Crest of Wolf - Riot Zone / Riot City - PlayThrough - PC Engine
1Correction - the game doesn't feature 2 player simultaneous play. I've only ever plated it single player but thought it was 2 player for some reason.
I hope you are all happy, safe & healthy whatever challenges you are facing right now. Apologies for the delays in uploads - life has been hectic but for a bit of a change of pace here is a new type of video for my channel - a somewhat sloppy playthrough of the Final Fight inspired beat-em-up Crest of Wolf (in Japan - known as Riot Zone in the West) on PC Engine.
Following the success of Capcom's scrolling beat-em-up Final Fight in the arcades (& the subsequent disappointing SNES port and awesome Mega CD port - I'll do videos on both soon!) many titles took "inspiration" from the game & every machine needed it's own "Final Fight". So the Megadrive got the Bare Knuckle/Streets of Rage series. SNES got Rushing Beat series with the first game (released as Rival Turf in the West) being one of the more obvious examples.
The PC Engine was one such machine. This diminutive little box was packed with power. Despite an 8 bit processor it boasted a powerful 16 bit graphics chip (hence being branded the Turbo-Grafx-16 in the US). It always had an air of mystique & the screenshots of its games in C&VG & Mean Machines were the stuff of legend. HuCARDs might be my favourite medium and lent themselves to the awesome PC Engine GT/Express. There were many amazing titles but I got mine back in the early 90's for R-Type and the many great Sega ports. Then picked up the CD Rom unit for the utterly amazing Dracula X. My machine has a hardwired RGB Scart mod but these days there are ore elegant modern solutions.
This is a bit of a strange one - it is a port of the 1991 arcade beat-em-up Riot City that was developed by Westone & released by Sega. This took inspiration from Final Fight but the character designs had more of a sort of Rollerball/Mad Max vibe.
Then in 1993 it was ported (loosely) by Hudson Soft to the Super CD Rom format on PC Engine. I say loosely as this is a sort of a soft reboot/remake/remaster/re-imagining as it keeps the backgrounds & format & lay-out but changes the storyline, some of the bosses, the enemy designs in places & replaces Bobby with Tony (a mohawk sporting punk) and makes Hawk into a more direct clone of Cody from Final Fight.
It is a decent enough, if uninspired, beat-em-up.
Plus points are:
There aren't many games like this on the system
Some good music
Large Sprites
Each level introduces a new enemy design or two
Of the 3 enemies on screen all three can be different
Some backgrounds have some parallax
Negatives are:
Backgrounds feel very flat. There is little to no life in them - on the stages that do such as the lift level, or the 2 frames of animated mice it really makes you appreciate the more animated backgrounds in other games in the genre.
Maximum of 3 enemies on screen at once
Limited/repetitive gameplay - even more so than usual for the genre - there are no weapon pick ups at all that would have lent some much needed variety for example & most enemies fall for the same tactics
Still it is fun enough for a play through from time to time.
I can usually 1 credit this game as it is pretty straight-forward in terms of gameplay with very few unfair hits. However my original PC Engine 2 button pad has a weird issue where in-game it suddenly stops registering certain direction on the Direction Pad (although this freeze seems to "unlock" when you press one of the button 1 or button 2 action buttons but not always the same one. Its very odd. You'll see it from time to time when I get "stuck" on a plane or walk back a forth a lot to try to "unlock" it
I'll dig out my 6 button Avenue 6 pad for the next time I capture PC Engine titles as this happened on several of the games while I was capturing - then again the system and pad are both over 30 years old and other than that it is still performing like a champion although once or twice the music didn't play or cut out leaving just sound effects. To be fair the CD Rom is still going strong despite being one of the very first of its type and a very early adopter of the tech. Truly ahead of its time!
Want to see more PC Engine games? I have a few decent ones on both HuCARD & on CD.
This is my original Japanese copy - - from back in the day played (at 60Hz) on my RGB modded PC Engine using the Arcade Card Pro memory as this required the System 3.0 or Up memory card through a Retrotink 5X for ease of capture - although my capture card didn't want to play nicely for some reason.
I'll be uploading more PC Engine games in the future :-) as well as more GameBoy Multicarts, mobile phone games, Saturn, Dreamcast, SNES, Master System, Megadrive etc
As always if you enjoy this video let me know. As always this is running on original hardware.
As always this is uploaded under the Fair Use Policy - no money is being made from this video.
Stay strong, stay safe and stay healthy - Grey Fox