Rocket Ranger (NES) Playthrough
153A playthrough of Kemco's 1990 strategy/action game for the NES, Rocket Ranger.
Following 1989's Defender of the Crown ( • Defender of the Crown (NES) Playthrough ) and The Three Stooges ( • The Three Stooges (NES) Playthrough ), Rocket Ranger marked the third and final time we'd see a Beam-developed port of a Cinemaware Amiga game trotted out for the NES.
Armed with a laser pistol and a jetpack, you are the "Rocket Ranger," an anachronistic beacon of justice and a blatant Rocketeer clone. The Nazis have established a base on the moon to mine "lunarium," a mineral that provides them the means to develop weapons more potent than any the world has ever known. To undermine their operation, you'll need to sabotage their supply chains, destroy their bases, and prevent them from capturing a pair of famous American scientists. After the situation on the ground stabilizes, you'll need to raid their factories, build a rocket out of the parts you steal, and head to the moon for the final battle.
That's how most of the Amiga versions go, at least. The German version follows the same story but replaces the Nazis with aliens known as the "Leutonians," and it's this version that the NES port is based on. It's not an important distinction - the intention is still crystal clear - but I thought it was worth noting.
The game's structure is fairly similar to Defender of the Crown's. You assign your field agents to different countries, and whenever they find anything that indicates an enemy presence, they'll radio for assistance. When you arrive on-site, you'll be thrown immediately into a minigame: a shooting gallery for the factories, ammo dumps, fuel depots, and the zeppelin, and a 1v1 fistfight for the rocket labs.
Rocket Ranger had to be pared down for the NES, and like the other Cinemaware ports, the presentation took it on the chin. The game loves to hit you with walls of yellow-on-red text, cutscenes are few and far between, and the animation is crude. There's not much to look at, and what is there is ugly.
(That last boss, though! Holy wow, talk about nightmare fuel! So gross. So disturbing. So cool. And the lizard eyes RR flashes at you during that kiss at the end... ew!)
The graphics aren't nearly as ugly as the gameplay, though. I liked the strategy elements (I thought they were strong enough to carry the game on their own), but the minigames are the very definition of trash. The controls are awful (you go zooming at the slightest touch of the d-pad), bullets never want to line up with what you're trying to hit, hits often fail to register, and moving too close to the top of the screen will invert the shooting angle. The shooting demands pixel-perfect precision, and you don't get a crosshair or targeting reticle, so you'd better be good at committing those distances and angles to memory if you want to get anywhere. The fighting scenes aren't as bad, but that's mainly due to their being so easy to cheese. Just hold Up+A for a guaranteed win every time.
For as much as I loathe the gameplay, I don't outright hate Rocket Ranger. The premise is cool, the writing is entertaining, and the sim portions work well. If they had focused on those bits and axed the action, Rocket Ranger could've been great.
I found some fun in it, but there's no excusing what a shambling mess of a game this is. There is some value to be extracted from it, but is it worth the effort when you could just play something less broken instead? Probably not.
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