thank you for being a friend.
I don't know much about Japanese culture. In fact, I go out of my way to avoid it, because what I've seen of their comics and animations has been quite repulsive. So I'll need some help here.
Why does the summary give the creator's name as "Yoshihisa Kishimoto", but then one of the quotes then calls him "Kishimoto-san"?
Is "-san" a honorific? How much honor does it bestow upon a name? Is it equivalent to "Mr", or is it more like "Sir", or is it even as serious as "Saint"?
And on an unrelated note, can anyone who knows Japanese culture explain why the comics and animations are so terrible? The subject matter itself is quite disturbing in many cases (octopus molestation, and so forth), but beyond that even just the drawing or animation style is of such a low quality. Why is that?
This is a culture that one posed a significant challenge to the mighty United States military, and a culture that has since given us highly reliable automobiles, the world's fastest bullet trains, and extremely advanced electronics. Yet they can't master basic drawing or animation techniques developed 80 or 90 years ago? Why is that?
It's a shame that everything about this new game looks rather terrible. The art assets look like one of those horribly insulting re-draws for western audiences, except this time it was the initial assets to begin with. A lot of what you see on the Kickstarter page looks like they've outright thrown out the entire sense and sensibilities of the Riki-Kunio series in exchange for what looks like a bad shareware clone made by fans.
Good Sir,
I have read your comment in earnest, but I fail to see the relevance to the topic at hand.
In your comment I see no reference to "NES" or "Famicon" or "River City Ransom".
I hereby suggest to you that your comment is off-topic, and irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
Regards,
Anonymous Coward
Interesting how this article pops up now, as I was just thinking about playing it this morning! Sounds like things are in great hands. I will definitely be digging into the information more now that I know about this!
When Nintendo did their world championships, I tried a bunch of the games set up for display. I actually dodged SMB3 because the line was so long. Some of the games were fun, but I was blown away with River City Ransom. Wow that game was really good.
I think there is something magical about games with good action mechanics with a little hackney RPG thrown on top. Another good example is Zelda. The reason these games are fun is that it typically rides you in a perfect difficulty. If the game is too easy, you push far without grinding your guy for levels until it is tough. If the game is too hard, you keep trying over and over, and your guy levels up in the process. Eventually you get strong enough to beat the levels and bosses even if you don't have a great deal of skill.
I shudder to think what a MMORPG would be like if it was quality action oriented combat first and RPG stats second. Instead of coming into fights and pressing 1,2,3,4,5 over and over again, you'd be actually engaging your brain.
God spoke to me
Part of the appeal of River City Ransom is just how much content -- quality content, much of it -- they packed into this little side-scrolling beat-em-up.
There are even weird hidden wonders like, if the enemy throws a baseball at your head but you deflect it with a stick, IT'S ON -- Stickball time, and you and the enemies get into formation and play a damn game of stickball.
And, it's a beat-em-up with role playing elements like items, skills, and stats. There are some other games like that for the same system (Little Ninja Brothers for example, with its Kung Fu Heroes style battle screens) but this game is modern and admittedly slick.
So, consider how powerful that was back in the 8-bit days, and consider how that still resonates as a "good game" today.
How in the hell do you capture that, again? You might say "well they are taking a good step in the right direction by retro-styling it as 8-bit", but is that all it is?
Think of it dynamically: there is potentially so much *more* that could be done with the game, today. This is the same problem all devs face when they're planning a franchise reboot from the 8-bit days to the modern, post-3d-playforming days. The devs have to ask "how much space of the new world of gaming should this game occupy".
I'm not saying that making RCR into a cartoonish Grand Theft Auto is going to somehow improve it, either. I'm saying that the envelope has changed.
The original game was explosive because it packed all of that game into that tiny 8-bit envelope, when there was nothing else to work with. Now, there's tons of other stuff to work with. You can still pack just as much game into just as small of a bit width, but the envelope is so much bigger, now, there's not going to be as much explosive force.
It's the big let down of retro-styled gaming. It seems like such an awesome idea to make more 8-bit games, as if the legacy didn't leave enough of them behind, but then you sit down and play it and your thumbs go "blah".
You're asking your thumbs to go back and enjoy tomato soup like they did back in the days when there was only tomato soup, only now they're more accustomed to gazpacho, borscht, and bloody marys.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Oh, obviously I was misinformed about the use of "-san". But, I don't have a very deep or vested in interest in Japanese language or culture.
