There is a genre of game in which you beat guys up. Double Dragon, Final Fight, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game. These are beloved classics. I don't know why, and I've never been able to figure out why. To me, these games are the lowest rung on the video game genre ladder. River City Ransom is probably the best game in video gaming's worst genre. The story, according to the ransom letter, is that someone named Slick is holding River City captive through some unidentified means, and is also holding someone identified only as "Ryan's girlfriend" hostage ('cause we all know that NES women don't need names, as long as they get captured and provide a goal), and urges that the unidentified people who receive this threat meet his demands (which are not provided) or he'll do something he also doesn't identify. Since I assume River City's police department laughed and threw this letter away, it's up to Alex and Ryan to save whatever day is in trouble. After all, the only part of the letter that had any specificity was the part that warned Alex and Ryan not to interfere, so I guess they decided to make the most of it. THE GAME Let me start by restating the fact that I hate this kind of game. I was willing to give River City Ransom a chance because it had such a beloved reputation, but I see that that reputation is completely undeserved. A typical game of this type charges you to walk in a straight line and beat up the nameless thugs who wander in from offscreen - even from the place you just came from - until they are all defeated and the game starts scrolling again. River City Ransom is different in that the screen scrolls freely left and right, so you can theoretically run past enemies you don't want to fight and also revisit areas you've been to, and the thugs have names. Oh, and sometimes you have to jump. That's about it. You can punch and kick. Some thugs have weapons that you can pick up and use or throw instead of punching and kicking, and if all else fails, you can pick up and swing or throw fallen thugs. Defeated foes also provide money. Some parts of the game are malls which contain stores, in which you can buy food or books or what have you to increase your stats, thus adding RPG elements to the game to create the illusion of depth. Um... that's it. Oh, two players can play at once. THE GOOD: The graphics are decent. Everyone loves the way the characters in this game are designed. I have nothing against that. The sound is okay too. Being able to build up your stats is pretty cool. In fact, figuring out what foods do what is the best part of the game. Besides the stat-building, River City Ransom actually does have one big thing that seperates it from other games in this genre: The world is very open. It is not divided into "levels" that you go through, one way, in order, but is instead a big city composed of Zelda II-like sections which you can travel through freely (provided you defeat the enemies as you go). The more I think about it, the more I like it. Now, if only the different sections weren't all nearly identical, flat areas that gave you little to do besides punch and kick guys. Some translations are bad enough to be mildly amusing, like the girl Roxy who introduces herself in the third person, and defeated thugs' habit of saying things like "BARF!" and "Is this fun yet?" The answer is no, actually. There's a password function that allows you to save your progress, which is good, given all the stat-increasing. THE BAD Games with plots that default to a "rescue the princess" variant always bug me, and the NES era was filled with them. The one that bothers me the most is actually Chip & Dale's Rescue Rangers, in which Fat Cat kidnaps Gadget for no reason other than her being the token female. This game, in which Slick's ransom letter doesn't even identify the girl beyond "Ryan's girlfriend," is probably second on my list of most disliked NES plots. Like every other game in this genre, gameplay is monotonous. Once you get out of the stores, there is nothing to the game beyond walking and mashing the A button until the foes are defeated. There are no puzzles to solve, almost no platforms to jump on, nothing. In fact, this was the first NES game I've reviewed that I didn't finish, because I knew after playing for ten minutes that I had seen all that the game was going to offer. In most games, the screen scrolls with your character in the center. In this game, the screen scrolls with your character about three-quarters of the way across, so you have almost no time to react to enemies appearing in the direction you're going. My theory is that this was done to allow you to move around while fighting without having the screen scroll enough to introduce additional enemies, but it's annoying. In the rare portions of the game where you have to jump from one surface to a higher one, you have to be very precise, because if you jump while too close to the ledge you're trying to get to, you'll bounce off of that wall and actually jump backwards. It's like they obviously didn't give a shit about decent jumping mechanics, because those spots take up about 1% of the whole game. TIPS & TRICKS There's a hidden store in the tunnel. Just move up against the wall and push up as you go, and you'll enter it. There's probably a password that takes you to the end of the game, but I don't care enough to find out what it is. FINAL ANALYSIS Don't be fooled by the reputation. This game sucks. Thumbs down for River City Ransom. SCREENSHOTS You're looking at pretty much the whole game. This is the rest of it. Man, America would be trembling if Al Qaeda wrote letters like this.