Rival Turf

Rival Turf! is the game that Batman Forever wanted and should have been. It's the quintessential 90's two player beat-em-up in which an unlikely pair must make their way through a city in turmoil in order to rescue a woman, or stop the drug trade or something like that. The objective here is unclear, there is a map and it appears that the characters are trying to make it down to the Mexican border? after a couple of stages in the city a helicopter arrives and takes you down "south of the border" with no actual explanation, you are then fighting in the jungle.

In Rival Turf! you select from one of two characters: Jack Flak whose look has made a complete 360 from outdated to back in style or Oozie Nelson who dresses like M.Bison (by the way was it standard for tough guys to dress like Eastern European dictators back in the early 90's?). They battle a substantial amount of stereotypes with names that say all you need to know about them, examples: Gigante is the big guy, Arnold is the bodybuilder, Reggie is the hip black guy and so forth.

This game, like many other, was based on a Japanese original. In this case it was the Rushing Beat series. Like MegaMan, Darkstalkers and many more games the developers simply replaced Japanese art with Western art (happened in anime too, how is this better than this? its not) and completely Americanized the characters. This isn't necessarily a bad thing but it is a shame that that Japanese cover was replaced with shit like this. I wonder when exactly the video game industry realized that gamers were into Japanese art and culture.

The gameplay is smooth, without a doubt the SNES was made for this type of game and its not surprising that titles such as Captain Commando, Ninja Turtles and Double Dragon were some of the most popular on the console. Rival Turf's characters are surprisingly big, they fill up the screen nicely and are drawn in a stylized way that still feels fresh. You get a total of six continues and five lives per continue, with infrequent health boosts and increasing difficulty a beginner can still get pretty far (I got up to stage 4 my first time). Two player mode should be easier and a lot more fun.

The beat-em-up genre sorta died as technology improved and games became smarter. The last one I remember is Fighting Force which was fun but not as much as the sidescrollers but with retro gaming now more accessible these old games return either through wide availability online (as downloads or at eBay) or through places like the Xbox Marketplace and Wii Store. This genre offers mindless co-op fun and works better with simplified graphics, sounds like a perfect concept for the iPhone.