Reader, ignore my comments on the use of "-san". Others here have fleshed it out more accurately.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Remarkably, getting the license and the help of original River City creator Yoshihisa Kishimoto proved easy for the team, indie developers who were submitting game designs to Atari in crayon, aged six.
Uhhh... What???
I don't normally kibbitz over the typical low quality of our FP summaries suck, but I can't even parse that.
Two of them, at least..
OK, Herr Megol.
Try dungeons and dragons online, which is exactly this! If you're playing a melee class, it's got good action combat, where positioning and player-skill matter more than pressing the numbers... but it's got a crunchy RPG core based on the D&D 3.5 ruleset.
I bought DDO when it first came out because I love Turbine as a company(In my book Asheron's Call 1 was way more fun than WOW). What I found is the same as in PNP D&D, clerics are just superior to fighters. They can do everything a fighter can, minus a few damage ticks per swing, but also have heals. I haven't picked it up lately, but I max leveled in well under a week and beat everything they have. D&D is good for Pencil and Paper, but doesn't make a hot MMORPG system. This is because you advance too rapidly in D&D. In PNP, advancing rapidly is balanced by permadeath, but I've even heard stories of where people "beat PNP D&D" because they had max level characters with so many magic items than no monsters or situation could pose a challenge.
God spoke to me
Play Tera. The combat system is amazing. There are a handful of lock-on skills, everything else is a skill shot. You place your attack wrong, you wiff. On the flip side of the coin, you can dodge roll and backstep most boss mobs attacks and massive AOEs. The combat system places a huge emphasis on skill, with gear level coming in second (until late game). I main a tank (Lancer) in the game, and its unlike most other tanks in games I've played. I cant just shout, grab agro, and tank and spank. I have to chain my skills with perfect timing, watching the BAM to find out what he is going to do next, and throw up my shield block before I get hit so I can absorb the damage.
Manaya's Core Hard Mode run - I love the art style they did in this game, as well. This is also by far the hardest instance in the game, even though its ilvl requirement is massively below the dungeons I run for my end game PVP gear. Anyways, I'd say check out the game. It went F2P recently, but most of the stuff you pay for is just costume stuff. The only real reason to get Elite Status is for more character/bank slots and to run twice as many in game dungeons for late game. Considering that the ones you need to run take 1-2 hours to complete, just casual playing end game you'd be fine without it. You can get instance reset scrolls dropped in game that let you go in twice a day if you want.
You mean someone has kidnapped Shellsuit Boab's top? http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006p2xl
... to modernize the game given how unknown the game is to most gamers and how they barely scraped by with their kickstarter. It would have been nice to modernize the game but it is an old game that no one knows about or is really that interested in.
I shudder to think what a MMORPG would be like if it was quality action oriented combat first and RPG stats second. Instead of coming into fights and pressing 1,2,3,4,5 over and over again, you'd be actually engaging your brain.
That doesn't make any sense. The difference between a "pure" Action and a "pure" RPG is that in the action games, it's your skill as a player which matters and in an RPG it's the character's stats which matter. So really, in a "pure" RPG you don't engage your brain at all because it's all about the character, you just provide a broad direction and it does the actual work. It's the action game where the characters have no 'stats', and the difference in performance is solely based on player ability to think and act.
But most games are not "pure" in either sense, they are usually a hybrid system. Why? Because it's usually more fun that way.
Instead of coming into fights and pressing 1,2,3,4,5 over and over again, you'd be actually engaging your brain.
We'll see how The Elder Scrolls handles as an MMO. I feel like the evolution from Morrowind through to Skyrim has been smooth. They've kept the same basic mechanics for the most part, though things have been refined quite a bit.
They've really blended a lot of Fallout and TES together (Bethesda), but playing Skyrim feels like their intention from the beginning was to build a great MMO, and each iteration in the series was simply a step in that direction.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
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It amazes me that no one seems to remember Autoduel. It was a free-roamer, way before the Grand Theft Auto series. It was sent in a post-apocalyptic "Mad Max" sort of world. It was made by Lord British, the same guy that brought us the Ultima series. You could design new cars with an incredible level of detail, balancing features and power with weight. I spent months of my life on that game.
In modern times, there was Auto Assault, but that was one of those stupid MMORPG things. As if I want to hear 12-year-olds mouth off. Give me that game with a deep single-player experience, and I'll probably forget to go to work! Hell yeah.
Granted, you can download the original if you want, but I'd rather see a modern version.
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters