Rival Turf! (SNES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
342A playthrough of Jaleco's 1992 beat 'em up for the Super Nintendo, Rival Turf!
Played through as "Oozie." Why do I get the impression that they meant to call him Ozzie? I mean, unless he has a wound that has gone septic... what a hilarious screw up.
Rival Turf! is a traditional beat 'em up in the same vein as Final Fight and Streets of Rage, and was the first game of Jaleco's 16-but brawler trilogy. Brawl Brothers and The Peace Keepers followed Rival Turf!, though for some odd reason they were never presented as related works for their English-language version releases.
You play as either Jack or as Oozie as you storm across LA searching for Jack's girlfriend. The plot is entirely irrelevant, though - this focus here is entirely on pounding endless waves of hooligans through the pavement.
The move sets 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: everytime 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 plowthrough 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 enemies (there are some odd characters running about for sure) and in the stages 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.
I'm inclined to call it all a bit generic, but that doesn't stop it in any way from being fun. 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 is just magical.
Finally, if you'd like to see the game played through as Jack, you can check out my older playthrough of it here: https://youtu.be/bqgC7FDVEgY
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
NintendoComplete (http://www.nintendocomplete.com/) punches you in the face with in-depth reviews, screenshot archives, and music from classic 8-bit NES games!
Visit for the latest updates!
http://www.facebook.com/pages/NintendoComplete/540091756006560
https://twitter.com/nes_complete