Ring Rage (Arcade) Playthrough

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Published on February 9, 2023 8:18:22 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oifFCOznpBE

Game:

Ring Rage (1992)

Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 31:43

4,720 views

190

A playthrough of Taito's 1992 arcade wrestling game, Ring Rage.

I play through all of the available modes in this video on the machine's default difficulty settings:

5:45 Tournament mode
Played as Killer the Shaddam and Gunboat Rodie

19:35 Battle Royal mode (factory platform stage)
Played as Spike

24:12 Extra Match mode (steel cage stage)
Played as B.B. Scorpion

26:22 Battle Royal mode (street stage)
Played as Kelly Deckerd

Ring Rage was an impressive game when it came out. It was one of the first games to be powered by Taito's 32-bit F3 arcade platform and it featured fully digitized, smoothly scaling character sprites; clean CD-quality sample-based music; and a memorable cast of eight playable characters, all with their own unique animations and movesets.

Despite all that, it has been largely forgotten over the years. The arcade version was overshadowed by the release of Mortal Kombat (both games debuted in October of 1992), and it only ever saw a single home version (for the Game Boy: https://youtu.be/3wtW9ejGMic).

Many of the characters are campy caricatures of then-popular wrestlers and fighters, and they're hilarious. You get off-brand versions of Vader, Roddy Piper, the Road Warriors, as well as a boxer, a ninja, a martial artist, and my personal favorite, "Killer the Shaddam," a clone of the Iron Sheik who can stab and set fire to his opponents.

The action is fast, the controls are easy, and every character gets a good assortment of grapples, throws, and finishing moves that can be pulled off with simple button combinations and a bit of button mashing.

Taito hit this one out of the park. It feels a lot like an early take on Wrestlemania: The Arcade Game that Midway put out a few years later, and it's just as stupidly fun to play.

(I also love how much Taito always managed to slaughter the English language. "TWF Martial Arts Grand Prix RING RAGE" is an amazing name for a tournament, but what the hell does that even mean? And then there's the game's boot-up message, "WAIT MORE MORMENT." Classic Taito right there.)

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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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