Retro City Rampage

[Hendo]

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[Chinzon]

Retro City Rampage looks AWESOME!

[Hendo]

More about Retro City Rampage:

WiiWare is currently the only platform, though Provinciano noted that he was currently "in talks" with Microsoft on bringing the game to XBLA. PSN was also on the table, he offered. A PC version would be out of the cards for "at least a year."

Provinciano began the game as Project Grand Theftendo, where he sought to create an 8-bit version of Grand Theft Auto 3 that ran on the NES.

The PAX 10 are all excellent games -- sporting that label on your game is a sure sign of its quality -- but Retro City Rampage is the kind of game that makes you remember why you got into gaming in the first place. Mostly because Retro City Rampage reminds you of other awesome games basically every few minutes. And from the outset of my demo, I knew Brian and his compatriots at VBlank Entertainment really crafted something special here.

The PAX demo came in two different flavors: story mode and free play. The free play mode unlocks the city and takes the restraints off Player (the main character you control), opening up the city to exploration and crime. But the real gem was the story mode, which starts off with an ambitious Player eyeballing a poster inquiring about henchmen. Hey, it offered benefits ... and a cell phone!

Three years later, Player is henching for Jester, a Joker-like mad man who sets off to rob a bank -- Dark Knight anyone? From here, my demo took me down a rabbit hole full of crazy. I robbed the bank, escaping in a school bus (natch) and eventually found myself in a Frogger segment trying to dodge an intersection full of other speeding buses. At this point, Jester wanted me to cross the intersection on foot, but Player was quite hesitant. There was a dead frog in the road that didn't particularly bode well.

So Jester showed me the ace up his sleeve: a pair of red shoes that would increase my speed to hedgehog-like proportions. I made my way across, but Jester grew impatient and decided to shoot up all of the buses with a rocket launcher anyway. Naturally that brought the cops in and I found myself going through a daze of gaming send-ups.

I went down in the sewers and dodged ninja turtles. I met Major Lee Solid, who told me about Jackal and what truck I needed to sneak into the back of in a sequence almost exactly like that in Metal Gear. I even took a ride in a time-traveling phone booth and met a Doc Brown-looking dude. It was all very bodacious.

Even through the flurry of events, the gameplay never took a back seat to the hilarity on screen. Aside from incorporating basic shooting elements (point your character, press the button and light somebody up!), the game also had a pretty neat cover mechanic. Creeping up against any object, I only needed to hit a button to hide behind cover. Then it was as simple as pressing the d-pad toward my target and firing, which would cause Player to peek his head up and let loose. The driving segments were just as basic and intuitive. Think: the first Grand Theft Auto.

Retro City Rampage is truly something special. Not only is it an obvious labor of love from somebody who loves games, it's proof positive that a classic game is perfectly capable of incorporating modern gameplay elements in an excellent way -- even if it's technically not a classic game at all.

[TopGunKnacker]

my. fucking. god. that looks good. i was wondering what had happened to grand theftendo

[Hendo]

Summer 2011 for XBLA, later for WiiWare. So....this'll be one of the Summer of Arcade, then?

Insane Grand Theft Auto-inspired WiiWare romp Retro City Rampage is heading to Xbox Live Arcade, its developer has confirmed.

Brian Provinciano's game – a sort of maniac 8-bit cocktail of GTA, Commando, The Legend of Zelda and Contra – was originally planned as a WiiWare exclusive.

However, Brian has announced that he's doing the decent thing and going multi-platform. According to Destructoid, the game will now launch on Xbox Live Arcade next summer before hitting WiiWare a few months later.

And the reason for this decision? "In order to continue making these games and not have to start flipping burgers after Retro City Rampage is done," Provinciano explained, "it needed to be multi-platform."

[Uncle Dokuro]

Beat Virtual Super Meat Boy, but now working on getting on the band-aids. Has anyone beaten the Super Epic Meal Time arcade cabinet? That mini game is quite brutal on my thumb.

[radiofloyd]