Crime City (Arcade) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
194A playthough of Taito's 1989 arcade action game, Crime City.
Played through on the machine's default difficulty level.
Woken from a dead sleep, "supreme law" Tony Gibson and Raymond Broady both receive a call informing them that some prisoners have escaped and are wreaking havoc in Crime City. They wash their hair, sort their weapons, and at Broady's suggestion ("Well, let's go for a kill time"), the men hit the streets.
I'm being serious. That's the intro.
Crime City is an arcade platformer, related in some nebulous way to Chase HQ, that focuses on platforming and gunplay. Adopting a gameplay style similar to games like Sega's Shinobi and Namco's Rolling Thunder, the heroes run about, laying waste to every gangster and hood they can find as they make their way to the bottom of things.
The controls are 80s simplicity at their best: you can shoot, duck, roll, jump, and high jump. The six stages have you walking from one side of the screen to the other, jumping over crates, dodging cars, and trading bullets with the enemy, and like I mentioned earlier, it feels a lot like both Rolling Thunder and Shinobi. It isn't as complex as either of those games, though. The stages aren't made up of multiple-level platforms (a top and bottom route, if you will) like we saw in those earlier titles, and it lacks any hostages to rescue or doors to duck into. Stripping it down to basics like this was one of my favorite things about the whole game - it feels closer to early 80s arcade style play with its reliance on reflexes and memorization. Because of how focused the gameplay is, I had a lot of fun playing it again and again for higher scores.
It does love its late 80s windowdressing, though. The story would be ludicrous enough on its own, but the hammy intro and its English "translation" put the game's plot in a class of its own. The lead characters look like they're straight out of Lethal Weapon, the bad guys look like every cliche imaginable from eighties action flicks, and the whole presentation is put together nicely. The backgrounds are well detailed and the sprites are big and look good, despite the super awkward animation. It isn't "impressive" for a game from 1989, but it is good looking.
Taito often showed how to take an existing idea, imbue it with personality, and tweak the mechanics just enough to make it feel like something fresh and novel, and Crime City is a damn good example of that.
But good luck making sense out of that plot. Wow. The game never seems to feel the need to explain itself, but the credits do provide some "insight." Special emphasis on the quote marks there.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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