Rival Turf! (SNES) Playthrough

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Published on September 8, 2023 7:28:14 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgrWkjj8Jmc

Game:

Rival Turf! (1992)

Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 53:31

2,897 views

171

A playthrough of Jaleco's 1992 beat 'em up for the Super Nintendo, Rival Turf!

Played through as Oozie. (I dunno either. Maybe he has a festering wound?)

Rival Turf! is a traditional beat 'em up in the same vein as Final Fight (https://youtu.be/2a1YGGNxx9s) and Streets of Rage (https://youtu.be/UrVMYd7MUzM) that borrows several elements from Jaleco's 1991 arcade game 64th Street: A Detective Story (https://youtu.be/eD_NPCUNjzQ), and it was the first game of their SNES trilogy of brawlers. Brawl Brothers and The Peace Keepers followed Rival Turf!, though for some odd reason, they were never presented as related works in their English-language version releases.

You play as either Jack or as Oozie as you trudge across LA and into South America searching for Jack's girlfriend. The plot is entirely irrelevant, though. The focus here is entirely on pounding endless waves of hooligans through the pavement.

The movesets are pulled directly from Final Fight - you get the standard array of punch/kick/throw moves, but special moves are a bit different. Instead of using up your life bar to pull these off, you get a dedicated stock of uses: every time you defeat a bad guy, the counter at the top of the screen goes up by one. Everytime you use the move, this counter is reduced by ten, so the number of times you can do it is directly proportional to the number of people you've left on the road in a bloody heap. It's an interesting change to the formula, even if it can make it a bit too easy to plow through boss fights if you've saved up enough.

The game overall plays pretty well. It lacks the polish of the bigger productions from the era and the hit detection can be a bit suspect, but the fighting feels solid, and the variety in the enemy and stage designs does a good job of keeping things interesting throughout. The animation is lacking a bit, but the sprite work looks nice and the music is suitably energetic.

Like many of Jaleco's titles, there isn't much originality on show, but it's more than competent enough to make for a fun afternoon or two. If you've played through all of the high profile beat 'em ups on the system and still want more, I'd totally recommend picking this one up.

And that box art deserves a chef's kiss. *mwah*

(This is a brand new playthrough to replace my original blurry 720p video of the game.)
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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