Wild Streets - Atari ST (Full Playthrough & Opinion)

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Village Monk's Gaming Memories

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Published on February 5, 2018 8:23:20 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAkuXE_ad3g

Game:

Wild Streets (1989)

Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 31:18

1,311 views

21

Wild Streets is a one player scrolling beat em up that was released by Titus in 1989. As well as this ST version it also came out on the Amiga, DOS, Amstrad CPC, C64 and ZX Spectrum.

Normally I go through the good and bad points of the game, but this time I am going to tell you straight away, this title is terrible and a complete disgrace of one of my favourite genres. So let me go through what I find so dreadful.

1) Level Design. Each level you only go from left to right. There’s no raised platforms, or any reason to jump and no background objects to interact with. The reason why you have these elements in these types of games is to vary up the experience from beating up the same enemies over and over again. For instance the bottomless pits in Golden Axe, the falling chandeliers in Final Fight, the cannon balls falling down the stairs in Ninja Turtles: The Arcade Game and the spike traps and spears in the last level of Double Dragon. Essentially it forces you to change your tactics, but in this game, because of this level one is the same as level nine in structure.

2) Reusing Assets - It’s also worth mentioning that level 1’s backdrops repeats four times in only nine levels – how lazy can you get? I actually thought the game was looping when I first played it. Additionally the standard enemy designs are repeated over and over, now this normally happens in this genre, Ninja Turtles uses the same foot soldier sprite that is recoloured. The difference here is that whereas Komami did reuse the same sprite, each different colour of foot soldier has a different attack pattern. All the enemies in Wild Street act exactly the same and can be dispatched in exactly the same way. In later levels they change from dying after two hits to four hits, but it just makes the more annoying when you include the next point.

3) No attack patterns – In scrolling fighters the designers decide which enemies to appear at which point in a level. Here they appear randomly and will continually respawn unless you keep moving. This is insanely annoying in level 8, 9 where if you are too slow you can actually find yourself being pushed backwards because the enemies appear before you have had a chance to kill one.

4) Lazy Bosses – The bosses do have a slightly different attack pattern but they do just have a habit of running at you and trapping you in a corner. It’s always fun when the enemies on the edge of the screen and you can’t move without getting hit. Unfortunately this happens a lot in the game, until you realise that the bosses are insanely easy. Just save your gun until the boss screen and use all your bullets on him. It seems to work much better than using your fists.

5) No multiplayer – There are two hero sprites on screen at any one time in the panther and the man. Unfortunately you have no control over the panther, he just attacks whenever he feels like it. Which is really disappointing in that he dominates the box cover. Worse halfway through the game, the cat disappears, never to be seen again and you are forced to bodyguard the Chief of Intelligence through the levels in reverse and he doesn’t do anything to help.

6) Programmers Wanted – I’m not sure if this was a joke or a cry for help, I want to say that it is the second one. Because someone should have stepped in here.

7) Run Away – If you ever want to finish this game and you really shouldn’t be thinking about such things, try not to actually attack the enemies, especially if they are behind you. Just walk away, they will never catch up. It’s such a chore to actually attack someone and I’ve noticed that if you are too fast then attacks can actually go right through them, you have to slow down your rhythm just go get over the dodgy hit boxes.

Titus didn’t have a great record of making games and although this isn’t their worst game, it’s still pretty bad and I personally would not recommend playing it on any system, let alone this Atari ST version. It’s lazy, boring and the ending like all bad games is a complete waste of time, which just like this game is not a good thing.

Now this recording is one I previously did from about a month ago. Unfortunately when I went to go and cut it I realised that I missed recording about half of level 1. Rather that play the whole crappy game again I have stuck two playthroughs together, one of level 1 and the second playthrough of levels 2-9, so that’s why the score suddenly jumps between levels.

If you're interested in seeing more retro or current game videos then feel free to subscribe or check out some of my playlists:
Atari ST: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLx4xxIIv8AfzF1WNCk2yjFs9SNEZUf6o3
Sega Mega Drive: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLx4xxIIv8AfzY6iR6W6cRsFRt7zUlgHIE
Sega Master System: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLx4xxIIv8AfySbjh71hXweL28cqu-DbR5
Windows PC: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLx4xxIIv8AfxkkqPP6dWcSarH94BPrbvr

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